There are a million fun reasons why I love sewing: it’s creative and challenging at the same time, I get a huge satisfaction from making my own clothes, it gives me the opportunity to wear unique clothes that are not mass-produced, I can have design clothes for a more reasonable price, I can experiment with different fabrics and materials…What are some of the reasons that you love sewing?
However, learning technical aspects of the sewing machine or the overlocker would be down the list. But what can you do? It is important to balance creativity with technique to be a good seamstress. That’s why I decided to dedicate two blog posts to this complicated machine: the serger! Well, it’s not that bad after all 🙂
Continuing from my previous blog post, here are some other important parts of the serger:
– On the front side of my serger towards the bottom, there is the looper cover and once I open it, I can see the “map” for threading my serger. This is quite helpful as threading the serger is quite complicated at the beginning. This map shows you “the path” for each thread separately.
– At the top of the front side, there is the presser foot pressure adjusting screw. I am not really using this button right now. It basically increases the pressure of the presser foot. However, if I wanted to sew heavy material such as denim for making jeans, I would have to increase the pressure of the presser foot so that the fabric would move easily over the feed dogs.
– On the front side, there are four dials, two for the loopers and two for the needles. These are used to adjust the thread tension. The serger requires finer tuning of thread tension than the sewing machine. Also, not all the threads will have the same tension. You might have the two looper dials on 5 while the needle dials will be on 4.
I found out that the best way to adjust thread tension is to use four different colored thread spools and make several trials. So how should the stitches look? Below are three examples and the best adjusted one is the second one in the middle.
You will notice that in the first one, the navy blue thread is too tense. While it should look like a big loop, in this example it looks like a chain of small circles. It should, however, appear almost like a triangle where the top side is on the edge of the fabric. This way, it gives a ragged look to the fabric end rather than a clean-cut.
In the third one, the navy blue is too loose and so it is not sitting on the edge of the fabric.
In the ideal example, which is the one in the middle, the top of the navy blue triangle sits just on the edge of the fabric giving it a clean-cut.
Sew-In-Progress 