Pins and PIncushions

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How important are pins to you when you're sewing?

For me until recently, I just bought cheap pins and assumed that 

"a pin was a pin"

But little did I know.....

I have some very small pins with tiny heads...

But these are small and tricky to get hold of to pull out, so I mainly just use these for pinning up my daughters' sporting ribbons!

Then I have lots of pins with round coloured heads - like these on this cute Christmas pudding pincushion that my daughter was given last year!

However, after posting a picture of the sad state of many of my pins on

 my facebook page recently..

I did receive lots of advice as to what pins to buy.

A few days later I went out and bought these:

WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

Whereas my old pins..

were shorter and would bend easily when I tried to push them through thick layers of fabric, these new pins are longer and stronger and as yet, I haven't managed to bend even one of them! (I've had them about a month now!)

So since I bought some new pins, I decided that I needed a new pincushion to put them in!

Cute, isn't it?

So what kind of pins do you use?

Then of course there is the other question of how you use your pins? Do you put them in the fabric in line with where you're going to stitch, or at right angles to the line of stitching?

Personally I've always put them in line with the stitching:

(see my dodgy bent pins?)

That's the way I learnt and it never occurred to me to do it any other way! Recently however, I've been trying to experiment with pinning at right angles to my stitching to see if it's easier ...

I'm still deciding. It's hard to break a habit!

I even found a whole article written about 

"How to use Pins the Right Way"

Who would have thought that 

"a pin could be so much more than just a pin!"