Lessons

Lesson Info

Blind Hemming and Nonstick Foot

I'm going to snap this foot off and replace it with my regular replace the needle with my regular needle a request for an example of a blind hand oh, great. Okay right on track oh, good all right, so I'm going to remove my threads and I'll re thread my machine and when you put your needle back in you want to make sure that it goes all the way up if you don't have your needle all the way up when you put it in you might find you here this clunk clunk clunk or your stitches look really bad that's another thing you can check if you're having that happen to you that needle needs to be properly seated before you secure that and again I just like to give that one little tweak with my screwdriver and let's do some blind stitching so here is a nice well, I have a piece of this wool left over I hope you can see this okay? Because I know it's a little dark colored but I had done a pencil skirt out of this wonderful espresso color it's a very beautiful piece of wool and you want I mean I'm going t...

o sew with a contrast thread so you can see the stitches better so let me show you the blind him foot the blind him foot looks like this and this is an optional accessory available for your machine you can do a blind him without a blind him foot, but it's a little more challenging because you've got a kind of guide the fabric perfectly straight under the general purpose foot and this blind him foot gives you this wonderful guide or extension at the front that you can used for guiding the edge of your fold. Let me just I'll show you how to fold in just a second, but just for to show how the foot works you've got when you, when you're ready to start sewing there's this fold of the fabric, that the edge of that white extension at the front of the foot is used for stitching along like that and it's really nice to have that you all so much more consistently if you have a blind him foot and this foot is adjustable too, you can move this there's this suggesting screw here so you can move this extension closer or further away from your fold. And the reason why that's important is because fabrics are different thicknesses or different wigs thiss being the kind of cashmere wool that it is it's a different thickness when I have this fold than if I had a cotton that's much thinner and finer and I might need to adjust my foot depending on that so it's nice to have that foot I thinkyou that's a very useful one for you um so what we do to sew a blind him is you turn up your him however deep you want it to be uh this is the wrong side of the fabric this is the right side of the fabric and you'll turn up that ham depth your desired hem depth and you might finish this edge with a pinking shears or an over edge stitch or just however you would like that raw edge to be finished so it's not unraveling then once you've done that you're going to temporarily just turn this over like this your ham is folded under and then the rest of your garment is still out here like this and this is still the wrong side of your garment this is all in your book to hear in just in your instruction manual but what happens? I'll do that again here's your ham this is the wrong side turn your fat you're him up and then turn that back temporarily so that there's a bit of a fold here and there's a bit of a lip of that seem a lot of the top of your ham edge sticking out the top so when we put this foot on the machine what we're going to be doing is lining this up so that the fold is against the extension and our stitch is going to be formed like this I guess I'll just use here I'll use this pin as a kind of a guide for you, but the stitch is going to go the blind hem stitch looks like this it goes stitch, stitch, stitch and then it swings over with like a zigzag and then it goes stitch, stitch, stitch! And it was over like a zigzag like so on, so what we want is it does the stitch stitch stitch over here, and then it swings over and just grabs a little stitch into that fold, and then it comes back over here and it takes a bite into the fold, and then it does a few more stitches and then takes another bite into the fold and that's what we're looking for when we're I would practice this on a little scrap, too, because you might adjust the width of yours blind hem stitch you might adjust the placement of the adjusting guide for you can you can actually adjust it in two places just depending on your fabric let's see if we can get that quite on there. There we go. So let me just get my needle threaded again because I took that out too. Uh switched between needle out my prep take up lever is up here, make sure it goes into the eye of the take of clever, very important, or you won't have a stitch it all and thread the eye of the needle with that automatic needle thread her I can still use it even though that foot is on there there's my lip pull it through and we're ready to go so here I have this is a just just a scrap of my fabric and I'll turn this up and give this a try I guess I should cut this nice and even a little little bit crooked their turn that up and then again they will fold that back place this underneath the foot but we got to select our blind hem stitch too which is right here and I'm going to put a usually like that with a pretty long stitch length that again to depends on your fabric if the stitches a real close together you get lots of um bites into the fold and you can afford to have this be a little longer like that so it's taking a pick a little further apart than just great on top of each other and you might also loosen your upper thread tension will help that thread relax so you have ah ah him that tends to just the stitches relax in the him so let's check with our with at its widest to see first if we like that or if it needs to be a little bit narrower and that foot controller I can reach it there we go just start so sometimes you have it where it doesn't catch the fold it all you'll know you either need to widen your stitch or movie the placement of the foot, so here I am catching the fold that looks great and this so it looks like on the back side and I don't see anything on the topside so I'm in a good place to actually go ahead and do my him so here got my fabric all prepared like we said earlier, I'm going to slide it underneath the foot used the fold of the fabric up against this extension on the front of the foot and as long as I keep that full there if I'm using my all purpose foot, I've got a kind of kind of really guest to me where this is guiding and I might take more of a bite on some of the stitches and not a bite it all with others and so you might really enjoy having the blind camp foot it'll help you, so I'm faster and more consistently and where this really be a dream to have is if you like to so a lot of draperies or today's our bed skirts and projects that require hemming that we just, you know you want to blind him on those because a straight stitch him would give a more casual look and if you're sowing silks, for example, you wouldn't want a top stitched him you'd want to blind him on those and they're very long pieces that would take a very long time to do by hand and this would just be a dream so here we are and we don't see anything I just seemed very very fan I have white thread in here and look at how nice invisible that ham is and on the back side just the end of my thread there you have a beautifully finished him so I hope that answered some of the blind him questions for folks I know this fabric was a little hard to see I didn't think about that being such a dark colors I hope that was clear okay there's another really great foot that you might like and speaking of the class that susan did she did a lot with oilcloth in that class and we gave her in her class to use with the machine where the non the non stick foot the nonstick foot is different from your standard press her foot in that it has it not only is it different in the color which is obvious, but the back is a sort of a silicone sort of surface so when you're going to be stitching things like vinyl or leather oilcloth in addition to using the right foot for your uh excuse me the right needle for your fabric you would use the right foot now if I was to try to put my standard press her foot on here, I'm just going to put a little pressure on this is all I'm trying to so that I can already feel it's like sticking its sticking to the oilcloth it doesn't it's I'm probably going toe not even have success trying to sew a seam on my machine were here when I put the the non stick foot on it just same amount of pressure in fact even more and it's just gliding over the top so that's that wonderful foot for those kind of fabrics to keep you sewing successfully and the other tip I'll mention is when because any of these oilcloth weather pleather when you pierce them with the needle, those holes are permanent so when you're pinning your fabrics, I know a lot of times folks like to pin over here into the body of the garment or project and then stitch here and there pins are over here, I know they are for me I'm a lefty I pin way over here if you're right handed, you might have your pins over here, but regardless part of the pin hole is on this side of the seam allowance so you want to be mindful of that? Because on weather then you're gonna have permanent holes over here after you remove them so that's why I have these paper clips here these are wonderful to use for just temporarily holding your fabrics together as you so and will put this non stick foot on snap it on just like all the others press a foot over the fabric put the presser foot down and then just like you'd remove your pins as you so in this case you would remove your paper clip says you so we want to be on a straight stitch ideally I would use my leather needle for this, but because of time I'll just stay with what we have and I need to put this on my straight stitch with and I'm gonna probably use a fairly long stitch length when you soul weathers and vinyls you want a lengthen out your stitch length and the reason for that is if you do a very, very short or close together stitch length you're making all those little tiny holes each each stitch makes a hole with a needle obviously and what can happen if you so with stitches very, very close together and not longer like this, you could actually depending on the type of leather you're working with, you could actually perforate it so that this would just peel right off because you've actually like like perforated coupon in a magazine or something he would just it would just ripped right out so a short stitch length is not ideal for those kind of fabric I want to make sure you lengthen that out and that is your nonstick foot so why don't I show you that free motion everybody loves free motion yeah we might is alright go jump right to that so free motion sewing lets you do the free motion quilting the way we're going to need a optional presser foot for your machine called the free motion foot looks like this it's a little different and to do to use this we need to actually not just remove the presser foot like we've done you know this is that it doesn't snap on like these do we actually have to use a screwdriver and take this screw off and remove this entire ankle or shank from the machines? So let me do that sometimes when you're machine is brand new out of the box that screw might be really tight to turn but don't just just it'll come off don't worry about that sometimes the very first time it feels a little tight to get off and now I'm going to just get this where I can see the top of the needle bar this foot has an arm on it that kind of extends upward and you want to make sure that this arm is resting on the top of this needle bar if you put this foot on and it's underneath here it's not going to work for you, it won't so it all because, well, just want so you need to make sure that the arm is resting above the needle bar so you might have to fiddle with this a little bit should just get it in right position. Sometimes I like to drop the needle down just a bit too get so I can see that needle bar and just jiggle it around till it gets into position and then put that screw back in course because I'm trying to hurry makes me slower and I have a little oil on my fingers now, because this one's brand new out of the box I just touched up above there is a little a little bit of oil on the needle bar, so tighten that up with a screwdriver and this foot a cz you so it moves up and down with the needle bars. I said so it could, especially because we saw it a little bit higher speeds with this, it could work itself loose if you don't tighten this on. Well, so give that a nice you don't wantto over, tighten it, but just give it a nice tweak with your screwdriver to make sure it's securely on there. And then the other thing we're going to do is we're going to take this cover off and remember earlier we dropped the feed dogs for the button sewing we're going to drop the feed dogs again for free motion work, so just push that lever on the back side over to the left here, those drop down, we're ready to start free motion sewing machine is on straight stitch the stitch length really doesn't matter because the feed dogs aren't moving ok, so while I'm getting my fabric out for this, I'm show you a few examples. Yes, could I get those? And I got a couple over here too, and I'll show you some things you can actually do with this and what? What? We talk if your brand new tow free motions selling like what that means and what what you use that for? So I got a whole bunch of stuff here. Um, one of them could I get that pillow too? From the sofa that's a nice example so you can use a straight thank you so much we can use straight stitch and you can use his execs either one and they give you different effects and you use some differently. Here is probably the most common example of free motion sewing and that's the steeple quilting, so this was a, um uh pill atop that we did where we used a quarter inch seam allowance to join our fabric strips and then we put the batting behind and then we did the free motions stable quilting there is a quarter inch foot available for your machine as well that will help you to so perfect quarter inch seam allowances if I have time I'll try to pull that out and show that to you if I don't have time, you can certainly contact our customer service department at singer and they'll tell you exactly what you need for your models so but we want to talk about we're talking about free motion right now so I'm going to demonstrate how to do the free motion stippling another place you can do the free motion work is this was something I did once I really really thought this was fun I just kind of made this up but this is ah bridal pillow and I keep forgetting to put rings on this but um what I did here was I took a piece of this just satiny fabric and I went to the craft store got a lot of bits here and I just got you know those flowers you can just buy on the stem and I pulled some of these off and just steamed over them to flatten them out just a little bit and I laid them on my base fabric scattered these about no writer. I mean, this could be pink flop petals on white. I mean, it can look however you want. You can do this, is a bridal pillow, or just make it a pillow pillow you could make it is part of a garment or a purse. I mean, the possibilities really are endless, but then what we did was we set our machine for free motion, the bridal netting, or the tool traps the flowers in there. And then what I did was just free motion. So around the shapes of these just meandering around like so and then when we were all done, we laid a few of the loose petals on the topside and then just went around free motion to attach these to give a more of a three dimensional look to that. So it's really, I mean, there's. So many things you can do with free motion sewing, I'm gonna demonstrate on this piece in just a moment. So we'll leave that there here's an example of a dress that we saw something similar to this in kind of a high end boutique not long ago. And it was we thought, just like I said earlier, sometimes when you know things your machine will do for you, you start seeing things in the store differently, and I thought we could do that with the free motion foot so we just cut out these shapes and their applicator on just like our heart wass on the satin stitch demonstration and then the free motion sewing and you're just really drawing with the needle and thread here's another example of a dress where we use a zigzag stitch we laid bridal netting in a contrast color zigzagged around, trimmed it away when we were done and then went back in the center with straight stitch to draw in here and it almost looks like a lace effect on this dress all free motion stitching and finally we have, um my tote bag which this is giving you an example of thread painting so what we did was we just drew our design on the fabric with that fabric marking pen I talked about earlier and then you just set your machine for zigzag with your thread color and you just start going back and forth guiding this as you go to paint on the fabric now here's another example to its stippling this is a long table runner we did. This is only half of it but here's the stippling and more of ah kind of deliberate pattern where we did more of this kind of um uh it's got a little more uniformity to it than the meander all around so he can really look however you want it to look it can blend in it can contrast it's really up to you what it looks like. So here to kind of show you how that works. We've got our feed, dogs are dropped, our machine is on straight stitch again, stitch length doesn't really matter because the feed dogs air out of the way. Our machine is set for straight stitch on the with setting as well, and then we're going to just place our fabric underneath here and just start meandering around. And this is usually what makes people a little crazy or a little freaked out is because normally your feed dogs are what are pulling that fabric through, but here you're in complete control. You are the one to see that I had the president lifter down, but the fabric is still free. I need to do the driving now, but that's the beauty of this it's, it's, it's, all free motion and the trip to doing this well, my press office down, drop my thread uh, needle down the fabric and get started eyes. I'm just going to stop and trim that thread tail, so I'm not dragging it around is you want to use a nice, consistent speed on the controller, but guide in a moderate speed with your hands. Usually where I find people have issues with this is they're sewing really slowly on the foot controller because they're a little nervous and then they're trying to move the fabric too fast and it gets they get very jagged looking curves because they're there giving it to little power at the foot controller for how fast they're moving the fabric so the trick is to give it nice be don't be afraid of it practise on scraps um nice speed on the controller and you don't want a herky jerk this around, you want to just take your time with it, it's really a lot of fun and I think you can see what we're starting to build here is that meandering pattern just like we did on the rest of the piece and that's free motion sewing I'll just change my threat very quickly and I'll put that pink pink on there, get my small school cap, press it, put up, take up lever and highest position down, make sure it goes in the take up lever. Yes, it is. I know we were getting close that's why I was asking you if I had time. Okay, all right, so now we've got our contrast color in there and I'm going to grab my sample that I showed you earlier, and I'm just going to continue filling in this flower petal that from where I started yesterday, you can use a straight stitch for this. You can use a zigzag it's, whatever you're comfortable with the straits to, she'll probably take you a little longer to fill it in, but it doesn't really matter. It's whatever you want it to look like or however you want to do it, I should say to a couple stitches just so I can get rid of this big long thread tale. You know what I just did? I just cut my threat. E I e I got too close with my sister and I cut my thread it's re thread that real quick trying to hurry and I made myself slower. So we'll do a couple of stitches stock and trim that tail over here. So now we're just gonna free motion back and forth. I don't think this is exact same thread color, but I think you're gonna get the idea. You just meander back and forth. Just fill in this area however you want it to look, you're just really painting with thread is all it is filling it in, and in the case of something like this, after we did these stitches and we came in, then you work from the outside and work in so your stitches than, um you'll have the lighter color. Just overlap the's. So they sort of bland, it's, not right or wrong. You're just you're you're painting with thread and that's. Why they call it threat painting.