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Twin Needle and Blind Hem

Before I get rolling, I promised on the break that I would take a quick peek into that question that came about the bob and I do stand corrected. It is a fifteen j I I was saying to the galled early, I'm sure the reason I had that in my mind is because the machine we did this morning was fifteen j and I talked fifteen j all morning, and I had that in my head, so I apologize for that, but I will show you right here on the table top when you look for your bobbins, um, you want to look for the fifteen j on the package as opposed to class fifteen? I had said just the opposite, but you want the class fifteen j so thank you for whoever just brought that to my attention, and I stand corrected, so I'll put these aside and we'll just keep going. So again, I like I said, I there's so much more than I could probably spend two days on a machine like this it's so packed with features and packed with things you can do with the stitches, and I'm going to just try to hit some of the things that I thin...

k are the most popular things that folks want to know how to do. And one of the things I'd like to show you is working with a twin needle. Now I know you don't get a twin needle with your machine, but they're everywhere where you shop for machine needles and there's some things you want to pay attention to when you work with the twin needle and now examples of twin needle work I had that t shirt if that's handy anywhere here it is let me just grab this to give you an idea of where what I'm talking about with twin needle sewing here is a t shirt just a store bought t shirt and if you look at the him on the sleeve of him at the bottom of the shirt, this is a twin looks like twin needle. This was actually done, though with a surge er so this was a cover stitch surge er that did this if you look at the back side and even does look like an over lock stitch it's a cover stitch this particular type of stitches called a cover stitch on a surgeon, you can get a similar effect with a home sewing machine using a twin needle. Now what will look like on the topside is two rows of straight stitching like it does with the surge er but the back side instead of looking like the surge er, the back side will be a zigzag and it will stretch like this does so you can get a if you're making t shirts and things for yourself. Twin needle is a neat alternative to just top stitched hems or blind hemming so thie other thing that thie twin needle can do for you is it can give you create texture and fabric. I've got two rows here where I've done double needle and you there's an optional foot available for your machine called a non stick foot. So whenever you so any of these sticky plenary leathery oilcloth types of vinyl fabrics and so on the nonstick foot has a silicone type of surface at the bottom, so when you're stitching that will just glide right over the top where as if you were to use your standard presser foot to try to stitch over these, it would probably feel like it's sticking and not wanting to move along so the nonstick foot just glides right over those but this texture we created on this bag just a simple little square little bag period is a clutch sure carry it like a total, but that was twin needle stitching, but you can also use your decorative stitches with a twin needle and could create complete new texture in your stitching here's just a simple serpentine stitch with a double needle it looks completely different, so let's see how to set the machine up for that so um I'll just leave that satin foot on that we used earlier this was handy right here and I'm going to use my screwdriver to loosen my iss needle out of the needle clamp three and then we're going to replace it with the double needles so here I'll just lay these on the table side by side so you can see the difference between them now they both have that uh shank that goes straight up into the needle clamp but instead of the needle coming straight down the center the there's a needle on each side of center attached to the one shank so when you put this in there you obviously don't use your automatic needle threat or because that pin would just come around in between the two of them so this this one you definitely thread manually you want to just make sure that that needle goes all the way up and then give just give it one little tweak with your screwdriver and then you'll see appear I place thie auxiliary spool pin into the hole on the top of the machine when you put your second thread on you want to make sure that this thread unreal tze this direction off the spool instead of like this because you don't want this dropping down and maybe tangling with the other ones so flip it on here so that it's some reeling off like this and you'll take these two threads together and you'll just thread them as though they're one through your entire thread path but make sure oppressive foot lifter is up when you start this up and then up over the top and then come down again and then there's a thread guy just above the twin needle and what normally when I just so with single thread I took my threat behind that when you saw the double needle you put one in front of it and one behind not not one behind it and when not not behind it so I'm gonna take my left hand when I can tell which one is my left one by pulling this it's my horizontal thread and I'm going to tuck that one behind the thread guide and then the other thread just bypassed that and then we're going to thread these manually one at a time so just bear with me here for a moment while I um thread my twin needle gonna put my machine on straight stitch to start and it moved my needle to center position so there's one threaded and here is thie other ones will slip that in and we're good to go okay come on they would now you're sewing with three threads because you've got to up on top and one on the bottom right so now if this was a hymn that you wanted to do with double needle this is ah real nice nice weight of knit that you might make a dress from or a tunic top or something turned that ham up however dp wanted and then you work from the top side you need to work from the top side of your fabric cause that's where your two rows of stitching will happen you don't do this upside down or you're zigzag will be on the right side of your garment and then placed this underneath here and we're on straight stitch and we're going to start to so I'm using a twin needle that is a three millimeter with you could use a wider one near or one whichever your preference three is probably one of the most popular sizes so let's we'll just stop right there and I'll take this out for sake of time but I have so many things I want to get to but now when I lay this on the table you'll see I got a nice twin needle him the backside is a zigzag you could take your scissor and trim up to your stitching if you wanted to get rid of some of that excess like so but here is your it looks just like store bought and the beauty of this too is that it stretches it's got give to it because the back side is a zig zag so even those are those are straight stitches they won't pop because the back side is is it is egg and I think that's really need to have an alternative hemming technique it looks very professional all right? So that when you do decorative stitching with a twin needle um one of the things you want to do is make sure that you just pick something here like, for example, let's just say we want to use number twelve so when you do this, you want to make sure that the width of your stitches reduced down for for your stitching and what I mean by that is if you just kind of look here at the front of the table, I'm going to show you this kind of with my hand with my hands, but if this is the width of the opening of the hole in your presser foot and you have a single needle and you've got this seven millimeters stitch with and wherever you set your stitch with for sowing your fine as long as you're because you're it doesn't matter if it's like point three or seven point oh, because you're within the parameters of single needle within the whole of that foot, but when you have a twin needle in here, you're on both sides of center and the machine doesn't know that you have a double needle in there, so when you maybe pick a zigzag stitch and you picked the widest with it's going to go zig zag like this because it thinks it's got just that one shank in there, so what happens? You'll reach you, you'll swing over to left and right and thie needle is going to hit the sides of your presser foot. So what you need to do is reduce the width of your stitch so that you stay clear of the sides of the foot so you can. Just after you select a given stitch, you can come into your down here at the bottom of your machine there's a button that says twin needle and when you press that, you'll see a picture of the twin needle appear on your lcd screen, and it automatically reduces the width of the stitch you've chosen for you, so you don't have to try it and clear it and make sure it clears. I mean, you need to make sure it does. I always still turn my hand wheel and check it, but it happens the width of the stitch for me, so I don't have to guess what that setting might b, so we'll still just give it a little test and that zigzag it's a multiple stitches zigzag and I've pressed my twin needle button and it looks I've got a complete cycle of the stitch, and it looks like I'm clear. And so now I can just proceed with sewing. When a machine doesn't have that twin needle safety feature, you've got to determine that for yourself. With every stitch it's still possible to do it's still possible to so the twin needle, but you'll need to make sure that you adjust and adjust until you're clear of the sides of the foot where a machine like this just has that. But now I press, and it automatically puts it at a reduced with so I can just perceived to soul that's, a wonderful feature on your machine, and you'll know it's activated because you'll see that little picture of that double needle on your lcd screen right up here, next to the presser foot picture. And, you know, you can raise this up and bring this around, and you don't have to be limited to just a single roll of this you could just continue to sow was showing the group's earlier today, so row after row after row of this until you've done you could you could text you're a fabric with it. For example, if somebody could grab me that one pillow the black and white or excuse me, the green and black one that we have over on the shelf, I'll show you something that we did to text your some fabric it's on the upper left side and the upper left cube. I love this one. Yeah, here, here we've actually created a wide what looks like a really wide stitch that would you'd have on a top line machine, but here we just took and did our little is the stitch that looks like an ivy, like a little vine like this and with a twin needle, and we did role after roll and then went back and made like a grid pattern to texture this fabric, so make it any color you need for your home decor, but those air creative options you have with you have so many beautiful decorative stitches and that twin needle button, I mean, you could just keep on experimenting, but I just wanted to kind of get you thinking down that track a little bit because it'll it'll be really a lot of fun to do when she start playing with them so it's it's a functional stitch but it's also a decorative are a functional feature that twin needle but it's also decorative okay, so we'll take the twin needle out and I'm gonna move on and show you how to do a blind him because I find that there's often I think in every class that we've had since I've been here everybody's asked about blind him I think I think probably the reason why that is is because it's the way you set up for it seems a little counterintuitive and once you kind of demystify that it's it's actually really fun to do now the blind him is just exactly that the reason it's called that I'm just replacing my needle the reason it's called a blind him and this is what your foot looks like here put it on the table so you can see what that looks like the reason it's called a blind ham is because from the right side of your fabric you don't see the stitching um but on the back side you see the blind stitch and I have I'm going to use a quite thread on this navy blue fabric so that you can see it better a mute obviously use ah thread that matches your fabric but in this case I wanted to contrast so you can see what's happening so I was tried on a little scrap first, but what happens here is this's your this is a piece of just a very nice wool and this is the wrong side and this is the right side of the let's say it's a skirt so you would turn up the hem of your skirt however deep that needed to be and you could use an over edge stitch or an over lockie stitch off some type on your machine or a pinking shears to finish off this edge so the threads don't unravel whatever you want to do there, but then what you'll do is you'll temporarily turn your him under like this so that what you have in front of you is the fold of the fabric this is still the wrong side of your skirt, so to speak, and this is that top edge of that him so again, I'll just show that to you this is your what your hand looks like wrong side of your fabric, you've turned your him up, you've done whatever finish you want to the raw edge and then you're going to just temporarily turn this him back on itself so what's happening here with this foot this is your blind him foot and this is all in your book too, but this foot has an extension at the front of it along which you guide this fold and you can adjust with either your stitch with control, or you can adjust with this adjusting screw on the side of the blind him foot. You have two ways to adjust for your him, and the reason you would want to adjust it is if you were doing a him on this whoa, which might be a little softer and a little thicker than, say, a quoting cotton that you'd make a summer skirt out of the fold of that fabric might be thinner and finer than something like this, so you will want to adjust your stitch and and or the placement of your extension, depending on your project. So I always like to try on a little scrap of fabric first, and your one of your quick, direct stitch buttons is a blind him here on the front, right on the front. I don't have to dial it in it's right here on front, and it even hears it shows me a picture of blind him foot I still have my twin needle activated, so I'm going to take that off and, um, here we're going to put the blind him foot on the machine lets snapped that on that snaps on, just like all the other ones do that we have been working with so far. And we'll just give this a try and see what our what what it looks like if we're if we're in a good spot or if we need to adjust either the bite of this what you're after here, by the way, let me just show you what what our goal is, I'll do that here on the table, the stitch of blind him stitch souls like this it goes stitch, stitch, stitch and then it swings over to the left and then comes back stitch, stitch, stitch, and then it swings over like this, and when it's doing that swing over, it should come over and just grab the fold of the fabric and then come back onto the the this flap part here so it goes stitch, stitch, stitch and then it grabs my fold and comes back stitch, stitch, stitch grabs my fold, so your goal is really to just look down as you're sewing to see that that stitches just grabbing a threat or two of this fold, you don't want it going way over in here. When you flip this over to look at the correct side of your him, you'll see a big white line over here in this case, white because I'm using white thread you'll see a big stitch, the idea is that you want this to be as invisible as possible and by trying to just grab a threat or to those will disappear now, obviously again, you would use a navy blue thread when you do this to help it remain is invisible is possible, but this is how it's stitch it. And by the way, you also have a stretch blind hem stitch in your machine, which is number ten, and that one what that does, instead of a straight stitch and then going over and then a straight stitch and going over it has little zigzag, little zigzag, little's, eggs, egg and then it bites and then little zigzag, little zigzag, little's, executor, and it bites. And what that does is because this part is stretchy. You would get a blind him that stretches so that's, good to know, but your when you probably use more is thie one for woven fabrics. So that's, what I'm watching for as I looked down into the hole of my presser foot and I'm going to just begin to sew and see what I have if I'm even catching it it's a little narrow, so let me widen that out. I'm going to go in here, and I'm gonna widen this out to about him. You want to go to a six and just see if that does the job I might once I get that really wide like that and it's, if it's still missing the fold, then I'll need to move where my foot is, allowing me to guide the fold so let's, have a look and see what we have, you know, it's just missing it a little bit see it didn't catch, so what we'll do is we'll move the move the foot so that I'm a little closer and length. Why not our stitch a little bit and let's, try that again on our scrap so thie outs that flap that where you had maybe done pinking shears or seemed finished goes underneath the foot and the fold goes up against the white extension at the front of the foot on. I just want to check and make sure it's catching mice fold can use my thread cutter, and this time I am I'm catching it that's great and so let's, go ahead and run are for real him into the foot because we've got it adjusted the way we want it, so we'll put our fabric underneath like, so lower the foot. And it's really great because that white extension at the front of the foot all I have to do is just guide this cold as I sold and it takes all the guesswork out for me. It's nice and consistent if you do a lot of sewing of curtains or home to core items that have large hands on them large long hams, a top stitch tem isn't always appropriate for some projects it looks maybe too casual for some more elegant fabrics. Ah, blind him is definitely the way to go, so here we are we've got that way caught the edge of our fold so when we undo our him like so to come back to this other side there's our stitch but when you look at the right side it's completely invisible and you can imagine if you have navy blue thread you definitely I mean, you don't see that I don't even see my white thread here because we got it adjusted and it definitely grab the edge it grab the edge of our fabric we had it set just perfectly so hopefully that de mystified blind hemming for you, but generally what it is is it's how to fold the fabric to feed it into the machine that it gets a little confusing so you would have your ham turned up, then just flip it under like that guided into your foot stitch. And then, when you're done, you just flip it back like that and there's your him. So I hope that helps some of you who have been wondering how to do that. Because we usually get a lot of questions on that one.