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Basic Needle Styles and Threads

Here I'm going to just show you some different fabric swatches that I brought me just reach over here and grab these I find that very often folks have ah issues with their machine without even realizing that they just they're just using the wrong needle for what they're doing and you may not even realize that you're doing that if you don't know about how needles can be different, so let me de mystified out a little bit of my first group of fabrics here. This is a ah stack of some fabric squares that are what we call woven fabrics, which means there's a warp in a lift thread to weave the fabric it's not a stretch knit, which, if you think of like how a sweater knit looks there more knitted together. These are woven together that's kind of the basic difference, but here I have a like a nice lightweight dress weight wool here's, a cotton velvet like a velveteen some folks call that this is a cotton silk blend again woven fabric caesar various silk ease here is a flannel flannel fabric and...

some metallic kind of lemay a this's a marble print but it's a quilting cotton this is a silk do peony I love soaked up eonni love the texture this is a outdoor fabric like you'd make patio furniture out of very stable, firm woven burlap denham these are examples of woven fabrics and when you so woven fabrics you use a style twenty twenty needle which are for woven fabrics you can also use a style two thousand which is this is these are also for woven fabrics this's a chromium needle there they're a little more longer lasting than a style twenty twenty we often recommend these singers for machine embroidery because of the constant fast speeds of the embroidery machines because they run several hours to do an embroidery design, but you can certainly use either of these in your singer one sewing machine and those are for woven fabrics there's a very sharp point on the needle I've gotta slide I'm going to just turn on right now and show you these three basic needles stiles I'm talking about is thie the rig regular point on the left, which is what we just talked about the twenty twenty or two thousand chromium next I'm going to show you the ball point, which was the one we have in the middle there. If you look at the points of the needle, you can see that they're a little different right at the point the point e one for the wolverines pierces through the woman fibers the ballpoint needle works its way in between the knitted threads of the woman materials, so I'll tell you why what can happen if you entered interchange them but let me just show you some examples of knit fabric that you may have been working with this is a excuse me a stretch galore this is ah ribbing excuse me a t shirt on it this is a ponti I don't if you you may be seen that word ponting it in some ready to wear garments it's very popular in the fall for dresses, skirts and trousers it's a really nice firm will knit fabric this is a fabric that's very popular it's many of the fabric stores and so on for baby blankets or throws for your living room whatever you like this is a swimsuit fabric four way stretch here's a ah ribbing fabric and a sweatshirt police those air fabric stores as well very popular for any of these kind of fabrics what you want to use their is a style twenty forty five a singer twenty forty five for knit fabrics because again these thes these ballpoint these these needles have the ball point and the chromium version of that is thie two thousand one now if I was to use a twenty twenty needle on one of my stretchy fabrics, what could be happening is I'm experiencing a lot of skipped stitches and you're like why does my machine skips stitches? Your machine doesn't skip stitches, your needle does so you want to make sure you have the right needle in there conversely, if you used a ballpoint needle on a woven fabric particularly something like the's silk ease that a ballpoint could catch one of these threads you might be something along and then it goes snag and it pulls a thread and then you so along in its snags again and that's either an indication that you've got a damage needle or you're using ah ah ballpoint needle on your silk ease and so you want to make sure that you marry your needles correctly with thie style of fabric that you're stitching we also if you've noticed here we've got different colors on these needles there's the's yellow color than the blue and the purple and the needles are kind of similarly color they're a little area on the needle where you can tell where they have a different color and what this this means is you've got three different sizes here there's an eleven of fourteen or sixteen or we say eighty, ninety and one hundred but that is is the smaller number is a thinner or finer needle and the medium size here is a medium it's hard at a glance you really kind of can't tell the difference but they really are different if you look at them closely you can tell the bigger the number the thicker the needle and basically the rule of thumb is the thing the finer needles are for your finer fabrics the medium needles are for medium weight fabrics and you're bigger needles are for the thicker fabrics and this is all in your instruction manual to there's a fabric thread and needle chart in your instruction manual. We also have here you'll see that I had these other swatches here and these are leather pieces, different different types and we have leather needles for things like pleather there's, an oilcloth here, different types of vinyl. This is an actual leather skin swayed cloth, there's, oilcloth and vinyls for these you want to use a leather needle? Ah, leather needle has a wedge point, so it makes more of a slice into the fabric, then a hole which irregular needle does and but it has a longer I for some of the thicker threads that you would use with the heavier fabrics. We also have heavy duty needles, and a heavy duty needle is even larger, yet it's a size eighteen or a one ten and this you might use for patio furniture, heavy canvas, maybe some of your jeans sewing that's on the third picture that you see on the diagram that I had on the monitor. That needle is not only a larger needle, but the I of the needle is bigger, so because generally with these, you're using an outdoor thread ah, thicker jeans thread and that will accommodate the thickness of the thread when you do those kinds of projects so needles make a big difference when you so and those are just the kind of the basic styles of needles I have a couple of specialty needles here if I have I'm gonna just keep showing you as much as I can today with the time that we have but hopefully I can get to these and this is a twin needle and this is a hem stitching or a wing needle thes they're just examples of other types of needles available and I will try to demonstrate both free today ok speaking of needles that could get damaged I'm just going to go to my next slide and here you'll see a picture of three different things going on with the needle one is a damaged point that went on the left there's a bent needle in the center and there's a blunt needle on the right a damaged point if you really look at the point of that needle on the diagram you'll see the very very point of it looks like it was chipped that could happen to you if you maybe were sewing over pins of course you have to pin your fabrics together as you so and you must remove your pins you don't want to so over pins if your needle just hits that pin just right you might continue sewing right over it but eventually you're going to start creating some damage, possibly even to your machine, so but that damaged point once once that tip is damaged, throw that needle away and how you'll probably know is as your sewing, it'll start making a bit of a pop pop pop pop sound when it's running on your fabric, so just throw the needle. Wait, you don't sharpen needles, you don't put him in one of those little old emory strawberry things and sharpen them when the needles are done. You throw him away ah, bent needle can happen if especially, I noticed this with new sewers. They don't realize that you don't have to pull or push fabric through the machine, you just let your feed dogs feed the fabric through for you, and if you're pushing or pulling your fabric, it can make the needle deflect and it comes down and it hits your fabric and bends it, and you'll also probably here. You'll either have tremendous skipping stitches if it even sells it all or you'll hear that popping sound or it'll just break so again, just throw that one away. A blunt needle is just it's kind of lived its life and its either snagging your fabric, making that popping noise just throw it away and replace it. Ok, so let's, talk a little bit before we move on. Then I just want to tell you a little bit about threads. We talked about how needles and your fabric make a difference, but you also want to marry the right threads with your needles, so to start off with, I'm just going to show you with some all purpose thread. This is just your basic garment construction thread and these two particular skills, of course, there's many different brands out there, but these are the most readily available. That I'd seen is thief from coats, and this is their newer style of school. This is the older style of school. I have still a lot of these at home, and you probably do, too if you've been sewing for awhile. The reason these air different is thie older styles that they had. You could tell me how this awhile. Ah, labels are coming off the there used to be a little slit or there was a little slit here where when it was new out of the school, you would pull it out of the slit and then start on reeling it. And if when you put the school on your machine um, sometimes what could happen is as your threat is unreeling, that thread can get caught in that little slit, and it's not feeding into the machine and then that's another way that a needle could become bent or broken. So you want to just turn that sport nothing wrong with the threat at all, but just turned that spool around so that little slip is over on the right hand side and you eliminate that problem so you can still continue to use als, but what they do today with the threads is now they have this ah, like retaining ridge in here, where it just talks away really nicely and you don't have that slit anymore. But that's your all purpose thread, garment construction so your home decor projects curtains, any just basic construction thread is your arm all purpose threat now there's another thread that we like to use as I was talking a little bit ago about decorative machines sewing, and this is ray on thread rayanne thread, if you can tell just looking at it as compared to all purpose thread it's got a bit of ah machine or a shine to it that the all purpose thread doesn't. This makes beautiful decorative machine stitching, especially with satin stitches, which will do in just a little while. Stitches are very shiny and pretty what you don't there goes my label on that one, um, what you don't want to do with ray on thread here I'll just grab this one this one is from sochi this one is from robertson anton they're all of you this one is from coats there's all kinds of brands of it out there because reon thread is really just for decorative work you don't want to use it for construction because it's too weak to like so a garment it's strictly meant for decorative work perfectly fine for decorative work um and here you have their label this these two were also there smaller schools from sulky but what I wanted to show you here was ray on threads also have they come in different weights, which means thicknesses of thread so here, for example, on these two sulky schools this is silky as well it's just a smaller version of it thiss says silky thirty on it and the thirty is the smaller number. It means the threat is thicker. This one says silky forty that means it's a finer thread, so it'll change the look of your stitches s so you want to experiment with those you'll start collecting a lot of these it's just they're really yummy when you go to the store it's hard to pick colors because they're also beautiful this is the one from coats and this is a forty weight says for machine embroidery it's ray on a cz well so ran threads for decorative machine something you could do decorate a machine stitching with all purpose thread too but the ray on we'll give you that pretty shine there are also some other threads for decorative sewing these air his one from I've got the wrong well you can use that one for its machine quilting but there's a thirty it's a three mrs thirty weight and you can use that for dex deck stitching here's a sulky version it says twelve weight on there you definitely want to have a big enough needle in there because this starts getting to be a pretty thick thread you can see it here how kind of heavy that threat is beautiful beautiful stitching with that here's the thirty weight version of it so these air more of a map cotton look in the heavier weights all these would be for your decorative work then we have bob and thread and this one is from robertson anton this one is from sulky uh they both make black and white. This bob and thread is used for decorative machine sewing so you would put bob and fill in your bob in either color just depending on the color of your fabric or your project or your upper thread and you would put your decorative thread in the top of the machine when you're sewing with all purpose threat usually the same thread goes in the needle as it does in the bobbin but for decorative machines sewing you can use a bob and fill in the bob in and then your decorative on top and the reason you would like to use the bob and phil is because it's a much finer threat so that does two things for you is it it because it is finer you can get a lot more of it on the bob and then an all purpose thread, so you're not having to wind or fill a bobbin as frequently and the other thing is because its finer it makes the backside of your stitching less dense than an all purpose thread would be when you're doing real dents stitching so these these guys usually married together really nicely? Okay, now you also have a denim threat or a jeans thread in fact, here it even says jeans or top stitching the's air available a lot of places where sewing notions air sold because a lot of folks are hemming jeans a lot for taking the kid's pants and hemming them shorter longer, turning them into shorts and he's actually even come in popular jeans colors the traditional gold there's blue gray, even white now and it's a very heavy it's the same thing weight of thread that's used on commercial genes so that you can get that tow look just like when you have those up, it won't look like they were him like they were fixed and then this is another threat it's an outdoor thread ah polyester outdoor thread and this is especially treated so that when you make your outdoor projects it can get weathered on and not be affected by getting wet and so on here is a transparent or nylon thread monofilament thread you sometimes hear this called this one is from coats this one is from sulky they both make a clear and what we call a smoke color and what this is for this goes you would probably put a bob and fill in your bobbin and a or you could even put an all purpose threat in your bob and and then this would go in your needle and this might be where when you if I get time to demonstrate it today I will if you want to let's say you're going to do ah a table runner and you want to lay like a pretty trim that you bought underneath a open toe foot and then zigzag over the trim to attach it to the runner. If you use a monofilament nylon thread to do that, you wouldn't see the stitches it would kind of just just disappear so all you would see is the trim so that would be your nylon threatened for things like that and then the other one I wanted to show you wass the metallic thread and I often hear folks say my machine won't so metallic thread my machine is shredding a thread, but actually, machines don't shred threat it's the needles that shred the thread um, you got to prepare the machine properly for working with a metallic thread. And what I mean by that is the way that it feeds into the machine. So, for example, if you look at these, this one is ah kallick, stylist, if I have the end of it and I think you can tell looking at it just a regular. Well, here we go metallic thread. And then this one is a little different. This is more of a filament that I was telling the group's earlier. It kind of reminds you when you feel it with your fingers, it reminds you of old christmas tree, tensile it's, a flat filament. In both of these cases, it's best to have the thread on your auxiliary spool pin standing vertically so that it feeds into the machine flat if the's lay down there twisting as they go into the machine, and that will increase the likelihood of them as they're rubbing in the eye of the needle to want to either shred or break so you have more much. Ah more success with these if you use them standing vertically if you have a really really big spool and it's too heavy for the machine to pull this long you might want to get an auxiliary cohen stand to stand behind if it's a real big spool of it too big to sit on this but usually people buy little bits of it like this the smaller schools just stand them up and then threat is normal and then make sure the eye of your needle is the thread is flowing smoothly through the eye of the needle if your needle is too small or your needle is old or dull that's going to cause this to break and you also another tip for working with metallic threads is to just slow the machine down don't so at high speed take your time, slow it down nice, slow moderate speed to let that thread really do its thing because these can tend to stretch a little bit and sewing a little slower will keep that from happening. So do we have a question? And this came from lee ad is bomb and fill a specific kind of thread or is it just referring to whatever threat you have in the baba it's a specific kind of thread this one's a spun polly and this one is a swell it's is a lightweight polyester it's just that they're spun finer so that you could just get more of them on the bob bobbin. It just makes it less dense on the underside and that's. Why they're nice to use. Yeah, it's. Not like a special type of threat. They're still polyester is just their spun finer. But, yeah, that's a good question.