Trial and Error... and Success

This past weekend, I vowed to start working with my sewing machine

so I did.

I decided that I would work with my Brother first just because I knew that all of it's parts were included. 

I'm also pretty tech savvy, so the fact that it's computerized played a role in my decision to work with this machine first.

My first step would be to thread some bobbins.

So as a young woman living in this generation,

instead of looking to the manual for instructions on how to thread bobbins,

I went to YouTube.

I found this sweet old lady by the name of Nadia who was using the same machine that I have and was showing her viewers how to thread bobbins as well as testing some of the stitching.

PERFECT.

I watched Sewing with Nadia one or two times and I decided I was ready.

*flips switch*

It was literally my first time actually turning the machine ON.

If you watch the video, the following pictures will make more sense but I will explain as I go along.

I took the SEWING MACHINE THREAD and placed in on the machine and put the empty bobbin on the bobbin pin with the thread "threaded" through the hole on top of the bobbin itself.

Snapping the bobbin pin to the right holds the bobbin in place and once I put my foot on the pedal, the bobbin winds the thread around itself until it is full.

I did the same thing with white thread..

Then I decided to just thread bobbins for all of the colors of thread that my mom gave me.

Isn't this little bobbin case cayute!

Once I got all of the bobbins threaded, I decided I'm a pro at that lol

I wanted to move on to some actual sewing.

So, with Nadia, I put the black threaded bobbin in the sewing machine and the big spool of thread up and down the machine.

Nadia was moving all extra fast so I had to keep pausing and rewinding the video.

Once I did all of that, I was ready!

Following my girl's example, I started with just a straight stitch which is the number 00 on my machine.

I did one straight stitch.

I was hype! lol

But then I turned the fabric over.

o_0

What is wrong here?

Why is it all extra loose?!.... and crazy looking?!

So I tried another one.

Again, the top was fine but the bottom was all loose!

I do it a couple more times as the annoyance started to set in.

So I had the bright idea of changing the color of the thread in the bobbin case to see if the problem was that the TOP thread was loose or if it was the thread coming from the BOBBIN.

sn: You have to have thread on the top AND the bottom so that they can secure each other.

That is something that I did NOT know prior to watching Nadia... I thought it was just the top!

   

Alas, I tried another straight stitch and I got the same problem. But what I was able to see was that it was the black thread on the top that was loose and not the red thread coming from the bobbin below.

I tried the straight stitch a couple more times with another piece of fabric folded in half in hopes that my error was in that the fabric was too thin to begin with.

...... no.

I put the machine away

I started googling my situation and I came across a post in a forum that said something about thread tension.

I also read some other posts that talked about how to FIX thread tension but because I lost my English manual to my machine and only have the Spanish version, I couldn't figure out how to change it on my machine.

AND Nadia wasn't changing HER tension!

Yea, I was salty lol

But I ended up googling a manual for my machine in English and found that there is apparently some dial that changes the tension.  It also said that the tension is pretty much in the middle in general practice.

The next time I took out my machine, I found the thread tension dial,

and LOW AND BEHOLD, that joker was ALL the way down to ZERO.

No wonder my thread was all floppy!

So I quickly changed that setting to about a 4 and started to resume my tutorial with Nadia.

First straight stitch....

Success!

Oooh yea!

In accordance with the tutorial, I did another straight stitch next to the previous one.

Then she decided to switch it up a bit.

So we changed the stitch to 58 which is a flowery looking stitch.

On this machine, when you change the number of the stitches, the macine automatically tells you what presser foot you need in order to complete the stitch.

Presser Foot - (n.)  a forked, metal device on a sewing machine used for holding the fabric in place while stitching. 

To do stitch number 58, I would have to change the presser foot on the machine from J for the straight stitch, to N.

I can show what each presser foot looks like and explain those other buttons for the display in another post :-)

Walla!

That was pretty much the end of Nadia's tutorial, so I decided to continue and take things into my own hands.

I just kept trying different stitches, with different color threads, and different presser feet.

Oh, the sweet smell of success :-)

*sings*

If at first you don't succeeeeeeed!... *echo* first you don't succeeed!

Thanks for reading!

As you can see, I'm well on my way!

If you have any questions, leave a comment!

See you in the next post!
share and stuff!

xoxo, Tasha