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Lesson Info

Ribbing Insertion and Free Motion

Why don't we dio some over edge stitching for putting in? You know, we just did the twin needle for hemming in it. Why don't we do an over edge for putting a, um a ribbing into a t shirt collar? So as an example, here's a I've got a couple different kinds of rib here. I just want to show you how these khun b a little different, this one that I have has a lot of memory and it there's a some of them are like one hundred percent cotton, and some of them have mohr of ah kind of lycra spandex kind of material that is part of the fiber content, and those tend to give the ribbing a little more memory than one that's one hundred percent cotton, the one hundred percent cotton ones they're nice to work with, but they can stretch out a shape a little sooner than you might want. So you definitely want to get something that has a bit more of a memory, and I think what I'm going to do because my threat is white, you won't see it on the white fabric, so let me try this blue one, and I'll try one of t...

hese others here to just show you how you would put that into your garment, so I'll just pretend this is one of my shirts it looks like it's a little small, but I think you'll get the idea and that's our next band and we want to insert a ribbing into our t shirt this's a little wide, I think for what we would really want, so let me trim this stone just maybe these are is there a little narrower? Let me try one of these just to save some time because it was so much to do so when you guide this in there, you're going to sell your stitch and it swings off to the side stitch swings off to the side like that, and you're going to stretch your rib but just guide your bottom fabric in straight as you go so you won't be stretching the bottom. You'll just be as you stitch, you'll be leveling this out straight to feed it straight in as you stretch the rib, and by doing that, then when you're done, because you stretch this, this will have enough memory in it to pull tight to your skin, and I'm going to use my, um, let's see, do I have in here? I think I put it away is my over edge put. I put that in the little drawer, you would want to use your over edge foot for this and the reason why you would do that, as opposed to your, um all purpose but to your general purpose foot is if you look really closely at this foot you can see down inside of the opening that there's a pronger or an extension in there and what that does is it puts just a little extra threat in the stitches I'm sewing so that does I'm sewing near the edge it'll help the stitches lay really nice and flat you're near the edge this is great for seems seemed finishes as well he wanted to do just a scene finish on the edge of a fabric if you just so right on the edge those will tend to pucker on you some but if you use that over edge put those away nice and flat because it gave the stitch a little more um thread so we can use this one don't hear again this one of these quick touch stitches I talked about earlier that one would be like an over edge and over lock type stitch and as I so let me see what our length and width look like I'll press that button that's a nice wide with I bet that's going to do a good job for us so let's get this started that usually the optimum is is a good good selection you can change it if you like, so I'm stretching the top is I so but not the bottom the bottom when I'm just feeding straight in I think that's enough for our purposes here because I have so much I want to show you, but here I've got my stitch it's our seem and our finish at the same time it stretches and it gives me my keeps my curve shape on my neck band so that that we'll fit around your neck or your cuff. However you've decided to do that, but again, the ones with the more memory and them are the ones that you want to look for when you're shopping, sometimes it costs just a tiny bit more, but they're definitely worth it. So I know one of the other feet that you got with your machine was an even feed foot, and this is for your quilting and that goes on the machine with a screwdriver, so let's, let's take a look at the even feed foot. Normally, I've been changing feet by pressing this button on the back and releasing a foot, but in the case of the even feed foot, it has its own way that it screws onto the machine. So I need to remove this presser foot shank with the screwdriver, this presser foot holder sometimes it's called and you undo that screw remove the whole ankle and instead we're going to put on the even feed foot and what this does the way that this foot works and why you use this when you're just doing normal sewing like a seam the presser foot comes down and presses down on your fabric against the feed dogs to feed the fabric through great but when you are quilting for example, you have more or less like a sandwich happening there you've got an upper fabric I mean, I think I have this over here let me just reach over and grab this quickly you have, like, a lot of stuff but I have a lot of things I want to show you trying to keep it all handy. Um you have here's something that we had started but it's a like a table runner and you have your upper fabric after you've prepared your quilt and topper, which we did in this case with a quarter inch foot and your quarter inch foot for your machine looks like this. Okay, um you followed used the edge of the foot as a guide for your seems it's a perfect quarter inch from center needle position so you would piece these together that way and then after your topper this is called a topper. If you're new to quilting, then you layer it over your batting and you're backing fabric and once those layers are together and this is this is a batting it's, a warm and natural there's warm and white there's where there's different you don't thicknesses of batting some of them are loftier than others thiss one for something like a runner you probably wanted a little thinner like this but regardless in any case you've got the this the's layers it's like a sandwich of fabric where you've got a back in the middle and a topper and what can happen if you just put your regular press afoot on and so is the feed dogs are on the underside drawing the fabric through but you've got all these layers up above and not everything pushes through together so you can get this shifting where your presser foot is actually pushing the top fabrics forward while the bottom ones are getting drawn back and you get fabric shifting and so the even feed foot that's where it gets its name it feeds the fabric evenly eso what happens when you put this on the machine there's like another set of feed dogs in the top of the foot and they work together with the lower feed dogs in sync to take the upper fabric and the lower fabric and feed them evenly together? Sometimes people call this a walking foot but regardless it's the function is the same whatever you want to call it now there's an arm on this foot in this foot came with your machine it was in a separate little box inside your packaging this little arm right here this needs to rest on this needle clamp so let me just lower that a little bit so you can see when you, when you attach this to the machine, make sure that that clamp is riding up above that bar. If this is below it, it won't so properly, so little go ahead and screw that back into place with the screwdriver involved tight knit with my fingers first, and then I'll give that a little tweak with my screwdriver, make sure it's securely in place, okay? And then I'm going to put my machine on center needle position with that second down, quick touch button, and we're in good shape to go now. Um, um it's also not just for also for you also on this piece here in just a moment, thea other thing, it's good for if maybe you're so you're at home and you're saying, I'm not a quitter. I don't know if I care about that. What this is really good for is when you want to sow fabrics with a nap, so you have maybe this cotton velvet or velveteen, as you might call it, when you put these together to sew a seam, um, you can get the same kind of effect I was talking about where the nap of these two fabrics, when they join they, they start to shift the bottom one we'll keep wanting to feed through and the top ones going to shift over and you're going to as you so along you're going to get this this kind of bubble that starts to form are a ridge same thing with anything like a quarter I fabric when you put the two together to so they're rubbing against one another in the bottom one will be trying to feed and the top one will be slipping if you use a regular foot so by using an even feed foot you know you can use it for free fashion or your garment sewing or your home to course owing to keep fabric layers from shifting it's not just a quilting foot though most of the time it is used for quilting here's an example too of just fabrics some together with some loft in there to keep the layers from shifting. Okay, so let's do that and when this runs I've got a white thread and here I know we were stitching on this earlier with gray but that's ok, but I'll just run a row or two on this to give you the idea how it works and when you run it you'll hear it does kind of make a click, click click click sound and that's totally normal and by the way this is a perfect place let me just stop for a moment and show you that extension table this is a perfect time for you to use that extension table that comes with your machine, so you're going to flip these legs open and slide this on my table isn't big enough for all my stuff, but isn't that true of everybody sewing room right? You never have enough room and then just slide that on and now with that gives me is I haven't done much ah larger level surface for working, so I'm not fighting with my fabric it's nice and level that great oh, I can just start my stitching I'll tuck my thread underneath the presser foot and this one I kind of like cause we rather than doing a free motion staple stippling which I can show you in just a bit all assure you free motion work, which is like what we did on this quilt to do this free motion work on here and in the border that's all free motion as well thiss one we decided to use the even feed foot and just kind of do random lines a very traditional way of quilting can I would you mind that in the lower left hand side I've got a tote bag and cosmetic bag there that we also did with humble, even feed foot? And here is where we did that traditional quilting pattern of the diamonds this is a thirty weight cotton in our needle and we did a thirty weight cotton here and followed and did vertical lines just to show that these are kind of the traditional quoting patterns. But here, just to be a little different, we did a little bit more of just a random creating lines wherever we wanted to. So there's, no writer wrong with this. This is just however you want this to look and you'll hear that kind of click click, click, click, click but that's totally normal it's the feed dogs on top and the feed dogs on the bottom and there they're working together to pull the fabric through so I'm don't have just a standard presser foot would sit like this, and the other feed dogs would go like this, and everything would be slipping because of all the layers. But when I go from top and bottom, everything goes together and I don't have any shifting and then this big surface I mean, how wonderful keeps all your work nice and level, and that was all included with your machine, you come to the end and you can use that handy little thread trimmer and pick up and just move over and decide where you want your next role, put your foot down and resume stitching so that's your even feed foot. And so I'll change next to our free motion foot and show you some free motions sewing through this some quote is very inspiring for that and you're free motion foot looks like thiss to clarify again backing for kelly h that even feed foot comes with the machine yes, yes it's it's not in that little trade it was in a little box looks great by itself in the packaging. Thank you. So hopefully you didn't throw that away with the packaging if you threw your box away just don't, jake but yes, that comes with your machine it's why I like it a lot for napped fabrics I do garment sewing and I, um and you know it's nice to when I'm just whoopsie I want to put that even feed foot on um or the free motion foot thie when you so stripes aarp lads it's nice to just put that on there so you don't have your shifting of your on your seems on your side seems it'll keep like when you need your plans to perfectly match you don't have them where they off a little bit. That foot will help you keep everything really nice and even so it's got a lot of a lot of use now we need to go in here and drop our feed dogs because we're going to do free motion work remember what I told you earlier when you go to engage those again, just turn that hand well toward you one full revolution to raise them up again when you're ready to bring them up and then I'm going to slide this extension table back on here, and we're going to put the free motion foot on and just like the last foot where the arm needs to be resting on the needle clamp. Same thing here if you have to move your hand well upper down there, move the needle up or down a little bit with the hand wheel just to get this in a good position to put that screw back in. But you definitely want to watch that that arm is resting on top of the needle clamp. We have some tutorials on the singer website on how to use the's feet, and he even feed for different feet. Some detailed tutorials on that as well how to attach them and so on. If you need to see that real close up eso, we're ready to do free motion or feed doug's airdropped. And, uh, could I get my dress and my some of those free motion samples in the meantime, and I will show you how this works, um I have yeah there's some examples over on the table over there yeah here we go so that the the big quilt here has some really elegant examples of it this is probably your most common use of free motion work is this staple quilting so just a bit ago on our other piece we did with the even feed foot to do these lines like so but here is an example of a very similar fabric design but we did the meandering type of quilting so I'm going to show you how to do that and then some other ways that you use free motion work here is a are my step outs over there to the piece I want a quilt on is that over there is well ok and then the here is a dress with a belt and similar to how we had done the heart early both thank you so much thank you thank you um similar to how we did the the heart applicator these flowers our applicants are you use fuse herbal web to apply these flower shapes onto this base fabric here some tonal ones here are some acconci a contrast ones and this is like drawing with your thread just meandering around drawing with your thread so you can get a little bit more of an organic sort of look this dress here is a completely different look to it this it almost looks like it has this lacey pattern in it and what this is is we used a bridal illusion, it's, kind of like tool, but it's a little finer but it's still the same type of material. And we laid the tool over the white eight dress and then straight stitch in a free motion manner around and into our flower shape. We had kind of drawn the shapes onto the dress straight stitch. Then stop and trim away the excess tool, if you will. And then set the machine for zigzag and zigzagged around where we had straight stitch, and cut up to it to enclose the raw edges, then put the machine back for straight stitch to meander back and forth like this, and so on to give us the center area here, even the little detail on these buds, all of that was just free motion. So free motion gives you a lot of creative possibilities. Here's another. I've been showing this in all of our classes, but it's, not just quilting. It's really amazing what you can do with it. This is a small bridal pillow project I had done one time. I think the instructions for this might be on our site as well I believe they are, but but I think it was a white one, but anyway, here is um, what I did for that I usually have step outs with me because I never know how much time I'm gonna have. I can't always fully demonstrate everything. S o what we did was we just had our base fabric, which looks like this in this particular case. And I from the fabric store the craft store, you know, you get these, you know, flowers on a stem. This was like a hydrangea ana stam that I've pretty much picked apart by this point, but I just pull these off and run them under the, uh, ironed steamer just to flatten them a little and you can do is as dancer is open as you want, you can scatter these, um you don't have to do tonal. You can imagine this that this was a white fabric with pink or or purple flowers on it. Here we did a bridal pillow, but this could be just a regular regular pillow in a bigger size. I did this one time all in lavenders, everything kind of tonal lavender and I did a table runner out of it was beautiful with a vase on the table, but then after you blade, those on there, you could also do like a little girl's dress, like maybe the skirt of a bridesmaid dress. I mean, the possibilities are really pretty endless, but here we go. So now we have a layer of tool over this so you sort of trapped the flowers in there and then when you free motion what I did, which you'll see on my other step out just because of time I'll just show you this way we just meandered around the flowers to capture the leaves no writer wrong in fact, this is a case where you could even use ah monofilament nylon thread you wouldn't even see the thread you all you'd see are those pedals here I can see my stitching a little bit now on this one we used a bead for the center of the flower we added a few more pedals to the top when we were done trapping those in there and then laid them down there and did a little free motion around and around to secure those flower petals in place. So those are just some of the possibilities with your free motion work, so oh, and then we also have what we call thread painting and thread painting is I guess where it gets his name is that you're sort of painting on fabric with thread so you would draw your design on your base fabric thread your machine with the color that you're going to work with set it up for free such a machine for free motion like we are right now and then you'll just move your fabric back and forth and you're basically just filling in coloring sort of in between the lines with thread to create art we did free motion here with metallic thread on this I'll just open this quilt up a little bit for you too it's it's a little bit large but I think you'll get the idea here open that up and show you there's quite a bit going on in this quilt that is free motion it's mixing stitches for example I was talking earlier about how the fact that you have stitch elongation in your machine for some of your stitches if you look at the at your stitch out here that I was talking earlier here's here's for example this one it's at one x two x three x for x five x you could do the same with some of these other stitches and in the case of like these little bud stitch and then when you come in here um here they are a different sizes to show you the elongation of the stitching to create this sum. I don't know what these air called in real life, but it gives you the dimension of the flower and just mix those up and then this is ray on thread and metallic thread and just meandering back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and then when you're done, go back in with your little decorative stitches and just add those in their e mean the sky is the limit what you can do this's free motion here here's free motion we just go back and forth back and forth back and forth and this is a metallics and ray allen's mixed to create the texture and the leaves so hopefully that gets you a little inspired to see you know the possibilities with the free motion but let's see how that works on the machine thank you. People are very inspired oh, I'm so glad yeah, I mean, I didn't bring I could have filled this room with things we have in the office and so on, but I brought enough to give you the idea. So here we have a little quilt sandwich, right? And we couldn't do two different kinds of quoting with this actually we could do with the even feed foot and we could just go do do do do do do do like this like we did on that purple and orange bag and just do those diamond shapes across our peace or we can me under and do this free motion like this. So I've got a white thread in here and let's just do a little free motion where because I think what what you really want to know is how do you get that free motion to work properly? Because folks sometimes don't understand the product like how how hard you step on the foot controller and how fast do you move your hands to do the work? And I think I've had people say to me when I've done classes is every time I try to do that I'm bending needles or in breaking needles and what that's telling you when that happens is that you're moving your fabric a little too fast for how fast you're stepping on the foot controller so sometimes I just want to take a deep breath before you start when you're brand new to this the more you do it, the better you get at it and you actually find that it's it's really a lot of fun but the trick is tio uh you haven't just do a couple of stitches tio frightened cut this thread and cannot drag it around with me. The trick is to ah, keep your hands on your work and man keep a good speed on the controller as you move moderately with your hands you don't want to go really slow on the controller and then you're trying to move this around and what can happen is you won't have nice stitching like if you're stippling it won't, you know have these nice soft curves like this what'll happen is it'll look like this as you're bringing it around because you're moving too fast for how fast it's getting thread so give it some speed you can even if you're a little scared of it running a little too fast for you you can take your stitch speed control here at the front of the machine and just turn that down just a little tiny bit so it's not sold speed but you can feel confident that if you step on your controller fast that it won't I feel like it's running away from you as you're getting familiar with the technique but just meander around nice moderate speed with your can get over on the area where you can see a little better what I'm doing meander around now you can do this ultra here you can go you can go really close together and do your stippling really tight like this or you can be more open it's whatever you want to look like maybe you want to go back and forth like this is that one table runner handy? Aye think I have it over on the table there it's that kind of brownish colored one that that actually has this kind of technique in it that I'm doing right now I'm just going back and forth in this sort of overly pattern here take a look at this one so here simple, simple, simple just piecing strips together with your quarter inch foot but look at what we're doing to stippled just back and forth in just a meandering pattern, you can have your threat bland. You can have it. Contrast, it's, whatever you want it to look like. This is actually a really long table runner. I think here's the back side, you can see even a little better. What we did the backside is is pretty is the topside. And so, um, there are actually two. There are web sites that you can go to. I don't. I don't know them off the top of my head, but you can just do it well. They have examples of patterns to follow. You can you can even draw your pattern on your fabric and then follow it around it. If you don't feel confident with just free sewing it. But I really like stippling. I find it actually kind of relaxing, but just again, the trick is I'm just pushed my speed all the way over to that. The fastest moderates get over here where you can see it a little better. I got white thread in the machine, a nice speed on the foot controller, and then just meander around with your hands so that your stippling