Choosing the Best Sewing Machine Needles

Do you ever find yourself staring at the display of needles in the stor and like what should I get? You just, you know, what am I supposed to be picking out here? which one's the best for my machine? and what's the difference between them all? So I'm just gonna, quick little tips. Alright, this sounds, this is gonna sound really obvious, but you can look at the back of a needle package, and it's gonna tell you what it's for. This is a jeans needle. And it's for penetrating extra thick woven fabrics, denims, or quilts with minimum needle deflection, reducing risk of needle breakage and skip stitches. Okay, what that's really telling you is that it can go through a heavy, either a sandwich or a heavy fabric, woven fabric. All right, that's important, because if you are, if you're working on a knit fabric, you're gonna want something called a ballpoint needle, a ballpoint needle isn't sharp, it's just what it sounds like. It's kind of a rounded and so it slips between the little knit stitches in your, you know, in your knit fabric and doesn't split the thread. So if you're using something like a jersey or something stretchy, you're going to want ballpoint needle. If you're quilting, however, you're going to be most often using using something like this is a universal needle. It works with everything, and it's what I have in my machine, but sometimes you're gonna want something like a metallic needle. Now a metallic needle, you don't have to be using a metallic thread to use the metallic needle. It's a metallic needle it's called that because it has a big eye, so it doesn't shred the thread. If you want to just be really sure that you're not breaking your neat, you know, your thread a lot, it just makes life easier, you might want to use a metallic needle. I also like top stitch needles, let me show you what it says on the back of this one. It says these needles have an extra long eye for use with top stitch heavy multiple or poor quality threads. Well, that's a good thing to know, if you're using something that's a thick thread, or I hope you're not using poor quality threads. That'd be really sad. But if you are, you know, this is the needle for you. The top stitch needle. And here is one of the threads I use it with. I like to do a lot of wool applique. And I like having that blanket stitch, but I want it to be in a wool thread. So this is a wool thread, but it's thicker. It's a lot thicker than the thread I usually use for piecing. Okay, let me just show you here. You can see that's a much thicker thread. And so for me having a top stitch needle with this one, means that I'm going to have success when I'm sewing. So that's why I use a top stitch needle. And then just I'm sure you know this, but there are multiple brands. This is Schmitz. This is Superior. There are others. And one last one leather needles. Now why would you ever use a leather needle? Alright, for use on leather, artificial leather and heavy non woven synthetics. Has a cutting point which means it slicing through, well, you know, what that's really good for, it's really good if you're sewing something like laminated cotton, because while it is woven, it's got that lamination on top of it, which means that it's now just a solid surface, it's neither woven nor knit. And one of the things to know is first you of course you need to know what type of needle you want. But the other thing is size. Now there's a European way and an American way. And luckily for us, needle manufacturers put both sizes on the packages. So the needle size, if the numbers bigger, the needle is bigger. And by the needle, I mean there's the shaft of the needle, the actual piece of metal, you know, that's how big a hole it's going to make. So this is a 7010. That's what I usually use. And if you look up here, this one is 130/705. That's a really big one. This is 80/12, 90/14, 110/18. So you'll see that as the number goes back, if the number goes up, the size of the needle goes up. So that's really what you need to know about about sewing machine needles. And the most important thing I can tell you, is change your needle with every project. Or even more often than that if you have skipped stitches, or your threads breaking, if you're having problems, one of the first things to try is just change your needle because a needle that's dull or a needle that's a little bit bent can cause skip stitches. And that's about it. So, go help yourself to some needles when they're on sale so you don't feel bad about changing them all the time and change them all the time.