learning to work with the new serger

So it’s been a month or so since i got my serger. I made a cou­ple of starter projects on it when i first unpacked it but I had other projects (xmas) that needed my atten­tion and i didn’t have a chance to get back to it until last week.

I have a ter­ri­ble time buy­ing pants and leg­gings that fit well. Big butt and big thighs. I’m not pre­pared to tackle trousers yet but a decent pat­tern for leg­gings would be great. So I bought a sim­ple two-piece pat­tern and some cheap brown velour off of the rem­nants table and set to work.

Mea­sure, cut, pin, set up serger.

That last step didn’t go well. I could not get a seam to form, threads were break­ing… I think i re-threaded the thing 5 times and rest all the ten­sions and over and over. Then it was time to walk away for a while. Returned to the prob­lem, watched care­fully as i wound the hand­wheel through sev­eral cycles. and then it hap­pened. the thread com­ing from one of the cones hung up in the loop on the “antenna”. Right where the blue cir­cle is…

the prob­lem with my serger was…

a lit­tle think­ing — and voila.

this is the cor­rect posi­tion for the antenna

Yup, for­got to put the thread car­rier tower up. Doh.

And no, there is no way I’m going to show you the results of this sewing exper­i­ment. I added a lit­tle extra mate­r­ial form the crotch tip to down just below the knees. I now have a very nice pat­tern for leg­gings that don’t wrin­kle up at the crotch and just as soon as I make another pair I’ll show you pictures.

As for the brown velour. It hardly shows the cat hair at all and Nina is very fond of her new “blankie’ in the studio.