The Great British Sewing Bee: Sewing Studio Review

I absolutely love sewing. You can view my creations on my craft page here. From blanket to toys, to dresses and pillows, there’s something rather therapeutic about sewing.

Our twin girls have also taken an interest in sewing. Quite often if I’m making something they’ll ask to help cut the fabric or press the foot pedal. They’ve been desperate to make something of their own for a while now, but I’d never let them use my sewing machine as it’s simply too big for them and not safe for their little fingers.

We were recently sent this Sewing Studio sewing machine to review which means our girls have finally had the chance to make their own creations!

This official Great British Sewing Bee sewing machine is designed for children aged six and over.

The sewing machine itself is pretty compact which is great for little hands. It also has 2 speed settings.

I really like that it has a finger safety guard around the actual sewing machine needle which means you don’t need to worry about children getting their fingers caught.

There’s also a handy compartment drawer to keep your thread or various sewing things in.

I really wanted to like this sewing machine, but unfortunately I just can’t bring myself to recommend it. Set up was fiddly and I actually had to break a piece in order to sit the thread on the machine properly.

The instructions say ‘raise the thread spindle by pulling the exposed top upward until fully extended’. Sounds simple enough, except the top of the silver spindle was so wedged into the pink plastic base that it just wouldn’t budge.

I tried tweezers, scissors and a screwdriver to raise the silver spindle, but in the end my husband used a pair of pliers to break the pink piece off so that we could raise the spindle as it was just wedged in and wouldn’t move.

Sadly this wasn’t the end of our problems. Once the spindle was up, the machine was easy to set up, but the thread supplied isn’t very good quality so every few minutes whilst sewing the thread would snap meaning we’d have to re-thread the entire machine. This inevitably meant making the clutch purse took far longer than it should have.

I will say on a positive note that the instructions for the clutch purse were very clear and easy to follow. Children will need a grown up to help with some parts such as pinning the pattern onto the fabric and cutting the fabric out.

After reading through the instructions, it was time to get started on making our clutch purse bag.

I pinned the pattern onto the fabric and cut the fabric out for the girls.

Although the girls did get to have a go on the sewing machine, they soon became frustrated because the thread kept snapping. As such I ended up making most of the clutch purse on my own.

I do like that you can either let children use the foot pedal to power the machine, or they can just use the two speed buttons on the unit instead of the foot pedal. This is what we did as the girls legs aren’t quite long enough to reach the foot pedal on the floor!

As you can see despite it’s flaws the girls clutch purses turned out very nice indeed. The clutch purse kit includes enough material to make one pink clutch purse, but luckily I have a big fabric stash so R was also able to make a blue one.

Perhaps we had a dodgy machine due to the thread spindle being stuck, but as such I really feel that I can’t recommend this sewing machine.

I know other bloggers have received the same machine and have had no problems with theirs, so it’s unfortunate that this wasn’t the case for us. I doubt we’d use it again.

For the purpose this review, we were sent the above sewing machine. All views and opinions are 100% my own.