Last week I did a little shopping for a couple of new feet for my sewing machine.  One of them, which I’ll tell you about next week, I was looking for following a recommendation from a friend, and the other, well it fell into my basket along with the first one as I browsed through all the options to get my money’s worth from the postage.  To be fair, at £10 for the foot, it wasn’t a bank breaking decision, and it looked like it might be useful.

I find it interesting that for all that the various sewing machine manufacturers have invested in creating a whole array of useful feet, you rarely see them mentioned anywhere outside of dealer’s shops.  I’ll be the first to admit that I normally use 4 feet, my standard foot, that’s on about 90% of the time, my zipper foot, which get’s about 5% of the time, my open toed applique foot that gets about 2.5% of the time, and my FMQ foot that gets the remaining 2.5% of the time.  On extreme occasions I break out the button hole foot, and that’s it, I’m too lazy to even use my walking foot these days!  The only feet I ever see mentioned are 1/4″ feet, walking feet and FMQ feet, but the rest?  They’re a mystery.  I wonder why that is?  Oh well, I’m going to give 2 an airing now anyway ;o)

This is what Brother has billed as a Stitch Guide foot, and is a snap in foot, so there’s a good chance it would actually fit other makes too:

As a name it’s slightly confusing to me as I think of stitch guides being the things you screw into the bed of your machine, but in fact this little beauty is a bit of a genius invention.  Instead of having to try and follow measurement lines on the bed of the machine, the lines are actually included in the foot.  This great for top stitching as you generally don’t want a seam allowance as large as it would have to be to get the edge of the fabric to follow the line on the machine bed:

I do a lot of top stitching in bags, so this will get a lot of use for that alone.

The other place I anticipate it being useful is on curved pieces when it’s especially awkward to follow seam allowances on the machine bed, or even the edge of the foot.

I’m thinking it was worth the £10 investment!  How about you, do you have some fantastic and unusual feet for your machine?  Hidden little gems that are rarely talked about?  Let us know in the comments below.