Serger Session 4: Getting Started

So by now, you should be quite comfortable with changing needles on your machine, and now we can finally get started with actually sewing on our serger. So I want to show you the main reason why you have chosen a serger. As you can see, let me start again, this is a ravel-y edge here on the fabric. I'm joining two pieces of fabric together, and I'm just gonna use what we call a four thread overlock. It could be any stitch, but I'm gonna start with a four thread.

I want you to notice that I've pinned the fabric along the side and away from where my seam is going to be, and I have not pinned perpendicular to the seam like we do for sewing, I've pinned parallel. That's because you do not not not want to sew over any kind of pin, no matter how large, small, thin or thick, with a serger. Not only will you break your needles, but more importantly, you will cause severe damage to your loopers, and if you have to replace a looper, it is extremely expensive to do so. So do not sew over the pins, but even more important is if you sew over the pins with a high speed that this machine is going at, that pin can break and fly up and hit you in the eye and cause personal injury. So whatever you do, just don't sew over pins.

I cannot stress it enough. So we're going to lift up our presser foot, and just slide the fabric slightly in. Now, I want to point out a couple of things. You have, your knife is right here and it is well ahead of the needles. When you serge on a serger, don't watch the needles.

Keep your eye on the knife and guide your fabric in accordance to the knife, all right? And there are also some marks right in the front on your presser foot, and those can indicate a seam width, so you get an idea of exactly how wide your seam would be. This shows your left needle, which is the farthest needle. This shows how much of a seam you would have with your right needle, so you can see the difference right there. And then, if we move your stitch width, you can watch the knife and see how it's moving in and out.

So as I go to a smaller seam, it moves in. As I come to the bigger seams, it moves out, all right? And then your stitch length is down here, and we'll show you that in a second. So I've got this set up for how I wanna sew and I want you to just watch. I'm going to keep the needle, or the knife right there and I will literally just be taking off thread as I come along.

You see how fast that's sewing, and do you see how we have a nice crisp edge from the knife? We are now wrapped with our thread and you have also seamed. So you've done three operations in one. You've trimmed up your edge, you've finished the edge and you've also created your seam. So as you come along, as you're sewing, you may not wanna go quite that fast, so you can take out pins, or you can leave them way over here and not bother with them.

I know this seems awfully fast. If you are a brand new serger, you're probably scared to death, and you, obviously, if you notice, my hand is not getting anywhere near that knife. I'm just holding my hand here to guide and this hand kind of steers my fabric, but as you get used to your serger, you too will be full speed ahead. So that is the absolute joy of a serger. And then, if you were to open up this seam, and I've used the gray thread so you can see it, you can see that you have a nice finished seam that is very similar to those that you see on commercial garments, and you are never gonna have a problem with that raveling or popping open.

So let's show you the anatomy of your stitches, and I want to change out our thread to show you each part of the stitch. This one here, all the way to the left, is your left needle, and I'm just cutting these off. This is your right needle. Then you have your upper looper and your lower looper. So left, right, upper, lower.

If you notice, I cut the thread and left the machine threaded, and there's a reason for this. Once you've learned how to thread your machine, and that is, again, using your owner's manual, what you can do for the future, to save yourself some time and some grief, is you do what we call a tie-on tie-off, and to do that, you simply take your thread, a length of thread here, and tie an overhand knot, and that is a single knot using your two threads. So it just comes like that, it's a loose knot, and leave it. If you want, you can trim off some of the excess. So I'm doing my left needle, which is my furthest needle, in the aqua, and I will my right needle in the yellow.

The right needle would be indicative for three thread and four thread serging. The left needle is primarily for four thread or if you're doing a wide stitch. Let's tie these on. You can actually do this method for your sewing machine too and pull it through up until the point of the needle. It saves a little bit of time.

The red thread's gonna be our upper looper, and the green thread will then be our lower looper. And I'm taking the anchors, if you will, for lack of a better word, or the adapters or adjusters, off because I want a good hold on my skinny spool of thread there, so that it will feed through nicely and not just spin around or fly off, more importantly. All right, so now I just simply start to sew and gently let the thread come through, I'm not pulling it, and you can see it coming down through the serger, through the thread pass. The red and the green for the loopers is already coming through, but I wanna watch closely for my blue and yellow, because when it gets to my needles, those will not go through. The needles are not big enough to accept the knot, so at that point in time, I just wanna pull that through, trim it off, make sure I have enough to thread, pull that out.

I'm gonna try my right needle first. Get that out of the way, that may be a little bit easier. And sometimes if you have trouble getting it around the looper, just the tip of your scissors will make that task a little bit easier. There we go, right through that left needle. Again, I'm going under my presser foot and making sure I'm away from the knife to slip that one underneath the foot, and you can see that all of my threads are through, and then I'm just gonna give it a quick test.

By stitching, and you can see that all of the threads are through and making a nice looped stitch, if you will. So I wanna show you, first we're just gonna sew another seam here, so that you can take a good look at this and see what's happening as we stitch. Now if you notice, this previous seam, because my knife is up, it's being trimmed away nice and neatly for me. And now I have a new seam. So let's analyze this.

If you look here, we have the blue thread is to the outside. That is our far left needle. The yellow thread is about an eighth of an inch away to the inside, and that is the right needle. On the top is the red thread, because that's the upper looper, and as you can see, the thread is actually forming a loop there, hence the term looper, and all you see on the top is the upper looper thread. If you turn it over, on the bottom, you see green loops, again, from the lower looper.

So that's how you can kind of tell what your threads are doing and where they're at. All the way through, your needle thread is making a straight stitch on both the green and the yellow, and they're a little hard to see because of the green color for the upper looper, but it is a straight stitch all the way through. Now this stitch is absolutely balanced. This is what you want for good tension for your serger. The threads are nice and flat.

There's no puckering, it's as flat as can be. The green thread, if you look very carefully here, you can see the green thread riding right on the very top edge of the fabric. There is no green pulling toward this side. If it was coming down into the red, closer to the yellow, then you would know that your tension was off and you needed to adjust it. It's riding exactly on the top edge.

And now, if you look at the red thread, it's riding exactly on the top edge and you can see that on the back. So the red and green threads at the top are actually married up and that is absolutely perfect tension. If the tension was off with the upper looper, you would have the red thread coming down onto the back side, and that's about as pretty as you could want. So with that in mind, I wanna show you a few things with your stitching. Oh, and I will show you this.

This was the piece that got cut off, and you can see that nice clean edge that the knife makes. It just cuts it just as nicely as a rotary cutter or a scissors and just does it lickety split. So if you make a mistake when you're serging, you don't have to come back and cut that off and start again. You can just serge right next to it or even over it. So let me show you some techniques here for serging.

The first one is going to be, I wanna show you how to secure the stitches. So again, I am watching where my knife is, not my needles, because the needles will always follow behind. I just need to make sure my thread is up against the knife, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a couple of stitches, and a serger does not have a reverse. So what you want to do is take a few stitches, lift your presser foot and pull these threads to the front, and you're going to have them go right underneath the presser foot. Hopefully you can see that, how they come underneath.

They're right under my needles there, and the thread is actually falling off to the side of the needles. Then I'm going to put my presser foot down and continue sewing. The only time I do that is if I am not going to be crossing this with another seam. If I was going to open this and press it and have another seam coming this way, there's no need to tie that off, because it would be encased in the next seam. But if it's going to just be out there for some reason, that's the easiest way to secure those threads.

Well, what about the end, because these are just hanging out here? Let me show you a couple of options. First of all, I'm gonna show you another option you can have here. You can leave your front threads if you prefer. If you don't like that method of swinging them around.

And what you do is you leave yourself plenty of tail on either end, and you take a tapestry needle. A tapestry needle or a crewel embroidery needle has a huge hole in it, and that's what you want to get those threads through easily and quickly, and it's also kind of a short stubby needle, and while it's got a fairly sharp point, it's not gonna hurt you or destroy your project. So I take and wrap my thread right around that needle and draw it very tight, and then I simply walk it into the hole, that's why we want a big hole, pull all four threads through and then I just come back with the needle and go under the threads for as far as I want, pull it through. Think my thread got knotted on the end there. Simply pull it through, and then I can trim off the edges and now I've secured my thread and that is not going to go anywhere.

If I cut this off and open this up for you, you can see that the threads are buried and that this is not coming undone at the end of the seam, and likewise you can do that for the start of the seam if you didn't want to do the tie off or the catching method that I showed you. So that's the first method that you can use, and that's pretty slick. Another method, and I'm just going to leave my beginning threads loose. Leave yourself some tail, cut it, bring it into an overhand knot, or you can, if you want, carefully undo the threads and make a different type of knot, but I've knotted the thread and pulled it close to the edge, all right? Then I want to trim fairly close to that, and I'm going to put, I'm just gonna put this underneath here.

After I do that, I wanna take some type of a fray check, a fabric glue, there's several different types, and you just put a single drop right there on your knot to lock it. Let that dry and you won't have any problem with that end of that seam coming out. So that's another way that you can actually secure your threads. The final way is to go ahead, at the end of your seam, just come off a couple of stitches, and then what you wanna do is lift your presser foot and gently clear that thread off of the loopers. So there's the looper, I don't know if we can tell it better here if I open it up.

Again, remember if this open, it's not gonna sew. There's my looper, and I just wanna clear that thread off that stitch finger. Once I have that off, I'm going to gently bring my fabric to the front and flip it. Did you see how I flipped that? This is my upper looper, this is how I was sewing, so now I flip it so that the same end is there, you can tell it's flipped because we have the green thread for the lower looper on top.

Put it down and sew back the other way, and then just sew off. Maybe not quite as pretty but nobody's really going to see it, and that seam, again, is securely locked and you won't have any problems with it coming unraveled. So it's pretty much serger's choice, whatever you feel most comfortable with. Sometimes it depends on the application or where it's going to be seen, and again, if you have another seam coming across, for instance, if this was my seam and I've pressed it and now I've got another one crossing it for whatever reason, I just put those right there. I sew and the threads from here are encased by that one, so whatever was on this seam is now part of that seam and you don't have to worry about it coming unraveled.

It's going to be all secure. So that's the best way to secure your stitches. There's a couple other things you need to think about when you are serging, and the first one I wanna show you is how to finish an outside corner. The outside corner, I'm going to come along and stitch here first, so I'll be stitching like this, and then I need to turn it 90 degrees to stitch this way. There's a technique for making sure we get a nice corner.

You could sew off completely and then start again, but that doesn't always look as good, and you would also have to secure that seam, depending on its use. So here's what we're gonna do. It's pretty similar to the flip and turn. We come up here and we're going to come to the very edge of the fabric and take one stitch, so that I'm exactly off the fabric. So you can see, I just completed getting off the fabric.

I'm going to lift the needles tall again, gently clear my stitch fingers or the loopers, and then turn it around, make sure it's in there nice and secure, and I want to make sure that my needles line up with the back edge of the fabric. Once you start doing this, it's a piece of cake and you'll do it in your sleep, but trying to make sure I get it just right to show you is a little bit more time-taking. And then I just go ahead and start stitching again. And that's how you turn the corner. Now I will be honest, it looks like I got off just a little bit and that's why you wanna make sure that you're right on that edge.

But that's the basic tenant. We're going to, let's see if I can do that a little quicker. Come down to the end, sew off by a stitch, get it off of the stitch fingers. Bring your fabric back down, turn it around. And stitch, and that way, you have a nice corner that's fully encased and you only have to now go ahead and put one anchor on your thread.

You can either tie it and put your drop of fray check or you can go ahead and tuck it back in, depends on the application. Now what if you have a corner where, instead of going to the outside, it's an inside? The trick here is you want to just slightly cut a notch into the fabric so that it can come out straight, all right? Just a tiny notch, you don't wanna go too far or you're gonna be into your seam line. You're going to put it onto the serger, just like before, and you want to, on this case, actually I'm going to unlock my knife when I get to the corner.

So I put my, let me show you that again. I went ahead and my knife is up, now I'm going to lock it down. So what this means is, as I come in, since that knife is leading the fabric, I don't want it to cut the fabric there. So I'm going to come along and the trick here is to literally turn your fabric straight down so that you can make this curve, and just manipulate it until you get across the inside corner, and then continue sewing. And once you're past the corner, you can actually go ahead and put your knife back up if you want.

But that's how you would do an inside corner and have it come out as nice as can be, and once you press that, it is going to be square and neat. That's your inside corner. The final one that I think people need to be aware of is sewing a curve, and you would have curves if you have a princess line on a dress, or especially when you're setting in sleeves. That's where you really find the curve, 'cause typically, with a serger, we set the sleeve in flat, as opposed to doing the circle method. We go ahead and do it edge to edge, and you will have the upper part of the sleeve and then the under arm.

So watch here. Again, the whole trick is just keep the knife up against the serger and let it guide along. And with curves, I find a lot of times, I wanna slow down just a little bit. They're a little bit trickier, you've got some bias in there, so we don't have to always be in a hurry. I will go lickety split, pedal to the metal when I've got a straightaway.

But when I'm on a curve, I do tend to slow down just a little, and you wanna keep it right against the knife edge, you don't want the fabric rolling back up. You just wanna keep it there nice and neat and then you would finish your seam as appropriate. And you can see how nice that follows it. It lays nice and flat, and with those techniques, you're all set to start serging and are well on your way to success. The next thing, though, we need to talk about is the different types of stitches.