Sewing Machine Presser Foot Sets & Adapters

A sewing machine presser foot is the cheapest way to make a machine do something it could not do yesterday. A blind hem foot puts an invisible hem on a curtain; a binder folds and attaches bias tape in one pass; a zipper foot gets the needle right up against the teeth. The machine does not change — the foot does.

Before you order anything: which shank do you have?

This is the one thing that goes wrong, and it is worth two minutes now. Find the thumbscrew that holds the presser foot on, and measure from the centre of that screw down to the floor plate. Half an inch means you have a low shank machine — which is most domestic machines built since 1980.

The good news is that the 32-piece kit ships with three bonus adapters, so it fits low shank and high shank domestic machines out of the box: Singer, Brother, Janome, Kenmore, White, Elna, Euro-Pro, Juki, Necchi, Husqvarna Viking, Pfaff and BabyLock among them. Two exceptions, and they are the ones people get caught by: Bernina machines and slant-shank Singers are not covered. Bernina used its own fitting and changed it in 1996, so there are separate adapters here for machines made before and after that year.

Where to start

The 32-piece kit is the sensible first purchase. The packaging and the manual name every foot with a photograph and explain what it does, which matters more than it sounds — an unlabelled bag of feet is a bag you never open. It covers the ones you will actually reach for: zipper and invisible zipper, blind stitch, two hemmers at 3 mm and 6 mm, shirring and gathering, overcast, satin stitch, four cording feet, two quilting feet, two pintuck feet, roller, applique, knit, darning and an adjustable bias binder foot.

Buying feet individually costs more per foot and you will still end up wanting the ones you skipped. After the kit, the two specialists worth adding are the binding curve edge folder, for binding a curved edge without pinning it first, and the flower stitch foot, which turns a straight-stitch machine into one that sews circles and petals.

The small parts that are not feet

A magnetic seam guide sticks to the needle plate and gives you a physical edge to run fabric against, which is more accurate than watching a printed line. There is a screw-clamp for changing feet without a screwdriver, and a mini needle-plate screwdriver for when there is no way around it.

Shank adapters on their own are also in sewing machine shank adapters. General tools are in sewing tools and notions.