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Choosing a Needle and Stitch Style

So we were talking about needles and let me grab my got some fabric squares I want to show you here of different types of fabric and how to know what needle to use for what kind of fabric so to start out I've got my woven fabrics and they're actually needles for woven fabric there are needles for stretch knit fabric and I wanted to show you the difference between these got a few different selections here what I mean by woven fabrics are fabrics that are like not stretchy so they have ah a warp and weft thread in them and here I have like a cotton velvet here's a silky this is a cotton silk blend this is a nice dress wait well you might do a skirt or a dress out of that and it's sometimes when they're solid it's kind of hard to tell on camera what they really are a couple other silk ease of different blends here's a flannel hey um this is a metallic here's a quoting cotton is just sort of a marble looking print but that's just a quilting cotton this is a do peony silk I love sewing do p...

eony silk I love the texture this is an outdoor fabric like you make patio furniture from here's burlap here's denham so any of these kind of fabrics you would use a regular point needle yes and just a quick question on that neoprene what about that paper that would probably use a ball point needle which we're getting to the next ok sorry yeah jumping ahead of me that there are no save it he who is new to creative yeah no that's great no I welcome the questions so what happened if you look at these sometimes the packaging looks different different places where you pick these up but what you want to look for is either this style twenty twenty which is for woven fabric here's another style of needle that's also for it's a universal point but good for woven fabrics and it's a style two thousand chromium needle the's air a little there a little stronger needle they can maybe take the higher speeds that might be a good good needle for your heavy duty but any of these will work beautifully in your machine and those air for your woven fabrics now here I have some stretch knits and I want to show you these including I don't have a piece of neoprene but that is a stretchy type of fabric and so this is a stretchy sort of cotton velour excuse me stretch floor this is a t shirt fabric here's upon thine it pontin it is very popular especially in the fall for the dresses and pants and skirts it's a wonderful weight of mit this is the baby very popular baby blanket fabric you see in the fabric stores it's a stretchy this is a swimsuit fabric. It's got it's it's a four way stretch instead of just a two way stretch. Here's, another type of t shirt fabric. Here's sweatshirt, fleece. Michaels, over here. So any of these you would use a ball point needle. And here that's called a twenty forty five. And if you don't remember the number, you can just look at the package and it says for knit fabrics there's a chromium version of that as well called two thousand one. And any of these will work with your machine as well for the knit fabrics. Now, the reason it's important to use the right needle for the right fabric is I think I was slide to show you that will flip to the next slide. Yeah, these are basic needle styles, the regular point, the ballpoint and then there's like a heavy duty needle. And let me tell you why these air different if you look at the one on the left that's a regular point and looked right at the tip of the needle. It's it's it's a sharper point than the one in the middle, which is the ball point. So the regular point pierces through the fibers of the woven fabrics. The ball point actually works its way in between, like knitted fabric is needed, like, you know, almost like if you look at a knitted scarf that's like a close up version of how a knitted fabric would look if you put it under a microscope and the ballpoint works its way in between the mit, where the regular point pierces through the fibers of the woman. So what can happen if you use the wrong needle? Is thie ballpoint needle, especially on something like one of these silk ese? If you were to use a ballpoint needle in one of these, that ball can like snag a thread so you'd be sewing along in its snags, and you do a couple more stitches and its snags or pulls a thread. That's either affect that an indication that your needle is damaged and you should change it. Or you just put in the wrong style of needle for a woven. The opposite effect happens with when you use a regular point needle on a stretchy fabric. What can happen there is you can just get skipped stitches because it's kind of the ball is kind of bouncing off the the tip is it's just it's not connecting and making the stitches you might so a few stitches and then it skips a few and then it so is a few and it skips a few and it seems really frustrating and that's an indication that either your needle is damaged or you're using the wrong needle for the type of fabric you're selling. We have another type of needle just in general to is thie leather needle that looks like this, and the leather needle has a bit of a wedge point, so the wedge point makes a crisp, clean cut into the leather. So you've got things here like this is ah um swayed a suede type fabric. This is a pleather. These are all very commonly used today. This is like an oilcloth the's air, different kinds of vinyls, here's a this's, an actual leather skin that I have and any of these you would use a leather needle for thie eye eye of the needle is longer to take the heavier threads you would use for these. But the point is a universal point and it's about it's a it's a wedge point. So instead of making a bigger hole like a bigger needle would do, it makes a it's more of a slice into the fabrics he want a leather needle for for weather type and oilcloth and so on now that brings me to the subject of the needle size so if you take another look at these you'll see that not only do we have the style of needle for the type of fabric you're selling but we have these different numbers on the package in this case you see it says eighty eleven or ninety fourteen or one hundred sixteen this is all in your manual too by the way there's a fabric thread and needle chart in your instruction manual that it says all of this so you can refer to that I don't remember what page it's on but it's it's in there what this means is the smaller number is for a thinner or lighter weight fabric the medium fabrics you would use the ninety fourteen for like quoting cotton's maybe some medium weight linens those kind of things the eleven you would use for batiste cotton silk ease it's kind of like the rule of thumb is the lighter needle for the lighter fabrics the heavy duty if you're sowing denham um canvas any of those kind of fabrics you might want to go to a size one hundred sixteen the needle the smaller the number, the thinner the needle and also it when you go to a heavy duty needle like in the case of this this is even even a bigger size this is like the one on the right hand side on your monitor this has not only if you take a look near the bottom of the needle that you'll see that the whole of the needle is bigger and that means that you're you're not only sewing with a bigger needle to go through those this's maybe for like patio furniture those denham scenes where you so a lot of thick layers and you're going to be using a thicker thread for those you you need a larger eye for that needle to go through yes hello I was wondering about maybe using a mix of the fabric so if I wanted to maybe a denim and then maybe put a silk on top which needle what I twenty years probably well these say you know I would probably use a chromium needle because they're there they're like kind of like a universal type you can kind of go either way with those but are you thinking like a silk applicator are what were you thinking? I'm not too sure I was just listening and thinking that maybe if I had eight I need for a heavier duty new beyond that also something that wasn't I would go for the heavier fabrics because what could happen is if your if your needle is too small too small for the weight of the fabric you're stitching the tip of the needle could break or bend and so you wanted to kind of match the heaviest weight of your fabric and hear what I have on the next slide to that point is a doubt diagram of damage, needles and what those look like and how that can happen like we just said on the one on the left, it you can see the point of the needle is broken off. That could be because you were sewing over pins like, you know, when you actually are sewing, you have your long fabric piece and you have pins in your fabric, and as you come to the pins, you should remove them and never so over them, because what can happen? You might you might think, well, it just makes my pin and but I keep on going and everything looks fine, but what happens is your and your needle actually does suffer a little damage if it doesn't break and what might happen when you have a damage point like that is you'll hear this pop, pop, pop, pop pop sound you'll start hearing that because the tip is damaged, the bent needles that can happen from if you are sowing and especially I find this with new sewers, they're pushing or pulling their fabric, and what happens when you do that is the needle starts to deflect and it comes down not straight into the fabric it spent back and it comes down and you'll bend your needle. Ah, blunt needle can just happen from just the needles. Life expectancy is over and it's time to change it. So those are the indications that you're needle needs to be changed. Ok? And then there are some other specialty needles. If we have time today, I'll try to get to demonstrating these. But this is a twin needle, and this is a hymn stitching needle. And the difference on these is a twin needle actually looks like two needles on one needle shaft and that what that does for you is you saw with two threads at one time in the top, and that gives you that look of the twin needle top stitching and I'd love to get if we get a chance, I'm gonna try to show you get to that point where I can show you how to do that. And then the hem stitching needle it's it's different from a standard needle in that if you look at a regular needle and then you look at a hem stitching needle, this one has thes sort of blades or what we call wings sometimes, ahem, stitching needle is called a wing needle. And that's used for heirlooms sewing it there's stitches you can use like on the machine like this that it doesn't really have an entre dose ditch you might want a machine that has introduced stitches of heirloom is really what you want to do but you can get the effect of that with your zigzags and you're your multi zigzagging your honeycomb stitches on this machine using the him stitching needle so if I get a chance to demonstrate those for you today, I will got a lot to get through him short amount of times that we'll do our best here, so let me just get on here to the knicks knicks s so I want to show you next is these are some of the stitches if there's I got all the stitches that are built into your machine stitched out on this piece of fabric and you've got quite a nice selection here you've got a buttonhole, of course, and we've got a straight stitch a straight stretch stitch those air different because when you soul a straight stitch on a knit fabric, if you've ever a sewn straight stitch on something really stretching like this and then just to find that when you pull the fabric, the stitches pop that's because that wasn't the right stitch for a knit you need the stretching straight stitch, which will stretch with the fabric ok, these are yours regular zigzag and your triple zigzag multi stitches eggs egg I'm going to use that a little bit today and your honey comb that's great for last concession this is your blind hem stitch you're over edge stitch here's another blind hem stitch this is actually a blind hem stitch you would use for stretch fabric this is your blind him for woven fabric you're blind him for stretch fabric miss another over edge the zahra siri's of decorative stitches all of the rest of these air decorative stitches and here's some other versions of a blind him and a over edge and a another type of over edge kind of depends on the fabric you're working with but a nice variety of stitches for including that nice group of deck stitches a real popular ones like the scallop for example, I've got a really great pillow on set where we use this stitch here too and I like sometimes people say what do I use all those stitches for? But you can create texture and fabric you can do borders and and on garments or pillows or quilts and it's funny that once you start getting to know your stitches and sometimes I even tell people why don't you sell yourself out a little swatch like this? Because sometimes it helps you decide which ones you want to use forgiven project and just get to know your stitches a little bit but you you start when you go shopping, you'll start even seeing store bought items differently because you think I have a stitch that kind of looks like that and I was just showing everybody at dinner the other night a picture I took at a department store where I live and I looked closely at the dress and I had this chevron pattern in it and when I got really close to the dress and looked, it was actually a decorative stitch used to create with chevron and it just was fascinating to me and I never thought what that's a really neat way to use a decorative stitch so keep your eyes open when you're when you're out shopping because you'll be surprised how you become inspired now with your stitches it's a far enough so you could bring that and you're so you're all right, okay? All right, so let's just do a little stitching with some of these stitches I want to show you how to use your pattern selector dialling how to change your stitch lengthen your stitch awaits I've got a piece of fabric here it's a bright royal blue I think are gray thread will show up well on that so my machine right now for me this is my pattern selector dial and as I turn this, this lets me choose my different stitches and you'll see that there's a black dot right here on the base of the machine and I line up it's sort of clicks into place when I turn this there's a spot where that just slides into place and the stitch I want should be straight up under the dot but when I do that you notice that there are two different stitches in each place that that clicks in on the dial so how do you know what stitch? Of course the buttonhole is just the buttonhole but how do you know which one you're going to be sewing? Well you'll notice that one is kind of a black color and one is kind of a bluish color and so the stitch that is black what I would do is she was set my dialogue and then I would come up here to my stitch length dialled and I would decide my stitch length in this black zone so the black kind of goes with black if I wanted that blue stitch which on our swatch was the street like this the black one is the straight stitch and the the blue one in this particular case here is that stretch stitch so the blue are the blue ones on my whole dial our this stretch versions of the stitch so if I wanted to so that one I would instead of having a selection within this black zone on my stitch length dial I would turn my dialogue I suppose this direction to the s and make sure you feel it click in there you can kind of hear it click into place and there's an s and s means stretch so then I would be set up for my sewing my blue one the only thing I would want to do then is make sure my stitch with was set where I wanted it so we would come up here to the stitch with dial and set the width of our stitch for both for both of these I need lengthened with now on this unas on a straight stitch there is no with so you could use your with for needle position we also have a needle position dial up here and I'll come to that in just a moment but for now let's just so a straight stitch I'm gonna have my with zero I'm gonna put my stitch length here kind of in the center is sort of average stitch length and then I'll show you about lengthening and shortening use ditch length so here's kind of just normal everything looks great on then if you think well, if I was using a heavier weight thread or a heavier fabric I would want a lengthen out my stitch length so maybe I would go to a three and a half before just depending on the fabric on you can see that I hope you can see, the stitches are actually longer can capture that I do have a piece here too that might help you to see that here they're very, very, very short here they're kind of medium and here there longer and you you get that effect by changing your stitching length dial the same it works for some of your deck stitches like your let's just switch to a zigzag and I'll put this on a zigzag stitch and I'll put my stitch lengthen about medium and now because I have no with I wouldn't have any zigzag it all because my witness said it zero so let's move that and we're going to move it to the widest with right now, which is at six and I'm going to goes zigzag zigzag back and forth but my stitch length dial let's meet determine if those stitches are closer together or further apart kind of like what I have on this piece right here right now we just soda really wide one like this, but as I excuse me, I said it wide to start out, but we're talking about stitch length right now and as I bring this number smaller and smaller and smaller, my length gets closer together closer together closer together until I have stitches that are almost right on top of each other and that would be a satin stitch so that is your stitch length dial. And you can just set that according to your project, according to your preference, just depending on what you're using it for, you can that's you stitch length the distance between the stitches. If you wanted to change your stitch with, you would determine how close together you like them. I'm gonna go back to just kind of average medium, but you're stitch with right now we're set up for that widest with but as I bring this narrower and narrower will go from a six down to have, say, of four so you can see a difference and I'll go down to even like a to and as I. So you'll see how that got narrower from side to side, narrower and narrower and narrower, so you can really play with your length and play with your with on a mechanical machine. You really are in control of everything that you're doing okay with, with your stitches that you can just really spine to in those and set those where wherever you want.