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Lesson Info

Hemming Techniques

I wanted to show you one really neat decorative stitch that's on your machine it's actually called in on trudeau stitch, and you can do what we call on trudeau with it. But it's also used decoratively on trudeau is a french word that when you read different sewing books that talk about heirlooms, sewing, they'll say on trudeau means between two and it's usually meaning that this this trim is sewn in between a fabric and a lace, and this is a purchased on trudeau, where it looks like it has these little holes in it, but you have a stitch in your machine that can generate this look, I'm going to show you how to do that. I've got a piece of linen here we put my threat, my white thread back on the machine, and when you do this, you need to use what we call a hem stitching or a twin needle, and I showed you that earlier. Um if one of these specialty needle packages, it looks like this it's site style twenty forty it's, the ham stitching needle like so and the way it's different from a regul...

ar needle, let me just take this one out of here in a way it down next to it show you how they're different, so here they are, side by side, thes to needles and if you look at it closely, you'll see your regular needle is just straight on both sides, but the hem stitching or we needle has thes more or less wings on each side, or they look like almost like little blades that kind of, like, go like this on each side of the needle. So when you're sowing those little wings push fibers away as the stitches formed, helping to make these little holes in the fabric. And so let's put that in the the wing needle in the machine, we need a ll him stitching needle it's an interchangeable term you'll hear here both. I'm going to just tighten that in there like I do my regular needle. Make sure it's all the way up now, when we sew the hem stitching wheat needle, we do not use the needle threat or the reason why is that little pin that comes around to come into the eye of the needle could hit those those blades on the sides of the needle. So you definitely want to thread you're him stitching needle manually. Okay, so we'll bring this down. Wait, there we go. You can use your set foot for this if you it doesn't, you don't have to use your general purpose foot. The sudden foot is fine for that as well. What I did on the fabric before starting, you'll notice on this piece of linen there's, a polled thread, what that will do, I'll just cut a piece off here in the bottom and show you what I did. Um, you want to pull a thread or to a za guide for stitching, and so I just grabbed one like this and just draw your thread out, just pull on it like that, take your time with it and draw the threat out. Maybe a couple of them. What that will do is it will help enhance the look of the holes as you do the stitching. The other thing it will do is they'll help you so on green meaning exactly parallel with the fibers, because if you so off green even slightly with this technique, it doesn't look at all like it's supposed to so and you might also be aided with using some spray starch on the fabric. It will help hold the holes open. So it's the stitch over here on your front panel it's this stitch over on the far right in the next to the last roll, and you can also play with the length and width of this stitch. So I'm just going to give it a give it a start and see what we've got here I might want to change it depending on the look I want but I definitely want to watch that the center movement of the stitch thing I'm gonna put my finger over here on the table here's how it so's it goes down up, down over over, over, over, down, up, down over over over over so when it's doing the center part I want that center part to be right where I pulled the thread okay sometimes it's helpful to to increase your upper thread tension a little bit to help it hold those threads tighter so again, don't be afraid of that tension dialogues sometimes it's your friend to get the help you get the looks you want with some different techniques so when we're all finished we pull this out you see the the whole now I had this set it a wide setting my purchased on trudeau was a little narrower. You can just bring your with down on your machine if you want that to look a little smaller but here I've created my own um I'm stitching kind of look and I do have let me just reach over here on my table I'm going to show you a real life example of where you might use that um I've got a couple of napkins here and placemats where you've probably seen a look like this in your store bought table linens. And you wondered how in the world did they do that? You have that stitch on your machine and you just use a ham stitching needle to do that. And it looks just like really fine, expensive table linens. So that's, how you do use theon trudeau stitch. You can also use that stitch decoratively and what I did on this pillow, we just show you this pillow real close and up front. This isn't ribbon here. I've got a step out that I can show you here. This is a piece, uh, similar to what is done on this pillow. This is a ribbon that is that we purchased. And right alongside of each side of this ribbon, we had blue thread in the machine and we use that same stitch that we just used for this on trudeau. We just brought the width stone a lot narrower, and we let it so when instead of going right, you know, we were threading sewing right down the center of a pulled thread. What we did was we sowed right along the edge of the ribbon, so when it the needle swings to the left, it just catches the edge of the ribbon. And we got a sort of heirloom effect on the side of this ribbon as we sowed so it's not just for on trudeau you can actually use it decorative lee as well. All right, so that is your contrato stitch okay, so let me change I'm going take this wing needle out of the machine and put our regular, uh, regular needle back in I just dropped my screwdriver way we are you know what I'm going to do before we move on? I'm going to show you the twin needle as long as we're talking about needles let me show you twin needle sewing and how what that's for and how to do that that's really a lot of fun. So here we have a twin needle and the twin needle let me lay that down next to a regular needle so you can see how that's different they both have the single shaft that goes up into the needle clamp but in this case you have two needles coming down on each side of center rather than just the single needle. So we have to thread with two spools of thread to do that. So we're going to put this up into the machine and tighten titan with a screwdriver I usually like to give this one little twist with my screwdriver to just make sure it's in there nice and snug and now this is where we're going to use this auxiliary spool pin at the top of the machine. I want to trim my thread spool that's currently threaded because I want to thread these two threads together at the same time as though they're one. So this second spool goes on the exhilarate spool pin, and I want to make sure this one is reeling off the spindle this way. Not like this, because I don't want this to accidentally come in here and get tangled with this one. So if I have it coming off like this, it will stay clear of this guy. So you grab these as though they're one just get a little slack on him here and hold them together is one bring them into your thread path, but we're not going to use that automatic needle threat her, and that pretty much makes sense because there's your hole in the eye of your needle and that needle threat er swings around and it grabs the thread that tuck's under here like so, but when I have twin needles there on both sides of what is normally that hole, so that little pin is going to come around and go nowhere near the holes of the twin needle, so these must be threaded manually. And when we do that, you'll notice there's a thread guide down here. What we want to do is put one of the threads behind the thread guide and the other not so that that also helps them stay separated as we're sewing. So you should put the left hand one see, when I pull these my left hand threat is the one that I'm drawing off the school, and when I pull the right hand, one there that right hand one is turning so the left hand one I'm going to tuck behind the thread guide above the needle and the other one not. And now I'm going to threat both of these manually, so just bear with me a moment as I do that, and you can leave your satin foot on your machine for this is well, if you like, you can use this foot, or you can use your general purpose foot it's fine. Either way, before I start stitching, I'm going to show you a couple examples of where you would use this techniques, you know, where we're going with its you know what the goal is that we're after. So here I have a store bought t shirt that has this type of him on the edge, now this was not done with it. Standard sewing machine this is done with a cover stitch over lock machine when you look at the back side you can see it looks just like a surgery stitch even here at the bottom him um it looks like on the topside like two parallel rows of stitching but on the back side it is an over lock style of stitch because an over lock type of machine did this when you do this with a home sewing machine and a twin needle, you'll still get two rows of stitching on the top side but the back side will be a zigzag so this is from a cover stitch surgery but you can get a similar effect with a double needle and you're set for straight stitch on your machine and in the back side will look like a zig zag so you have a bob and thread and to needle threads okay, so let me grab a piece of net to do that with so I was just showing you that on a t shirt um your t shirt fabric is maybe weigh all wear a lot of nets you know leggings and sweat your tops and yoga type tops and so you would so this from the top side turn your him over however deep you needed to be, it can even be a little longer because you could go back in after you're done in trim away the excess and then you would pin your him in plate in place, but as we so you said that for a street stitch, nice moderate speed. When you're finished, you have your stitching to rosa stitching the backside looks like a zigzag stretches, and you see a little bit of a waving us here and that's, because I had left my tension of that tighter setting from when we did the on trudeau, I needed to relax that back down to the auto, and we would have that laying perfectly flat, so that just was simply I had that still set tight from the last technique, so there's your hamming technique, and then you would go on the back side and just grab your scissor and trim up to your stitching, and you've got a perfectly finished him that will stretch on your nets think that's a great tip now the you can do the same thing on vinyl! I haven't shown you yet the nonstick foot we may not get time for that, but there's a foot available for your machine that soze, vinyls and some of those stickier leathers and pleasures and vinyls. And we would we used a twin needle here in combination with a nonstick foot that has a silicone type of bottom, so wouldn't stick as we were sewing, too, so parallel rows on the vinyl to create surface texture on this purse this is just a little fold over clutch you can carry it like this or you can carry it has the handle but it's just a great you know, just trying to give you some ideas of where would I use to a needle stitching besides hemming? The neat thing about it too is you can also do decorative stitching with it so here's an example of where when you have your machine threaded with two threads you pick a decorative stitch and you can get this type of look here's that serpentine stitch I showed you earlier and how it looks with twin needle sewing, but and here's an example to of a pillow we did where we even used your little ivy, that little vine stitch double needle and created we sowed row after row and then came back this direction, and actually create surface texture for a pillow. So a lot of creative applications for it and one thing I want to tell you about when you do this it's very, very, very important is that your machine doesn't know you have a double needle in there. You know, you took out the single shaft out of there and you put in another one but the machine doesn't know that it's not this one with a single needle that it's actually one with two needles and the reason I say that is right now we're in straight stitch and I'm sewing straight it's no problem, but if I go to a decorative stitch like let's say we pick a zigzag depending on the size of the twin needle you're you have in the machine this needle now this is going to hear on the table I'm going to show you this is let's say this is the opening of my foot and I'm sewing a zigzag stitch I can go up to a seven millimeter with because I just have the single needle in there and I'm going back and forth and I can fill that hole opening of the presser foot but when I have a twin needle in here like I said, the machine doesn't know that so it's just going to go boom boom like this and if I don't do reduce my stitch with the sides of my needle are going to crash into the sides of my foot and they're going to break my needles so whenever you do decorative stitching with a twin needle, you need to reduce the width on your machine so I've chosen the zigzag stitch and I what I want to do is turn my hand it'll really slowly to make sure that that foot swing is clearing the sides of my foot now I happen to be on a four point oh and it seems to be fine just try that one more time it seems to be clear and I'll go ahead and so my length is really short from applicator let me put that back to a normal length because it remembered the length I had chosen here we go way let's see here now I'm sewing with two needles at the same time to get a wonderful decorative effect and you could you could even play with this and put like pink threat on the left and blue threat on the other and mix them up for you to do a multi colored effect let's see you come to the end of the row and you want to twirl this around and and do another row of stitching and you could do beautiful like border looking effects least could intersect they could be just parallel right next to each other you could put a space in between them so whatever you want them to look like but this would almost have the look of you know higher and sewing machine that had really wide stitches in it and you can get a really neat stitching effect by just putting in a double needle and sewing parallel rows I think that's really really need so hopefully that gave you a little inspiration and that was just your sat in foot you just need to get it a twin needle and they're usually pretty easily accessible at the fabric stores around the country