Several years ago I was sewing at the machine and got up to try on a piece in progress and in my way back to sit down my garment caught a pin in the magnetic cushion and CRASH!

Pins all over the carpet. Under the table too. So I bent over and picked up a section then got on my knees and started scooping them off the carpet and under the table.

When it looked all clear I pivoted on my knees to get a good handhold to get up and OW!

Something stuck me in the top of the foot. I had a tiny red dot on the skin, and I found a pin nearby so I figured I’d just been stuck.

The next day, my foot was a little tender on top, but nothing out of the ordinary I thought since it was punctured by a pin where it was. While at work I was increasingly in more and more pain as the day went on. My foot was swelling up inside my shoe to the point it was incredibly painful. I started the tough 1.5 hour drive home. I called for a friend a neighbor to come drive me over to the hospital and we promptly arrived at the ER with me crying from pain (I’m not a cryer). We managed to get my shoe off, and the pain was a tiny bit better, but my foot looked awful. Like a bloated sausage.

They xrayed it. You could clearly see the shape of HALF a straight pin lodged horizontally in the flesh of the top of my foot on the films. It had broken off inside. Great.

They set my up in a corner of the triage and after a half hour in comes this giant machine. It had a Horsehoe type section, and what it seemed to be was a live xray imager with a computer screen. The “viewing” part was a horseshoe shaped attachment about 3 foot wide. They sat my foot in the center of the thing and gave me a couple numbing shots. (And took some pictures with the machine for me, which I would include but I can’t find them at this time)

It was like a video game version of the old board game Operation. They could see the pin live inside my foot, but they didn’t have a good angle on it, just one side. They were poking tools into my foot blind basically. The pin was hidden deep in flesh of my foot. Little by little they had to increase the incision to try to get at it. Occasionally they’d bump it and I’d wince or moan as it hurt! You could see the pliers coming close to it and when it was close you would see the pin move. The problem was all they could get at was the snapped off end, a virtual dot in a small opening of blood and fatty tissue. It was small and slippery, so the pliers kept loosing it.

Finally, two hours of poking and missing and a two sided incision later they finally managed to get a pair of pliers on it and gave a stiff tug. It came free. It had stuck into one of the metatarsal bones in my foot, which is why it was so hard to remove, and probably why it snapped off.

Most of my pain lessened immediately. I actually walked into the car which was something not easily done on arrival. Took three days for the swelling to go down, but they have poked and prodded in there so much I have a small bulge of scar tissue there now and a V shaped scar 10 years later.

This is why I stuff my pincushions so firmly that they actually sound as if they crunch when you poke a pin in them. I stuff in so much polyfil that I almost can’t put in even a little more… I want to make sure that if you drop it, the pins stay in! Because I know what can happen if they don’t.

I don’t use magnetics anymore either. Not only do I not miss it, I don’t stick my fingers trying to get a pin like I used to.

Sometimes the old way is the best way.

I know some stuff with wool but I try to avoid it since I’m not using wool for the outisde due to many people being allergic to wool so I just use the ordinary cheap as you can get fiberfill. Hypoallergenic is good, recycled is good. I also pack them FULL, stuffing in as much as I can get them to hold and still keep it shut. I use the ends of my blunt scissors or even old take out chopsticks for stuffing sticks. if you can still fit in our stuffing, keep stuffing, and be sure to pay attention to the sides ad there are no flat areas. You want it to be well rounded and bounce back fully from a hard finger press.

Be sure to stuff any wrinkly areas to fill out the wrinkles entirely. No one likes a wimpy pincushion.

A few words on stuffing materials:

There is a “hard” pack or clumping kind for dollmakers, I have tried it and I hate it, clumping is right! It compresses and doesn’t have the oomph. Compression is bad as I see it you want the airspace to fill so your pins/needles are held securely, when they compress they get hard for one, but they also decrease the surface area gripping our pins and I find it will allow ‘shake outs” or pin droppage.

I will on occasion use polyester “Dollmaker” beads to add a little heft and weight to the bottoms (only) as well, you could even use them to fill a pincushion entirely though I won’t suggest it as they would provide too little support with the round sides not giving enough surface contact to actually HOLD a needle or pin. Not enough resistance means pins would loosen with a easy drop.

The first pincushions in the 16th century were stuffed with sawdust or wheat bran or germ. I imagine the dust from one of those after a few years use was pretty bad! And probably went mealy or bug infested in time. Ew. That stuffing, as well as wool or hay, seemed to carry on for quite a while it was cheap and readily available in most households.

I’ve seen DottyRal use Emery sand which is what the old little attached strawberries on the old style red tomato pincushions your grandma used were filled with – and I wanted to address that. While it is a old style of sewing notion it’s not the best idea for a pincushion.

When old pins dulled they became dangerous to fine fabrics as they pulled fibers, so they used the emery bags every so often to keep them sharp and clean from tarnish. But here’s the problem: modern pins/needles don’t dull or tarnish, and antique pins weren’t plated.

Pressing a modern pin into a emery bag can scratch that highly slick chrome finish and even help flake it off with the abrasive action of being sand. You ever press a flakey finish pin through fabric? Trust me, it causes pulls. Modern pins also are of a more hardened steel, they rarely if ever dull and due to the finish to do not require sharpening. And if they do, they are cheap enough to discard if they flake or dull. Antique pins were pricey, even when they first began to be at least partially factory manufactured in the Victorian era so you tended to try to eek every cent out of them.

I hope this helped I’ll think I’ll be posting some more of these how-to/info posts on materials, and history (I’m a history nut) as this blog progresses.

Thanks for reading!