Monday, September 14, 2009

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.

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