Serger Session 5: Overlock Stitches

Since I told you that this is somewhat of serger bootcamp, it's time for us to get in the trenches and really start getting down and dirty, and learning how these stitches work. First, I wanna show you the same stitch that we did before on the last one. This is the workhorse of the serger. This is your four-thread overlock stitch. You want to do the four-thread overlock anytime that you need durability. You're going to just use a polyester thread made for a serger or even the standard polyester thread that we use for sewing like I have on here right now. Go ahead and serge it, and once again, I just wanna point out that this particular stitch has your main straight stitch right here that you would normally have with a three-thread overlock. But then you also have a security stitch, which is out here, that's made by your left needle. So this is your four-thread overlock stitch. It's extra durable, it's not coming apart. And I'm pulling on that and it's still not coming open. If for some reason, this stitch should, let's say somebody pokes a hole in their jeans or in their shirt, whatever, on the playground, and that first line of stitching rips open, you still have a second one until you can get home and mend it, all right? So that's why the four-thread overlock stitch is the workhorse. Use it anywhere something is going to have stress on it or you need durability. This is two layers of fleece. We make a lot of things with fleece on the serger. You don't need it for preventing raveling because fleece doesn't ravel, but it is a nice stitch just for the durability. This is two layers of fleece. As you can see, it's a little thicker. But the serger handles it just fine. Now, if you find that it's bubbling a little bit, you can go ahead and move your stitch length. Come on down, I had it up around a three and a half. Let's try it around a two and see what that does. And then I'm gonna take it all the way to a one, just so you can see how tight it can go. It's almost a satin stitch when you get down towards a one. So if you look here, you can see that that was the three. This was the two. And here was the one, that's almost a satin stitch. So the tighter your stitch, the more it's going to ravel. So let's try it again. Actually, what I wanna show you next is instead of doing the four-thread overlock, let's just do it as a single layer. And I'm going to move that down to about a three, three and a half for my stitch length, maybe even a four. And you can now see that it's laying much flatter and that's just as an overedge. What happens if I do it as a double edge? Let's let you take a look. That's at a four, that's with two layers of fleece. And you can see that that lays nice and flat. You can either leave that as an outside edge on your garment, do kind of a reverse sewing, so that you can have some decorative threads or colors, makes it kind of sporty. Or if you have it to the inside, and you go ahead and press that seam open, you'll have a nice stitch there. You can also come along and do a mock flat-felled hem where you just come along with a stitch, oh, about an 1/8 to a 1/4 of an inch out, or 3/16 I would say, and just top stitch that, and it will give a very, very lovely look. I love how thread sinks into fleece and just gives it a lot of texture. So that's one of my favorite things to do is use that four-thread on fleece. Now, where I use my serger the absolute most is when I'm quilting. I have a professional long-arm quilting business and do quilts for people. And one of the things that my clients absolutely love is that I offer a service called a trim and serge. When I'm done quilting their quilt, if they choose this option, I go ahead and trim the edge of the quilt back and square it up with the ruler and the rotary cutter. And then I come along and I put it on the serger using my four-thread overlock. I set it so that my four-thread overlock is right at a 1/4 of an inch. And sometimes, if I don't wanna mess with a fancy corner, I'll just come along like this, because time is money. Again, it's already trimmed, so I know exactly where I need to be with the edge of that quilt. I'm just kind of trimming this a little bit. And because this is not going to be a permanent finish, I don't have to worry about the edges. I go ahead and just trim them back here. Sometimes I will do the formal turn on the corners like I showed you in the last segment, but now, if this is your quilt, you're all ready to do your binding. You've already got your 1/4 inch there. So you know exactly where you need to wrap your binding back around to, so that you'll have that lovely edge. It's nice and neat, so you aren't fighting it. And if you do your binding nice and tight like you're supposed to, you're gonna have a very nicely packed binding. So this for me is my number one use of my serger using the four-thread overlock. And that's the primary reason that I bought this particular serger. So if that'll help you with your quilting, so be it. And again, you would remember that this had stitching in between here so it's laying nice and flat. You wouldn't wanna just leave that because that's too far without quilting, but that just gives you an idea of what it would be like. It's also a quick way to make little coasters or hot pads if you need to. Use some decorative thread and have fun. So that takes care of the main thing that I wanted to show you with the four-thread overlock, but we also can have a little bit of fun. And for that, I wanna go ahead and change my thread out. I'm gonna use all white thread instead of staying with the colors 'cause I think you understand the concept now of what each one of the different elements that the serger does, what their role is in creating stitch. So I'm gonna switch to all white and let you see what some actual serging starts to look like now. Now we have the machine set up with all of the thread in the same color which is white in this case. And I'm going to show you what the overlock stitch looks like when you want to gather. There are a couple of simple changes that we made here. The first one is I went from having my differential feed from a neutral position where both were feeding through evenly to a number two. And when you have it on a two, that means it's going to do a two-for-one gather. So if your bottom piece, or rather, if you have a piece that's four inches long, when it gathers up, it would only be two inches long ideally. That also depends on the weight and thickness of the fabric that you're going to gather, but it's fairly close. So that's the biggest change you're going to see here. I've increased the stitch length to a four. And then I can change the width anywhere from this three. Well, actually it would be about a five up to a 7.5 because we're looking at the numbers for the left needle. You still have both needles in, so let's show you what this is going to look like. I'm going to gather on a single layer of fabric. And as we get started, you can already see that it's starting to gather. You don't wanna go super fast when you're gathering, kind of a moderate pace. And you can see that it's starting to make some nice little gathers there. Perfect for a little girl's dress or a little bit of ruffle trim. If you want to increase the amount of gather even more, just put your finger back here behind the foot so that your fabric is kind of piling up there. And can you see how it makes it a little bit fuller? Just a little trick of the trade. Now I'm going to go ahead and finish that off. Now, this is with the four-thread serger. You can also do this rather than just using the standard foot, for instance, if I was done with this, now I can go ahead and take another piece of fabric and sew the ruffle onto it with the serger and it would be finished. If you get the gathering attachment, which is a really slick, little foot, you can actually gather and attach it to the next layer all in one step. So you don't have to come back and do it again, which is absolutely a wonderful thing, especially for these ruffled skirts that the young ladies are finding so fun to wear today, the tiered, gathered ones. So just that easily, we went from a basic workhorse stitch to something that can be used as a decorative item. And it is much easier to do this than to do it on the sewing machine where you're pulling your threads and they're breaking. I just like this method quite a bit. So that was our four-thread overlock and gathering stitches. Now I wanna show you the three-thread. We're gonna start with a three-thread overlock wide. And that means that we are going to be using the outer needle, the left will stay in. So we need to find a screwdriver. There we go. And we are going to just take that right, I'm gonna put my thing down, and we're going to remove our right, right needle. So I just wanna take it out. And if you noticed, the thread will come through fairly easily. And then just go ahead and clip your thread. And you're all set to go for a three-thread. Now, you want to take the needle out. I thought I was gonna be real slick and leave it in, and just take the thread out one day. It didn't stitch right, it just doesn't work. So take your needle out. It doesn't take that much to put it back in. So let's do our three-thread overlock wide. And this time I want to go ahead and I'm going to put our differential feed back down past neutral. You can usually do somewhere between the 0.6 and 0.8, 'cause usually your feed dog's gonna go a little bit faster. And then I wanna move this back up to our normal stitch. In fact, the best thing to do is get our book out and double check that we are on the right one. So a three-thread overlock wide. I've got my stitch selector correct, the needle to the left. I'm going to go anywhere between a 2.5 and a 4 for my stitch length depending on the thickness of my fabric, as we saw with the fleece. I'm going to leave it on the wider width. Differential feed, we're actually gonna move it up to an N which is neutral. We don't lock our blade. We wanna be able to trim our fabric edges. You can go slow to moderate, or even a little on the fast side. We're all set to go. And it doesn't hurt to just quick go through that checklist and make sure that everything's set up right. As you can see, we're having the same action with the knife. It's trimming it. The threads are coming around and encasing it. And if you look at this, I know it's hard to see white on white, but that's more like what your traditional sewing would look like in your sewing room and if you're working on a project. You've got long loops throughout the entire width and they are anchored by that single line of stitching. It is a good stitch, it will hold quite well. Again, it doesn't have quite the durability of the four-thread, but it is an excellent stitch. I like it for if I'm doing lightweight fabrics, especially if I'm doing sheer fabrics or any kind of heirloom work, this is an excellent one to do. Now, let me go ahead, and I'm gonna leave that one here. Now, I wanna show you the narrow so you can compare. So that means I have to take out the left needle. And again, if you notice, I haven't turned those screws very far at all because I don't want those screws falling out and possibly being lost. Oops, let's get that out of the way. Bring that up to the highest position. Makes it a little easier to get that needle in. I like to just tap it up and make sure I'm in place. Quick screw there. We're gonna go with our right thread this time. So as you can see, I've still got my two loopers attached. And now I just need to find my right thread here. Bring it on down. The thread is usually a pretty direct path. You're usually, on most sergers, you're going to come through your tension loops and go under a couple of thread guides, up and over kind of like you do a sewing machine, down through the mustache clip. And this little piece on the Baby Lock holds the threads in so they don't fly out while you're sewing. And then we just go ahead and thread the needle, which always seems to be the hardest part for some reason. There we go. Make sure that everything's up and tight. This time I'm going to be doing the narrow. So I'm going to grab my book, just make sure. And actually, what I wanna do is, is take this out. I wanna put these side by side for you so that you can see. In this case, this is my narrow overlock, and I'm on a three-thread. So instead of being on the stitch selector A, which was originally for our four-thread overlock and the A was also for the wide stitch, we're gonna go down to the B for the narrow stitch. We've gone from the left needle to the right needle. Our stitch length is still in the same ballpark. Our width though, because it's not a wide width, we're going to go from the 7.5 and we're gonna come down to anywhere between the 3.0 and the 5.0, all right? And again, remember because it's the right needle, we're going to use the smaller number there. And then it looks like everything else is the same. We're in the N for our differential feed, the blade is unlocked. We're gonna sew slow to moderate. Not really many changes on that. The only thing you had to do was your needle and the stitch selection. Once you start kind of seeing the logic behind it, it doesn't seem to be quite so intimidating. So let's go ahead and sew this. This is our narrow three-thread overlock. Now, compare this to this one. And as you can see, it's about half the width. Let's look at that, just about half, half as wide. And it's the same exact stitch, just tinier. As you can see, one of the things that I really like to use that particular stitch for is, while fleece does not need to be serged because it won't ravel, I find that that particular stitch is wonderful. You can see how narrow it is compared to the wide one. I've used the narrow one, just to put a little edge on the fleece. It gives a little bit of a more finished feel, a little more decoration, a little more professional look. It will keep it from stretching out quite as much. And if you notice, the corners on my little dog blanket here, and this is for my dogs, but it could have been for a little baby or for a lap throw for somebody, I went ahead and curved the corner. That way I don't have to mess with that awful turning the corner and trying to get everything square. It also lays a little flatter with fleece. And to get that curve, I just used one of my kitchen dishes and traced around it, and cut the line on all four corners. And it just seemed to be a nice gradual edge. So that's one idea for you for using your three-thread overlock. Now, again, I wanna point out the difference. I know I'm kind of beating the dead horse here, but I think it's important for you to realize the different applications. That particular application, I didn't need strength and durability. I was simply putting a finish on an edge, that also would be wonderful when you're sewing. And if you're sewing by machine and you aren't going to serge it, you can still finish all the edges very quickly for a garment and then sew it with your sewing machine. This is camp shirt that I made. I still need to put the button holes and buttons on it. But I wanted to show you real quickly, some of the application for the serger on this. On this particular one, you can see where I serged the, the seam with the three-thread, and some of it I used the narrow, and others I used the wide. And I just did the shoulder with the three-thread overlock. And you're gonna have to look very closely, but if you look close enough, you will see that my stitches, obviously for the loopers, are in this white thread, so I didn't have to keep re-threading, but my needle thread is in the ecru that matched the fabric, so that when you go ahead and look at my seam, you won't see the stitches. And then I went ahead and did a little top stitch out here just to give it that nice finished look. And I did that by machine as opposed to the serger. Over here, you can see where I did all of my sleeve work and my side seams with the four-thread overlock. And then I also did it inside here. You can't really see it, but the width of that seam, and the narrow is pretty darn close to it. The four-thread is just a touch wider when I turned it over so that I had the nice finished look inside. I didn't wanna see the serged edge on the bottom of my shirt. It makes for a nice, easy edge to turn under and iron, and then turn again, and that's basically what I did here. And it just makes it as slick as can be. And then I just came right along and stitched it. In this case, I actually stitched it twice, but there's nothing to say you can't use a twin needle and just rip right around that and you're all set. The rest of the garment for the most part is done with the sewing machine, but it sure saved me a lot of time and effort. I did the sleeves the same way where I finished the edge with the serger stitch, and then just turned it twice. So I just wanna give you a few ideas to let you see the types of things you can start doing with the serger. And I did it in much less time than if I would have had to have finished a seam, you know, trim the seam, finish the seam, and then sewn the seam, this way it was all done at once. So that is one that I think you will really like. Now I wanna show you what we can do with another ruffled effect. Now this one, let's see, I've gotta go back to my four-thread. Oh my goodness, isn't that a shame? So we're just gonna put this four-thread back to use. And I'm doing this, I know we're going back and forth a little here, but I do wanna show you that it really is not all that difficult to switch over once you've got the machine set up. There we go. Oh my goodness, what do we need? We need a needle, so let's see if I can find my needle. If not, I'll have to get a new one. There it is. Make sure we're putting the needle to the back. Bring it in, pop it up. Give it just a little tiny boost to make sure that they're even, you don't want those needles being offset because then you won't get a good stitch either. Tighten it up, finger tight, 'cause you know you're gonna be taking it out soon enough. Now we're gonna thread that back up. If you notice that your thread, after you've tried to put it through, is kind of splitting, don't fight it, trim it and go again, because it's not gonna come back together, 9 times out of 10, it's just not worth it. So just give it a little trim, bring it on through. And now, I just want to go back and double check. I need to go back to my original four-thread stitch. So we changed that. We've got the needles in. We're going to go to a longer length 'cause we're going to gather. I want to put that width back out to the wide width. I'm gonna do the differential feed to the two. Everything else stays the same. Put my cap back on so my threads don't pop out from my needles. And I'm gonna show you something that I think is pretty cool. We're going to come along, and we're gonna gather this side just like we did before. And I'm gonna hold my finger back here so we get a nice gather. And you said, "But I already know how to do that." Good, you remembered, so we're gonna do it again. We're gonna gather this on both sides. Hold the finger back there. This technique is sometimes called shirring or puffing. And what you get is a kind of ruffled effect there. And then we're going to take another piece, and we're just gonna attach this right onto here. And we're doing a little bit of pretend. Oops, and I got in a rush. I need to go back to a regular stitch, just like that. I changed three levers. I can kind of adjust my ruffle as it's going through. Then we're gonna come and do the same thing on the other side. And again, this is just kinda showing you a couple of simple little techniques to let you be a little creative with your thing. Now, I messed up there and put the, the flat piece on the top, but you know what? It isn't the end of the world to just kind of pay attention to what's going on underneath. And normally I would have pre-cut those both to the size I wanted, but I just wanna show you technique here more than anything. So when you press that, now you have a nice little decorative insert that you could use on the edge of let's say a pillowcase. You could use it on tea towels. You could use it to make a beautiful pillow, especially if you had several of these for a nice decorator pillow in your living room. And also for on a shirt, or even on like a little girl's dress or skirt. So just that quickly with just two different stitches, you've taken your sewing from a basic construction machine to being creative. Let's do a little bit more. I wanna show you another technique. Now this time, we're gonna go back to that three-thread overlock, but I wanna do the narrow. And the reason I want to do the narrow is because I wanna show you how you can get a scant 1/4-inch seam for quilting. I know a lot of you are quilters out there, and it always seems like they're calling for a scant 1/4-inch. A scant 1/4-inch seam is slightly less than a 1/4 of an inch, it's just a hair less. So in this case, we want to go back, and set this up for the three-thread narrow. So I'm gonna go back to my different stitch, which is the B for narrow. I've got the right needle in. I'm going to move my stitch back to, oh, about a two and a half. And then I wanna keep the width at that lower range of a three. And again, I'm using the right needle. Whoops. Oops. We're gonna cut this in half. So this would be your typical chain piecing type of technique that you would do. You can see that it's narrow. It's just a little less than a 1/4 of an inch if you eyeball it. I would take this and iron it. We're just gonna finger press it. And we'll finger press this one. Oops, that should go the other way. And now we're going to marry those two up, and as most quilters know, you want to nest your seams, which means they're going to go right in next to each other. You can pin this if you wish or not. I tend to prefer pinning because I find things do slip. And I don't like to have to rip. Come back around. Make sure you take that pin out. And I take it out right as I get to about where the knife is. Because this is a four patch, and I am going to be attaching to other seams, I'm not worried about the edges there. I didn't tie them off and look at there, you're pieced. You're ready to keep going for your quilt. And you don't have all those ravelly edges, it keeps your work nice and neat. The joy with this is that it's nice and neat. There is a drawback. If you are off and you have to rip it out, it will come out. But it's a little more difficult to take out three or four threads than it is just a single thread like you have with your sewing machine. I like to use this technique for any kind of square piecing, rectangles. It will not, it's just not a good one though, when you get into more complicated piecing or into triangles and the like, but it does do a nice job. So that's another use for your three-thread narrow. When it comes to knits, same thing, three-thread narrow. This will be for seaming. You can, whoops, guess what, lesson learned. I didn't tighten that down fully. And my screw did indeed come out. So I'm gonna put it back in, and shame on me. I violated my own rule of locking it down. Now, that was from the needle on the left. As the machine vibrates, those will fall out. So you just wanna make sure you tighten it down. And I got in a hurry. I got distracted talking to you folks and forgot to do that. So when it comes to the knits, this is a typical knit. You can see that that's starting to bubble. I'm on about a two. You're gonna wanna go down to a longer stitch. This is at about a four, oops. And this little thread that we're seeing here is actually from... From the left needle that I forgot to cut. So let's take that out of there. See, even those of us who've been doing it for a while still make mistakes and need to reevaluate our techniques. All right, so now you can see by going to the longer stitch, it does lay a little flatter. If you aren't happy with how it's laying, you can also put a seam stabilizer under it. And that's very good, especially with knits on your shoulders. The nice thing is you can see that those stitches are not breaking. They give with the knit. And that's something that you just don't get as well with a sewing machine. Sewing machines do a pretty good job, but not quite to that degree. So that's what I like to do for the knit. Now, let me show you another little trick with a knit. And this is the same thing, except if you want to have something really pretty, let's add some wooly nylon. I'm gonna show you a cute little edge that's decorative. And like I said, I didn't want to do a lot of decorative edges in this particular video clip. I wanted to show you more construction and basics, but this is real simple. So it's kind of fun to have a little fun with it at the same time. So we're going to use our tie-on, tie-off method. Remember, the wooly nylon is very stretchy. And so, it gives with a knit. Now, this particular stitch I did with just plain polyester sewing thread. I wanna do it again for you with the wooly nylon just to show you that it can be used as a construction thread. And then I wanna show you this lettuce edge that's a nice touch for knits. So I've tied on there. I like to trim my thread back just a little bit, so we don't get extra getting caught in there. We're going to do this one. Let's change it up and put a matching thread on. Sometimes the thread gets caught in there pretty tightly. I'm just gonna take that one off. I just love this trick for threading. It just is so much easier to watch it thread itself than have to do it yourself. I guess I'm just a little lazy that way. So now, we're gonna come up here. I'm gonna pull my thread through. Sometimes that knot has a little bit of trouble getting through the thread area. So sometimes it's just easier to come back here and help it along. Oops, I got a long one. And yes, you will have a lot of thread. It's just the nature of the beast that you will be dealing with a lot of thread, but in the scheme of things, thread is fairly inexpensive. So don't get too upset over it. Sewers do tend to be frugal, but sometimes there's a difference between being frugal and worrying over something that just isn't worth worrying over. All right, so now we have our wooly nylon threaded in there. I wanna just check my... Something's not tight All right, so now, I get to troubleshoot. So we know it's plugged in. We know the switch is on. I'm going to give a quick, just a quick lint, because we did do a little bit of lint work there. Let's see if any of that is the reason for it. Sometimes it can be as simple as your thread gets caught up on your spool. Okay, that's pulling through. Doors are locked. I can't tell you exactly what it was, but it all worked when you go through the checklist. So now it's coming through. If I would have tried after each one to have sewed, then I could have isolated it. But in this case I just kind of went ripping through the checklist. So let's look at this three-thread stitch again, using wooly nylon so you can compare. And let's go. And I always test my thread on some sample fabrics, just like this, before I ever start the garment construction because it's better to be safe than sorry. So this is the wooly nylon. You can see that it's a little bit thicker thread. You can see the edge of it right here, where the loops come around, how nice and thick that is. And how it gives a little bit more of a decorative look than this. It does have a slight buckling there, and that was on a four, that's as long as a stitch as I can get it. So again, this is an extremely stretchy knit here, in this direction. In the straight grain it's not as stretchy, but on that cross grain, it is fairly stretchy. So that may be a place where you'd wanna use a little bit of a seam stabilizer to help hold it better. But now that you've seen how that is, watch this effect that you can do as a decorative edge. Now, this is on a single piece, we're at a four. I'm gonna take it back to about a two. and then I'm gonna keep taking it back. Oops. Hmm, I'll be honest, it didn't do what I wanted, but it also gives, even that stitch gave a fairly nice look. So let me take a quick look and see if I can figure out, ah, I know what I did. See, this is what happens when you don't look at your book and double-check. And you at home are probably going, "Hmm, what did she do?" It was very simple. I kept it on the three-thread overlock. What I needed to do was look at my book, and my book would tell me I'm on the wrong stitch selector. I needed to come down to a D. I have the right needle. I need to go to a rolled hem. And on my, my machine, I just go all the way this way to get to the rolled hem. And the rolled hem is actually turning more of the fabric under. I am at the right width. And I need to put my differential feed down there, which it is. Taking a few minutes and going back to the book to triple check my settings not only humbled me immensely, but it also showed me where my mistake was. And if I would've just read a little closer, I would have seen that with this technique, not only do I have to make sure that I set it up correctly, I wanted to read the written words down here, the narrative, because it had a little phrase in there that says, "Begin serging, stretching the fabric as you sew." And as I did it the first time, I just went through without stretching, and we got that wonderful finished edge, but it certainly was not the lettuce edge. So let's try it this time and see what happens when we stretch. Now, I will be stretching from the front and the rear. I am not pulling the fabric through. I am merely stretching it. And hopefully you'll be able to see the difference as I am sewing this, so here we go. So as it starts to come out, as soon as it gets there, I want to start stretching. And putting pressure on that fabric, but still letting the machine do the work. I'm stopping and starting to get a better grip and more stretch each time. This is done on the crosswise grain of the fabric where the most stretch is so that it will snap back. And as you can see, it's starting to ruffle up like that, and do what we call a lettuce edge, which is curly like lettuce often is. Now, depending on the knit depends on how much of a lettuce edge you will get. This one is a medium-weight knit. You would probably do better if it was a very lightweight knit. It also seems to work very well on ribbing. And I think that's because there is so much stretch in a rib, and then it snaps back tight to the very tight ribbing that we have for around necklines. So this can be a fun edge on a neckline. I think you could envision it for around a sleeve or perhaps even the hem of a garment on, let's say the edge of a T-shirt could be a lot of fun. But again, it all depends on your fabric. And I also recommend that you do this with a little extra in your garments, so that like where we aren't able to start those first few inches, you can cut that back, and still have the right amount for your garments. So always allow a little extra. So despite those couple of snafus, I hope that you will see the value of using the book and that we are all fallible to having a few things go wrong with our serger, but they're very easy to recover from. It doesn't take much and it certainly doesn't take the joy out of the serging. So now that we've covered all of the four-thread and three-thread overlock types of stitches, let's get ready and go into our hemming stitches.