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Needles and Fabrics

People don't realize when you're when you're just starting out their reald difference that using the correct needle can make when you're sewing different fabrics and so I'm going to try to demystify that for you right now so here we have just pull these out here we have a a set of different kind of woven fabrics this is like us that meaning that they're non stretchy so here's like a silky this is, you know, it's kind of hard to tell when they're solids and so on on the camera, but this is like a wool maybe you'd make a wolf pretty well skirt out of that another type of silky fabric this's flannel he's like metallic this is just a marble kind of printed cotton here's, a do peony silk this's outdoor fabric kind of like but could make patio furniture out of burlap and denim for anything like this. You want to use what we call a regular point needle um such it's to my other slide here young so I've got a slide up that shows basic needle styles and we've got regular point, a ballpoint and h...

eavy duty those air that there are many more needle styles, but these are kind of like basic foundational styles, so for the wolverines for singer machines you want to use singer needles andi have either you want to get either a style twenty twenty which is an indication for the woven fabrics which it says right here on the package the packaging khun very depending on where you picked them up but you just basically want to look for the style number so we've got the twenty twenty for the woman's and it says woman down here or this one it's called style two thousand that's also of a needle but these air chromium type needles so they they're they're they tend to have a little bit longer life on them they just specially treated and we use these a lot for like machine embroidery because of the high speeds of the machine but you can use either of them with your woven fabrics ok when we go to the nit fabrics I've got some stretching its here I want to show you and there's a series of these here this is a stretch velvet got to a stretched to its stretch velvet t shirt fabric this's kind of like a ponting it that's very popular right now for dresses and pants and skirts those nice berm ponting its air wonderful this is that fabric you find a lot that baby blankets and things are made from very popular here's a swimsuit fabric it's got four way stretch kind of a rib and then here's a like a sweatshirt polar fleece type of fabric for any of these that are stretchy or knit fabrics then you want to get a ballpoint needle and the ballpoint needle is either a style twenty forty five fernet fabrics or in the case of if you want the chromium version of that that's a style two thousand and one and if you take a look at the monitor, I'm just going to go up to the monitor for a moment and show you close up the's called at a glance kind of looked the same, but if you look at them close up your regular point needle has more of a point to it than the ballpoint needle does and what happens when you use a regular point needle with your woven fabrics? The point will pierce through the weave so you get nice clean stitches if you were to use a ballpoint needle on a woven fabric what can happen? Because that the point of that is more of a ball it can actually grabbed one of the threads like if you were to use a ballpoint on like, oh a silky or a tap it are something you might find that it's actually snagging your fabrics then you you know you've either got a damage needle or you're using you're using a ballpoint needle and a ballpoint needle would would do that it would grab that one of the woven threads, so you definitely want to use a woven needle in your woven fabrics or a regular point needle in your woven fabrics the ballpoint needle for nits knit fabrics are more like mitt id like if you think of looking at a knitted scarf when you look at a knit fabric close up it's kind of like that and the ball kind of works its way in between the nit so if you were to use a sharp needle on your knit fabrics, what can happen is you can get skipped stitches so it's very interesting but you want to marry your needles with the fabric that you're selling a heavy duty needle is a lot like come a regular point become kind of regular ballpoint or they come in universal style but what what happens here is the eye of the needle itself will be a little bigger, but the I as bigger because generally with heavy duty needles you also use heavier fabrics and excuse me heavier threads and the threads need to go through the eye of the needle care well, um, so let me show you also one other kind of needle we have and that is for oh leather and pleather and oilcloth and those kind of things I've got some different examples here I've got this is actually a riel skin, a real piece of a skin there swayed cloth here's pleather that's real popular right now and you know, leggings and dresses they're mixing mitts with pleather and that you see that a lot and stores for fall clothing now here's vinyl like you'd use for outdoor furniture oilcloth for tote bags is another oilcloth in the case of these what you'd want to use is a weather needle and here's an example of a package of leather needle and that style number is twenty thirty two and you can get there's a couple different sizes of that the leather needle has more of a wedge point so it gives you a cleaner doesn't make his big a hole you wouldn't want to use like a heavy duty needle in a leather because it would leave a big hole because once those stitch holes in the leather their permanent you know you don't it's not like fabric where you could rip out a seam and you kind of this the holes go away in leather there there so the wedge point makes a cleaner pierce into the fabric but it's got a really long eyes so that those thicker threads that you use can be accommodated so the leather needle for leathers the ballpoint for nets and the regular point for woman's there's some specialty needles that I'll show you later it will be fine get through everything I want to get through today there are also twin needles and there are him stitching or wing needles and I hope to get the opportunity to show you how how to use thes okay one last thing about thies needles if you take a closer look we talked about the differences in the style of needle for what type of fabric therefore but you'll also notice that there's different colors here there were these color bars across the top and you might be wondering what were those for and if you look more closely you'll see that there's a number above them like eighty eleven, ninety fourteen or one hundred and then slash sixteen and what that is is it's the size of the needle so the smaller number it is the smaller size needle and the larger number is the larger sized needles so if you work with for example a do peony silk or you know a taffeta dress you might want to use a size eleven needle it's going to give you a smaller hole in the seam you would never want to use a heavy duty needle in a silk it's going to punch a big hole every time it makes a stitch and when you pull the seam apart almost almost literally pull apart because it made hold in your fabric that you don't want the smaller needle is a spy is just that it's a smaller needle it makes a smaller penetration the fabric so kind of the rule of thumb is lighter weight fabrics smaller natal medium weight like your quilting cottons and your dress fabrics and so on you can use a size fourteen any of your like lightweight woolls medium weight woolls if you used denim canvas, twill tze anything a little heavier like that, you want to go to a sixteen, you can even go to weigh do have one that goes even heavier. It's called the heavy duty needle and it's even a size eighteen it's even bigger yet, and that might be great for those like outdoor patio furniture and some of those where you have a lot of scenes that are really thick intercepting seems that will be a real good needle for that. Okay, so we've talked about needles, types and sizes, so why don't we talk about how often do you change a needle? And I'm going to actually show you how to change a needle on this machine generally kind of depends on how much you're sewing, but with any given needle some folks say about every eight hours you khun I think in our customer service area they recommend at least at the very most that you want to use it every sixteen hours of stitching time, but no more than that and how you'll know you need to change a needle. I'm just going to go to my next slide how you'll know you need to change it, you could have either a damage needle, a bent needle or a I'm sorry, I can't see that far down a blunt needle and the damage needle if you look at the tip of that needle on the one on the left hand side actually has like a little broken tip on it and that was how that can happen is if you maybe we're using too small of a needle for the fabric you're working with it could be that you were sewing over pins you never want to silver pins when you actually see put your garment together and you're pinning you want to remove the pin as you come to it you don't want to so over pins if that needle you might think all I just stitch right over them and oh, it just kind of nicked it but it actually can cause damage like that and what it can do is snag your fabric it it can cause all kinds of attention problems so if you have a tip like that, you'll notice you you can hear sometimes even like a popping sound when you're stitching and pop pop pop well, it's sowing and you know something doesn't sound right that's time to change a needle when they're bent you probably are even getting skipped stitches and it's probably not even sewing it all and it's not like it really bends a lot it just needs the slightest amount abandoned that could be maybe where you had like to light weight of a needle for the heavy fabric, your sewing and it maybe caught the thickness and just bent a little bit maybe it's still kind of went through but it got a little bent a little damage and now you're either getting skip stitches or you're hearing that pop pop pop time to change the needle ok, so those are indications it's time to change so what you're going to do is take a screwdriver and this spray here after lower this down a little so you can see this is your needle and then this is called the needle clamp and this is called the needle clamps crew so you're going to turn this little screw toward you hold your neil and one little kind of neat little tip I'll share with ugh this is kind of a neat trick but might be a good idea to put either like a little piece of paper or a piece of fabric under needle before you remove it because if you were to maybe let go of it or drop it it could go down into your machine so just a neat little side tip there to just just put something there that would kind of be likable safety net for it and then we're going to take our screwdriver hold the needle take them the threat out of the threat out of here forgot that that was all threated and we're going to hold the needle of their left hand turn this screw toward you and you don't have to take it all the way out you just have to loosen it a bit and then that needle should just get a little more then we go and just pull that went out and we'll replace it with our new needle and I'm going to put a heavy duty needle in here to just show you some heavy duty sowing by the way when you change your needles take a closer look at these you'll notice that on the top part of it here it's rounded on the front side and it's a little hard for me to show you but the back side of the needle is flat and you always want that flat side to go in the back. The machines pretty much today are designed so that you kind of can't put him in wrong but you he said of fighting with it, wondering why it's not going in make sure that flat side is to the back and I like to just kind of drop it down into the hole here first and then push that all the way up and you want to make sure that goes all the way up like wiggle it a little bit and make sure it goes all the way up before you tighten the screw if you don't have your needle all the way up, you're going toe not the machine won't so properly so just make sure that's up there all the way and then tighten that up you don't have to overly tighten it if you wanted to with your screwdriver just give it one little just last little tweak but you don't have to really but you want to make sure it's firm enough that when you start sewing it doesn't fall out that's and then you can remove your her fabric here and so let's just do a little sewing so here for example, it is our let's say we want to sew a jeans him here and what we've got is our denham where we've folded our fabric up maybe you're shortening some jeans or you're making some jeans I know there's um folks do that now make their own genes and you want to him these up and so because I have the heavy duty needle in there but this on straight stitch and put my with back in the center and I'm gonna put my stitch length may be about a three something a little longer beyond kind of medium and I'm gonna change my upper thread to a top studio jeans, jeans thread you can get these at the fabric store uh there indicated I think that actually call them jeans thread question yeah, somebody had asked if this if we're going to learn how to hem pants with this machine, so is this kind of the closest thing I am later going to be talking about how to use a blind him foot ok, which is hemming and it's an optional accessory for this machine. So when I get to that section on optional feet, I'm going to show you that I think so let's put our genes through here, jen jeans thread they make them in the colors that are really similar to what they use in store bought jeans, you get kind of blue tone ones and the gold tone ones the fabric stores have them even some of the big box retailers carry genes threat because it's real popular and we'll snap that on here we're gonna thread the machine again, snap it in my press, their foot lifters up so that's good and I want to turn my hand well toward me on lee to get that take up lever in its highest position and then I can continue down up over the top threaded my eyes threaded and I come down here and just raised that needle just back up like that thread the eye of the needle if you're thicker threads tend to not want to go through there, just thread the manual you can thread the machine manually to you don't have to use the needle threat her but it's just such a great convenience, so now we're ready to him our bill genes seem and you can decide where you wanna guide that depending on what you want that himto look like. And so we got our straight stitch a nice long stitch length you might want to test on a sample to make sure the length is look, you want just so it on a little scrap, but here we go. We're sowing along. I would probably have this pin so it doesn't shift shift around. But when you come to that little thick area just right over it, because it's sewed successfully because we have the right sized needle in there and the right type of threat for the fabric or sewing, so that was really pretty effortless. Course she would have this in a circle. It would be on your genes, but I just created this from from denham fabric. I had to demonstrate for you, but there's our genes, him just like store bought. I bet that answered some questions for a lot of people that you know, he's something genes are, you know, one size fits all. You have to have him to be what you want, and now it looks perfect. Yes, on some feedback as we go along, we have liz in the chat room who says the needle thunder is awesome I love that you showed us how to use it so easy and I want to give liz is daughter a shoutout as well. Hey, hayley she's, eleven years old, becky and she is home schooled, and her mom just got her this model this summer. So she's at home in ohio right now, following, right along with you, hiding spot, getting school, but for its right, yeah, e lovering shout out to you, haley. A perfect.