I own several general embroidery scissors. They are under four inches in length. All but two of my embroidery scissors are under $10.
I would not use any of them for cutting a large piece of fabric down to the work size I want for a project. That much cutting of fabric cloth would dull the blades. I actually, for cutting fabric cloth, use inexpensive plastic handled, long bladed scissors with pretty much a flat not pointed end to the tips. I prefer using the flat ended tips for cloth cutting so that I do not poke into the cloth by mistake.
The below discussion is mostly about hardanger scissors:
The Dovo and Gingher are the higher price ones, near $40 for each and only used for snipping fabric threads for hardanger cutwork. When not in use they are individually sheated in a leather sleeve and settled into my sewing box.
 Scissors To the left shows the three main style of embroidery scissors that I used. The shown DMC scissor is my general go-to embroidery scissor. The two lower ones are hardanger scissors. The Dovo is best for precise snipping but often I am working for an hour or longer snipping fabric threads from the center of a kloster block. That’s when I greatly appreciate the larger finger holes in the Gingher scissors. These three companies (DMC, Dovo, Gingher) each sell different models of their scissors so if you go looking to purchase scissors the ones you find may be different than these. |
Scissors
If you do hardanger like shown above you probably will generally find that general embroidery scissors are not going to be precise or sharp enough at the tip.
Left photo: I am using the scissor tip to precisely snip specific fabric threads while having the scissor blades almost pushing back the stitching threads of the Kloster’s satin stitches. In this left photo you can actually see how the right blade of the scissor (at the tip) crosses over the left blade. Both blades of the Dovo and Gingher do this (cross over) and taper into a fine point.
Right photo: The Gingher that I am using is actually cutting through the fabric thread as I just try to hold still for the photo. My husband asked me why I was telling him to hurry up and I said because these sharp blades are freeing the piece of fabric from the work piece without me doing anything but holding the scissor firmly in place for the photo shot. Which brings me to the thought of warning you …. watch your fingertips don’t get nick. I had that happen years ago when I first started snipping out fabric threads for hardanger.