Clover Stitch Guide Review

Where has the last week gone?! I don’t know how a week has passed since I wrote last week’s review. This week I’m testing out the Clover Stitch Guide. This is a new tool from Clover that I couldn’t get my hands on fast enough and let me tell you a little story why…

I’ve been sewing for over ten years but I really fell in love with sewing in 2015 after I had my son. I absolutely loved making cute baby clothes – they are quick to make, fun to design and only use small pieces of fabric. I was totally hooked. Jersey fabrics were my favourite and I loved making him cute dungarees and t-shirts. Because baby clothes are quick to make, I could manage to fit them into the short times I was baby-free and it really brought me joy to have something calm to do that was just for me.

The only part I disliked was hemming on my sewing machine, the twin needle tended to like tunneling and I found it tedious to set up my machine for twin needle every time I wanted to hem something. I then saw a Coverstitch machine on Facebook and decided to save up. I don’t work and our family income is budgeted for so if I wanted to treat myself to a new machine I needed to save. I started eBaying a lot of the clothes, shoes and handbags that I used to wear when I worked in a corporate office and bought back in the days when I had disposable income. Bit by bit the money crept up in my PayPal account and in August of 2017 (almost two years later) I ordered my Janome 2000CPX coverstitch machine.

When the machine arrived, I couldn’t help but notice it doesn’t have any measurements on the needle plate! That’s right!! A machine almost exclusively designed for hemming has no markings on the needle plate/machine to guide you to sew at a specific width! If you look closely in some of these pictures you can see the pencil marking where I drew on the marking for the last hem that I did on this machine!

So when this cool seam guide came out I couldn’t wait to get one and put it on this machine! It comes with a little plastic grid with measurements on, it has holes in so you can put it on your machine and lower the needle through the hole so that you know the stitch guide will be EXACTLY the correct measurement from the needle position.

Then once your grid is in place (I went for 2.5cm as that is my preferred hem depth on jersey garments) you can peel the protective backing off the minty green guides and pop them on the machine. They have a sticky backing, but they aren’t permanent, they can be taken off and re-postitioned and if they start to lose their stickiness you can wash them and let them dry and they will be sticky again!

The instructions that come with are very comprehensive and give lots of suggestions for how you could use the curved sides to sew curves or how you could use one at each side of the foot to neatly sew straps without them shifting around. I specificially requested this just so that I had a stitch guide for my coverstitch machine but now I have read through the instructions I can see loads of uses for this that I never even thought of!

And if you are interested in the results of my first time using the Coverstitch machine WITH the stitch guide, the above picture shows you how precise it was! I have never had the stitching fall so neatly, enclosing the edge of the jersey and also not-wobbly! As well as keeping the hem the exact distance away from the needle, it also served as a barrier to stop my fabric from wobbling from side to side.

For more information you can head over to the Clover website  https://www.clover-mfg.com/ and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to drop them an email at clover@stocksitenquiries.co.uk

Disclaimer: ⭐️Stitch Guide was provided free of charge in exchange for a review. All opinions are totally my own, and I wouldn’t recommend something I didn’t like!