This site contains affiliate links from which we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!

Welcome to Day 8 of 31 Days of Getting Organized!

Thanks for all the great ideas on organizing threads! There were a few there I’d never heard about, like Sunny’s method of using Floss-a-way bags!  They were new to me, but a great idea for those who don’t have as many threads as I do, and who don’t want to wind them onto bobbins…

Today I’m going to share how I organize my Bernina feet and accessories… first off, I’m going to tell you how I came to have so many Bernina feet!

My first Bernina I bought was new – we found it in a corner of a sewing machine shop in the souk (market) in Arabia… It was the only Bernina in the shop, and an old model (Virtuosa 153 QE) . But I loved it, and since then I have been a Bernina fan (as you probably already knew!)

It was around this time that I first met Nora… and we started sewing and working together…. She also had Berninas back in those days (she now has and sells Janome). She had bought a second hand Bernina Aurora from a friend of hers who went back to the US… and it came with dozens of feet and accessories! I had never seen so many in one spot!!  I distinctly remember my jaw dropping when I saw them all 🙂

Fast forward five or six years…. Nora had changed over to Janome, (much to my shock and horror…. !) but she had this last remaining Bernina in her possession… she didn’t want to sell it because the friend she bought it from had since passed away, and it was sentimental for her.

Imagine my surprise, when one day Nora said to me – “I want to give the Bernina to Elizabeth” (my DD). I was so moved… she knew I loved Berninas and DD was at that time just starting to get into sewing… it was such a lovely gift. An added bonus was that all the feet and accessories that came with it, could fit on my other Berninas.

When Nora owned the Bernina, she had all the feet in a bag with clear zippy pouches in it…. she kept the bag for her Janome feet, so we had all the Bernina feet loose in a big bag… leaving me with trying to get them organized in another way.

My solution was the little cupboards that came with two of my Berninas. I like to call them “Barbie cupboards”:

These little cupboards attach to the back of my 440 and 240 models… I also bought an extra one, but that is back in Oz. Most of the feet can fit in the two Barbie cupboards I have with me here. I love the way you can organize them and also fit in a few bobbins:

The one above has yellowed with age, it belongs to my second hand Nina…

Since I keep my threads and bobbins together, I usually only have white or cream refills in these cupboards… and a few empties in case I start a new spool of thread:

The little drawers are handy for odds and ends:

There are some Bernina feet and accessories that don’t fit into the Barbie cupboards, so they go in an Ikea Trofast tub:

And there you have it… all nicely organized and I can find them quite easily. Of course looking at these photos I just realized I don’t have them in numerical order…. oh dear.. I’d better fix that!

Do you have these Bernina Barbie cupboards as well? If you have different brands or models of machines, how do you organize your sewing machine feet?