Tips for Choosing Sewing Pins

One of the expensive and smallest tools that we use with sewing of any type, are pins. And amazingly, if you go out and Google pins I have a favorite supplier that I like to use. And I went to their site and typed in straight pins and was shocked to see that there was page after page after page of pins that you could buy. There were dressmaker pins, bridal pins, tailoring pins and on and on and on. I never realized just how specific pins could be.

So today I'd like to show you three pins that I use quite a bit, and that you may want to consider with your sewing. The first pin is called the multi-use or ball headed pin. As you can see, it's got a little round ball at the top. These are very inexpensive pin, they're available at any sewing supply type store. As you can see, they're a moderate length shaft.

The shaft is fairly thick. And the point, the tip on it, is a little bit on the blunt side. So you may experience little runs or pulls in your fabric when you're using these type of pins. They're mass produced. They're inexpensive, like I said.

They do get the job done but they aren't my favorite pin. And one reason is because the heads will melt if they get near a very hot iron, or if you're steaming they can get flattened and literally melt into your fabric. My all time favorite pin that I like to use is the glass headed pin. These are very high quality pin. You will pay a little bit more for them but they're worth every penny.

The head on these types of pins are, as the name says glass therefore it will not melt when you get it near the high heat of an iron. They heads are also more firmly secured to the pin, so they don't pop off. There's a lot of times these heads will just pop off but you won't experience that problem with your glass headed pin. And probably most important is that, they come in different lengths, so you can get them in a longer length and they have an extremely fine point. So they will just slip into your fabric very easily.

Quilters in particular will like these pins because they are very fine and we need to match seams. And it's very easy to get that, literally, if you'll pardon the pun, pinpoint accuracy to match our seams and hold our pieces right where we need for, when we get ready to stitch. For the home sower, who's doing garment construction, whenever you need to match a seam particularly up at the tip of the shoulder or at the underarm, where you have two seams coming together and you want to match them. These pins are wonderful for that. So this is probably my go-to pin that I use all the time.

And I really like how sharp they are and how easy they are to manipulate through several layers of fabric. The final pin I'd like to show you today is the clover head or flower headed pin. These pins are thicker. They're probably on the same par with the thickness of your ordinary or multi-use pin rather. They do have a thicker shaft but they do have a little bit finer point than the multi-use pin, not quite as fine as the glass headed pin.

So it would be in between those two and they do come in longer lengths. One thing that I like for these is, they are nice and flat. They're very easy to use. They're great for applique. They're wonderful for when you're pinning a pattern onto your fabric, because they do lay flat and they aren't gonna get in the way when you're trying to cut and they also keep the fabric laying down.

Quilters will like them if they're doing particularly the kaleidoscope quilts where we need to point to one direction over the other. It's got a nice, big head that's very visible to see and it's long enough and durable enough that you can get through. I think this is eight layers here. You can get through very easily and it will hold them together. So again, we have the multi-purpose, multi-use ball headed pin, we have the glass headed pen and we have the flower headed pin.

And I think every one of these will be a valuable addition to your sewing toolbox.