Last week we shared our favorite brands of irons. Today I want to hear about what brand of sewing machine you use, and is it a good one or not?
I’ll also share the brands I’ve used over the years, along with my own opinion about each of them.
However, before I start describing sewing machines, I need to make my required disclaimer statement: As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. To learn more about how affiliate marketing works on my website, please go to the Privacy Policy page. Thank you!
I must also be perfectly honest with you: for Barbie and Ken, I rarely use my sewing machine. The smaller the doll clothes, the more likely I am to simply sew by hand.
When I do use my sewing machine for Barbie or Ken clothes (or for smaller doll clothes), I only use the machine to stitch relatively straight lines, like the hem of a dress or the straight-across shoulder seams. For corners like along the edges of a sleeve, I always sew by hand. I find I have more control when I stitch by hand, and therefore my seams match up correctly when I join pieces together.
For example, this is a tiny little skirt I made for the 5 inch Chelsea dolls:
I can’t imagine trying to make that teeny-tiny little thing on my sewing machine. It would just eat the fabric.
But I do own a lovely, easy-to-use sewing machine. My machine is a Viking Husqvarna with a top-loading bobbin. I used to use an older Singer sewing machine with a front-loading bobbin (see link for a similar model), and it worked great for years! But I’ve found that the top-loaders have fewer problems with the tangling thread and bunching fabric that gives people the biggest headache.
Both Husqvarna and Singer are good brands to choose, if you’re thinking about buying a new sewing machine. I’ve heard good things about Babylock, but I’ve never owned one. If you use one, please leave a comment, letting us know what you think of that well-known brand as well.
My daughters learned to sew on a Janome Sew Mini, and it’s a good starter machine for anyone just learning to sew. In fact, I just bought another one for my niece, Emily, for her birthday in April. I bought it on eBay, used, because these little gems are no longer in production, as I understand it.
I would have given Emily the one my girls had; however, after using it to teach my own two children to sew, along with dozens of kids at the school where I used to work as a librarian, our old Janome Sew Mini started to slowww waaaay dowwwn. Now it stitches at a snail’s pace, even when you push the foot pedal down to the floor!
Janome is inexpensive, so I still recommend that brand for beginners. Their new version of the Sew Mini Portable is only $49 on Amazon. That’s a heck of a deal for a beginner! But bargain machines aren’t usually the Cadillacs of the sewing world.
In the image above, that’s Francie standing next to my little slow-moving Sew Mini, so you can get an idea about the size of it. It’s not nearly as big as my lovely Husqvarna.
If you’re a long-time sewist, and you’ve been using your granny’s tired but true sewing machine since 1980, well… it might be time to move up in the world! Husqvarna and Singer were the gold standard back in the day, and they still have a good reputation among sewists in the modern era.
When my daughters graduated from high school, I let them pick which of those two brands they wanted for a graduation present. One got a Viking; the other got a Singer.
But these modern sewing machines also use new technology that didn’t exist when I was learning to sew on my mother’s old Genie Singer 353 model sewing machine. The feed dogs on that ol’ thing never worked right, and still to this day, I have a tendency to pull on my thread tails to “push start” my fabric moving, because Mom’s Genie was the machine that trained me!
Ugh! Bad habits are hard to kick!
I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve already started to purchase my gifts for Christmas 2025. So if you need a new machine, you can always drop hints to see if someone in your family will buy you one. That’s how I got my Viking Husqvarna, twenty years ago, and it’s still running strong!
If you’re thinking about buying a super simple sewing machine for a child or grandchild, or even an adult to learn to sew on, I still stand by my Janome Sew Mini as a fabulous first sewing machine.
As you can see in the image above, it doesn’t have a ton of features, but you really only need a straight stitch and a zigzag stitch to get started. And like I said, the newer version of this machine, the Sew Mini Portable, is available on Amazon for next to nothing right now.
I’m really glad both my daughters learned to sew on this simple and inexpensive little machine. It was cheap enough that I never felt nervous walking away from them while they experimented on it. And unlike my mom’s Genie Singer 353, the feed dogs worked back when the girls were little, and by golly, they’re still going strong!
Now it’s your turn…
What brand of sewing machine is your favorite and why?
And what type of sewing machine did you learn to sew on? Did it have any issues that you can remember?
Please add to the discussion! Leave a comment!