The serger is winning...

Hello and thanks to all who have been asking how I'm getting on with my serger. After experimenting with tension settings for several days I decided to move on to blind hemming. Some of you know I'm working on a tablecloth project -- Anchors A-weigh. For those of you who don't, I'll catch you up later. I set up the machine by the book and proceeded to blind hem a few scraps. The first one wasn't great, but by the second, I was feeling pretty good. So I decided it was time to move on to my tablecloth which is 52" round. Entering a seam proved to be a bit of a challenge. When sewing on a regular sewing machine, you lift the presser foot, slide the fabric under, lower and go. The problem with that same approach on a serger is that you have the cutting blade in the way so you really have to be sure you are positioning your material properly, which I did not -- which resulted in the blade coming down where it shouldn't have and putting a hole in my tablecloth -- it's now a 50" round. On my second try, I started off correctly. However, after I sewed around the entire tablecloth and took it out to inspect I found that I had unfortunately only connected with the fold 1/3 of the time. Now I have to rip the seam out. This is very important -- you DO NOT want to have to rip out serged seams. It takes forever and trashes your fabric -- it's now a 48" round. Now frustrated, I am thinking I might do this the easy way which would be for me to serge the raw edge and then sew (on my regular sewing machine) a top stitched hem. But the serger in me says I need to master doing this all in one operation. So for now I'm walking away from this project for fear that if I kept making mistakes I'd end up with something resembling a table doily rather than a tablecloth.