When you’re new to sewing, it’s hard to know what you actually need. Social media is full of opinions and short on filters — and asking feels risky, because somewhere along the way we all pick up the idea that everyone else already knows the basics.
Let me save you the guessing. You don’t need a drawer full of gadgets before you’re allowed to call yourself a sewist. For most of my sewing life, my kit held little more than the essentials below — pretty much the same things my mum kept in her sewing kit. It wasn’t until I turned 40 that I started adding to it at all. Decades of sewing, one small kit, and it never once held me back.
So here it is: what’s genuinely in my kit, what I’d buy first, what’s worth upgrading later, and what you can happily skip.
The essentials — start here
This is the kit I sewed with for years — the same handful of tools you’d have found in my mum’s sewing basket. If you’re just beginning, these are what I’d put in your hands before anything else.
Everything I sewed with for decades. The black pair are for fabric; the green-handled ones are for paper — I like a longer blade there, so the cuts aren't so choppy.
Two pairs of scissors. This is the one I’m most insistent about with beginners: one good pair of dressmaking shears for fabric only, and a second, cheaper pair for paper and everything else. Not one pair used carefully — two pairs, kept apart, with a solemn household rule that nobody — nobody — takes the good ones to paper.
Paper dulls blades faster than anything, and dull scissors chew fabric instead of cutting it. I grew up under the “no one touches Mum’s fabric scissors” law, delivered in a tone that suggested consequences beyond my imagination. If you’ve seen the memes — someone’s used Mum’s sewing scissors on cardboard and now the police are involved — I promise you they’re only barely exaggerating.
I still own my very first pair of fabric scissors, given to me when I was about nine. They’re left-handed — because I am, and my mum understood something it takes many sewists years to learn: the correct equipment matters. Right-handed scissors in a left hand fold the fabric instead of cutting it, and no amount of skill fixes the wrong tool. If you’re a leftie, don’t compromise — proper left-handed scissors exist, and they change everything. (Ask us — we’ll point you to them.)
Still mine, thirty-something years later.
A small pair of snips. For clipping threads as you sew. You’ll reach for these more than any other tool you own, and the reason is speed — there are no handles to fit your fingers into, so you can pick them up, snip, and put them down in one movement. Over a long session that adds up.
Pins — and a magnetic pin bowl. Glass-head pins are my preference: the heads won’t melt under an iron, and they’re easy to spot. The magnetic bowl sounds like a luxury until the first time you knock over a pin tin. Then it’s an essential.
Hand-sewing needles. Even machine sewists hand-finish: buttons, hems, that one spot the machine can’t reach. A mixed pack of sharps covers you.
A good tape measure. Fibreglass, not fabric — fabric tapes stretch over time, and a tape that’s lying to you by a centimetre will quietly sabotage every project. Replace yours every few years; they wear out and no one tells you this.
A quick unpick. Not a mark of failure — a mark of someone who sews. I unpick things weekly, and I’ve been doing this a long time. Buy one with a comfortable handle, because you will spend time together.
They also wear out, which nobody tells you. If a stitch won’t break without real force, the blade has gone blunt — replace it rather than pushing harder. Forcing a blunt one is how you put a hole in the fabric you were trying to rescue — or how the point slips and goes into your hand.
Marking tools. People ask me what the best marking tool is, and there isn’t one — it depends on the fabric and on what you’re marking. I use several: a water-erasable marker, a chalk slab, a chalk cartridge pencil, and dressmaker’s carbon with a tracing wheel, which is particularly good for darts.
To begin with, a chalk slab is the cheapest way in and comes in several colours. That’s plenty. You’ll add to it as you work out what you like and what behaves on what.
Whatever you use, test it on a scrap of your fabric first. Always.
Thread — and make it polyester. Bargain-bin thread snaps, sheds lint into your machine, and makes seams weaker than they look. But there’s a more specific point worth making, because plenty of people assume cotton and polyester thread are much of a muchness.
They aren’t. Polyester is spun from long, strong fibres with a degree of natural stretch — the proper term is elongation. Cotton fibres are shorter and have far less give. That difference shows up at every stage: while you’re sewing, and then every time the garment is worn and the seam is put under strain. Cotton thread is simply more likely to snap.
Polyester is the less comfortable choice environmentally, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it’s the best option currently available to home sewists — and a garment sewn with cotton thread will need repairing more often, which carries its own cost.
Worth every cent — the upgrades that can wait
I didn’t start adding to my kit until I turned 40 — so believe me when I say none of these are day-one essentials. They’re here so you know what’s ahead, not what’s required. Each one has more than earned its place since.
A truly good pair of scissors. When you’re ready to treat yourself, this is where I’d point you. My own shears are William Whiteley — hand-forged in Sheffield since 1760, and the difference is genuinely hard to describe until you’ve cut a long, clean line through fabric with them.
The pair I bought when I was ready to treat myself.
Honesty compels an admission here, though: they’re not what I reach for most days. See below.
Swedish tracing paper. If you sew from patterns, Patterntrace changed how I work. Instead of cutting into a printed pattern (and losing every other size forever), you trace the size you need onto Patterntrace — it’s sewable, drapes like fabric so you can check fit before cutting, and your original pattern stays intact. We’re the only place in Australia with the full range: all three roll sizes, up to 1m wide, so there are no joins when you’re tracing a big pattern piece.
Quality notions. This is where Prym comes in. Their ergonomic quick unpicks, fabric clips (brilliant for anything too thick or delicate to pin), point turners, and marking tools are the “small tools done properly” that quietly make everything easier.
A tailor’s ham and seam roll. The moment you sew anything with a curve — a bust dart, a sleeve cap — you’ll understand. Pressing curved seams on a flat board flattens the very shape you just sewed in.
A rotary cutter — with real caveats. Here’s the admission: I rarely use scissors to cut out. I learned to use a rotary cutter properly in one of those classes I took after turning 40, and it changed the job completely. I loathe cutting out, and this makes it much quicker. I keep a range of blade diameters, because tight curves need a small blade.
It isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t for beginners. Confidence matters, because one errant pass can ruin the fabric outright. You need a large self-healing mat — the small ones sold for quilting won’t do for garment pieces, and shifting the fabric around to fit a small mat introduces distortion and inaccuracy.
And the ergonomics are genuinely different. With scissors, your elbow sits at roughly a right angle. A rotary cutter needs a much straighter arm to put enough downward force through the blade, which in turn means a lower table — or working on the floor, which is beyond some people physically. It’s worth knowing that before you buy one.
(How my kit grew from my mum’s handful of tools into what it is today — and what’s actually in it now — is a story for its own post. Coming soon.)
What about an iron?
I used to assume everyone owned one. It turns out plenty of people don’t any more — vertical steamers have quietly replaced irons in a lot of houses, and a steamer will not do this job.
Pressing works because three things act together: heat, steam, and pressure — physically pushing down onto the fabric with the sole of the iron. A steamer gives you two of the three. The pressure is the part you can’t replicate, and it’s doing most of the work.
Pressing as you go is the single biggest difference between homemade-looking and handmade-looking. What I say to my beginner students is that I won’t judge them for never ironing anything else in their lives, but I will judge them harshly for not pressing their work as they sew. It’s said as a joke. The point usually lands.
Nothing expensive is needed — a $30 iron from Big W will do it. You do need something to press on, though. A small tabletop ironing board is about $10 from Ikea and takes up almost no room.
What you can skip (for now)
- Rotary cutters and mats — what I use myself, but not where I’d start. See above.
- Specialty machine feet — buy them when a project demands them, not before.
- Every gadget the internet insists you need — if you’re not sure what it’s for, you don’t need it yet.
The honest truth
You can start sewing well with around $100 of tools — plus an iron, if you haven’t got one — and a single length of fabric you love. I’m proof — my mum’s-kit-sized collection carried me through decades of sewing before I added a single thing. The kit grows with you, in its own time — and half the joy is discovering which tools you reach for, because everyone’s kit ends up a little different.
And if you’d rather try sewing before buying anything at all — you can. Our Absolute Beginners evening workshop includes everything: machines, fabric, thread, patterns, the lot. You bring yourself, and that’s it. Sewing can be an expensive hobby, and we’d rather you fall in love with it first and build your kit second. With no more than four students in a class, you’ll get plenty of help doing both.
By the end you’ll have made a tote bag and a pair of pyjama shorts — and you’ll know which tools you actually want.
And if you’re standing in front of a wall of options wondering which quick unpick, which pins, which scissors — please ask. There are no embarrassing questions here; the “basic” ones are our favourites. Email us, message us, or come see us in the shop (Fridays and Saturdays, or by private appointment) — bring your project idea and we’ll build your kit together.
