How the Singer Thread Snips Ended Up on My Sewing Table

For about a month in the winter of 2024, my kitchen scissors lived upstairs in the spare bedroom. I would finish a monogram on a hand towel, look at the thread tail hanging off the last letter, and walk down the hall, down the stairs, and into the kitchen to cut it. Then I would carry them back up, because I knew I would need them again in ten minutes. My husband Dale asked twice where the good scissors had gone. Both times I said I had no idea. That is how the SINGER thread snips ended up on my sewing table.

Here is what nobody explains before your first machine. The Brother SE1900 does not trim jump stitches for you. When a design moves from one letter to the next, the needle lifts and travels, and it leaves a thread stretched across the gap. On a name with four letters you might have six or eight of those threads to deal with. The machine is not broken. That is simply the work. You cut them by hand, close to the fabric, and then you go on.

Kitchen shears are the wrong tool for that job, and it took me a month to admit it. They are heavy in the hand, the blades are long, and the tips are blunt enough that getting under a single thread means lifting the whole towel off the table. Twice I nicked a terry loop on a bath towel while trying to be careful. Nothing was ruined. It just annoyed me, and it slowed me down on a morning when I had four towels to finish.

So in January 2024 I ordered the SINGER ProSeries thread snips. Five inches long, stainless steel, straight blade edge, fine tips, a rubber grip on the handles, ambidextrous, 1.44 ounces. I did not research it for weeks. I wanted something small enough to keep at the machine and fine enough to get under one thread without lifting the fabric, and this was the pair in front of me.

The first week the spring felt stiff, and I noticed it every single time I used it. By the second week I had stopped noticing. That is the whole of my complaint about the thing, and I would rather tell you that than pretend the first week was perfect.

The shears went back to the kitchen drawer in January 2024 and have not been upstairs since.

It lives on a short ribbon tied near the machine's handle, hanging down at the height of my right hand when I sit at the table. That placement is the entire reason it works. A tool in a drawer is a tool I have to go find, and I have proven to myself that I will not go find it. It hangs, I reach, I cut, I go back to watching the needle.

In use it does exactly one job well. The fine tips slide under a jump thread without catching the terry loops underneath, one squeeze closes the straight blades, and the thread drops. I do not have to lift the towel. I do not have to take my eyes off the hoop for long. The ambidextrous handles mean nothing to me personally, but my friend Marjorie from church is left handed and she picked them up without a word of instruction, which says something.

What I want to be clear about is that it did not replace my other scissors. I keep one small pair of curved embroidery scissors in the table drawer, no brand on them, and those are what I use to trim close on the back of a fleece baby blanket where I do not want a tip anywhere near the front. The snips handle jump stitches and thread tails at the needle. The curved pair handles the finishing work. Two tools, two jobs, and I would not give up either.

I also want to be honest about what it does not do. It does not stop the machine from making jump stitches. It does not trim them for you, and it does not make the work faster in any way I could measure. It is a small pair of snips on a ribbon. What it removed from my day was the walking, and the hunting, and the small flash of irritation every time I reached for shears that were not there.

By the time the December craft fair at St. Peter's comes around again, I will be doing what I did the last two years, which is hooping towels in the morning light by the window with the snips hanging where my hand already goes. I do not think about them anymore. That is about the highest thing I can say for a tool.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are new to this and you are still borrowing the scissors from the kitchen drawer, buy the small tool early. Not because the SINGER snips are remarkable, but because you are going to cut hundreds of thread tails, and every one of them is easier with something that weighs 1.44 ounces and has a tip fine enough to slide under a single strand. Tie it to the machine with a ribbon the day it arrives. Do not put it in a drawer with good intentions.

And keep your curved scissors too. If someone tells you one pair of snips does everything, they are either neater than I am or they have not trimmed the back of a blanket lately. Buy the small thing, hang it where your hand already goes, and then stop thinking about it and get back to the towels.