New to Sewing? Here’s what you need to know…

Whether it was a Sunday workshop or a sewing class your friend dragged you along to, everyone had to start somewhere. But once you were in, there was no going back.

We have all had a sewing box or sewing basket at some stage as a sewer – some of us may still have one. Mine was bought for me when I was 10 and is still hanging in there! I was wondering…If you have one, does it contains the type of things mine did?

 A tape measure of some kind.

 A pin cushion – home-made? Or is it built into the basket? Full of pins that have rusted themselves into the pin cushion fabric?

 A needle book – again, it is usually hand-made, showing off our fabulous hand embroidery after a sewing session at school and full of blunt and rusty needles.

 Wooden reels of thread or some skeins of very cheap thread that you haven’t used because it snaps and snags and gets knots in it?

 The ubiquitous skeins of embroidery silks.

 Blunt scissors – well, you can’t be allowed to have scissors that you could hurt yourself on!

 A broken triangle of tailor’s chalk

 A load of odd buttons & press studs loose at the bottom.

Familiar, huh? It’s probably time to make a choice if you want to start sewing – throw most of the items away and start again, or try and fail to be successful using them.

I had a pin cushion that my mum made when she was at school – it was a beautiful pale green silk. I remember playing with the pins in it when I was a kid – glass heads, metal heads – but they were no use for sewing because they were rusty and bent. They made big holes in my fabric, they made marks in my fabric – I even struggled to get the pins in and out of my fabric. Pay heed and don’t do it! Chuck them away (safely, of course) and buy new ones.

The same goes for the needles – they will be blunt and rusty. You’ll jab yourself, you’ll bleed and you’ll wish you’d not bothered. WG have a large selection of pins and needles as well as a sewing starter kit.

We’ll make a new pin cushion together on this blog in a week or two or you can buy a new one – try a magnetic one, it’s great for pin spillages!

And get some decent scissors – I will cover the variety and uses of scissors in a later blog post but you need some big scissors for cutting fabric and small snips for thread. To get you going, treat yourself to a pair of Fiskars shears and some of our snips. And keep them away from everyone else – paper is not the friend of fabric shears! I cut a piece of ribbon, approximately 15cm long and thread it through the handles of my fabric scissors. I sewed a couple of stitches at the end to secure it (or you could staple the ribbon together) so that they were easy to spot when any family member attempted to use them.

Thread is your final ingredient – old threads are useful but can be brittle if they have become damp over time. I was given a large box of old threads and use them for basting – they snapped constantly in my machine! I didn’t throw them away, I just use them in a way that suits the thread. But don’t get me started on cheap threads – cheap threads need throwing away! No further comment.

You can purchase all of these items in our online shop. Good luck!

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