SewingGearWise.com is an independent editorial site about sewing machines, sergers, needles, thread and the gear around them. To keep our guides free to read, we work with affiliate programs.
What are affiliate links?
If you buy something through some of the links on our site, we may receive a small commission from the retailer. You never pay more because of this, and the price is the same as it would be without the link.
Amazon Associates
SewingGearWise.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Our Amazon links carry the associate tag sewinggearwise-20. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. We may also participate in similar affiliate or referral programs offered by other retailers and manufacturers.
Our recommendations are editorial
Commissions never decide what we recommend. No manufacturer pays for a placement, and no product is included because it earns more. A product appears in a guide only after we have explained what it is for and who it suits, and it is left out when it does not hold up. Where the honest answer is that nothing needs to be bought, or that a fresh needle, the right thread or a proper clean is the real fix, that is what we write.
Several brands run largely through dealers rather than through a retailer we can link to. Janome, Juki, Bernina and Baby Lock models are often sold and serviced that way, and the machines at the top of the heavy duty and quilting categories are dealer goods with a price to match. We say so on the page instead of pointing a buy button at the nearest listing, and a model with no genuine retail presence gets a write up without one.
Some subjects carry no product links at all. Articles about tension, skipped stitches, thread nests, timing and when to stop and visit a repair shop point to your own manual and to a technician instead, because a purchase is not the answer to those questions.
We select on fit, on published manufacturer specifications and on reported owner experience, because we do not physically test products and do not claim to. We keep prices out of the written guides, since the current price is always on the retailer page.
A reminder about advice
Buying a product is not the same as getting advice. We are not technicians, dealers or manufacturers, and nothing we recommend is a substitute for the manual that came with your machine or for a qualified repair shop when a machine needs one.