Sewing needle

A sewing needle for hand-sewing is a long slender tool with a pointed tip at one end and a hole or eye at the other. The earliest needles were made of bone or wood; modern ones are manufactured from high carbon steel wire and are nickel- or 18K gold-plated for corrosion resistance. The highest quality embroidery needles are plated with two-thirds platinum and one-third titanium alloy. Traditionally, needles have been kept in needle books or needlecases which have become objects of adornment. Sewing needles may also be kept in an etui, a small box that held needles and other items such as scissors, pencils and tweezers.

Hand sewing needles come in a variety of types/ classes designed according to their intended use and in a variety of sizes within each type.

Needle size is denoted by one or more numbers on the manufacturer's packet. The general convention for sizing of needles, like that of wire gauges, is that within any given class of needle the length and thickness of a needle increases as the size number decreases. For example, a size 9 needle will be thicker and longer than a size 12 needle. However, the needle sizes are not standardized and so a size 10 of one class may be (and in some cases actually is) either thinner or finer than a size 12 of another type. Where a packet contains a needle count followed by two size numbers such as "20 Sharps 5/10" the second set of numbers correspond to the range of sizes of needle within the packet, in this case typically ten sharps needles of size 5 and ten of size 10 (for a total of 20 needles). As another example, a packet labeled "16 Milliners 3/9" would contain 16 milliners needles ranging in sizes from 3 to 9.

The first form of sewing was probably tying together animal skins using thorns and sharpened rocks as needles, with animal sinew or plant material as thread. The early limitation was the ability to produce a small enough hole in a needle matrix such as a bone sliver small enough not to damage the material: traces of this survive in the use of bodkins to make eyelet holes in fabric by separating rather than cutting the threads. A point that might be from a bone needle dates to 61,000 years ago and was discovered in Sibudu Cave, South Africa. A needle made from bird bone and attributed to non-humans, estimated to be around 50,000 years-old, was found in Denisova Cave. A bone needle, dated to the Aurignacian age (47000 to 41,000 years ago), was discovered in Potok Cave (Slovene: Potočka zijalka) in the Eastern Karavanke, Slovenia. Bone and ivory needles found in the Xiaogushan prehistoric site in Liaoning province date between 30,000 and 23,000 years old. Ivory needles were also found dated to 30,000 years ago at the Kostenki site in Russia.Flinders Petrie found copper needles at Naqada, ranging from 4400 BC to 3000 BC. Iron sewing needles were found at the Oppidum of Manching, dating to the third century BC.

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