Recently, I thought about how great it’d be if the sewing machines with electronics these days came with a stitch count feature. And maybe ten different counters, at that, while they’re putting in the counting features. A few for different needles, say, and the rest for different garments, as many of us who sew, don’t sew one garment or item all the way through before starting on another.

Seeing how many stitches go into a garment or item would be a really cool thing to know, in my opinion. It’d be like an identity number with a garment or item you sewed. It’d also give people a new appreciation for the sewing machine, in thinking about having to do that many stitches by hand! Or with the different counters, they can track stitching done from mistakes to see what percentage that is of a garment! As for tracking needles, companies would never need a better marketing tool for advising how often to switch needles!

With the garment tracker, you can also do all kinds of other things like seeing how different size garments compare for number of stitches, give or take a little margin of error cause you won’t be hitting the exact same number on duplicate garments. You can see how different garments compare, like pants to shirts to dress to coats, and so on. See how different your number was from a friend doing the same garment or item. See how many you rack up in a day, week, month, hour of furious sewing, etc. Simple, but endless fascinating fun, if you asked me! 🙂

People tell me there are “sewing” machines out there that count stitches, but they seem to be for quilting, for relatively small number of stitches are required for precision, rather than a large volume counter for total stitches in a garment. I don’t know if what I’m looking for exists in an affordable sewing machine rather something top of the line, but I wish it were. Maybe I’ll send this post to some sewing machine companies to see what they think. Maybe it’s a really hard and expensive thing to do, but I don’t think so. If you’ve got a sewing speed gauge, just estimate it based on speed and time pressed. An exact number isn’t needed, though that method should be pretty good, rather than, say, putting a manual counter into the machine somewhere, which would get worn out quickly given the volumes we’re talking about here!