PURPOSE: To quickly and accurately position an object to be sewn and to prevent the generation of the defective products of the object to be sewn by providing a cloth pressing device provided with a foot moving type cloth pressing mechanism capable of driving a cloth presser by a foot pedal parallelly to the mechanism of automatically operating the cloth presser by a solenoid.

CONSTITUTION: The long arm side of an L-shaped lever 37 is at the position of a line A indicated by a solid line. In this case, when a foot pedal 40 is stepped on further and the long arm side of an L-shaped lever 37 comes to the position of line B, a contactor 43 is brought into contact and the contact point of a switch 42 is closed. When the contact point is closed, the controller of a sewing machine is operated by the contact point signal, a solenoid 2 is excited, the clamping state of an object 25 to be sewn is held automatically and sewing is started. Then, the object 25 to be sewn is automatically clamped by a cloth presser 20 and performs two-dimensional motion within a horizontal plane, the tip of a sewing needle 26 through which a thread is passed is vertically moved while passing through the object 25 to be sewn and the sewing work of a pattern based on a program is performed.