Organizing Your Machine Stitches
Tara RexDescription
Tara Rex provides helpful tips on how to best organize your machine stitches. You will find these tips will save you time and potential frustration. Find out what classes are available to assist you with understanding your sewing machine. Learn the many stitch options your machine has. Use these tips to ensure a successful and fun sewing experience.
When you purchase a new sewing machine, it's really important to play with the different stitches, with different things that it has on it, because it can really save you a lot of time and a lot of frustration. And you can also take some classes. If you purchased your machine at a sewing retailer, sometimes they offer a free class for you to get to know your sewing machine, and so I strongly encourage you to take them up on it. If you purchased your machine at a big box store, you can also go to the sewing retailer and take a class. I think you might have to pay a little bit for it, but I would strongly encourage you to do that. And one of the reasons why I encourage you to do that is because they'll go through the different stitches that your machine has. So I have a machine that has a lot of stitches, a lot of buttons, and it was a little bit intimidating to me at the beginning, and so I found the class really helpful for me, and I made a binder of the different handouts that were given to me and the different stitches that we went through. And we actually did the stitches in the class, and we wrote out and we stapled the little swatches, if you will, to the pieces of paper. So we worked with elastic, we worked with knit fabrics. We did some smocking. And smocking isn't something that I would normally do, but it was really neat to do it with somebody by my side and kinda take that fear away from it for me. So as you can see, and we had worked with a knit fabric, so t-shirt material. We also touched on button holes, and these can be intimidating to some people as well, but it was really, especially this one, but now I feel comfortable in doing it, and I have no problems. We talked about the button stitch. And this is one thing that I wanted to show you as well. My machine does this wonderful stitch and I've used this on a couple of my quilt edges. Had I not played with this stitch, and I went to use it on a small project, I would have been pretty surprised, cause as you can see, it is quite large. And my machine also, it'll sew to the side and then up and I don't have to actually turn my fabric. It's all, I can do it with a touch of my finger on the screen. And so had I not taken my class, I wouldn't have known that. And so it will go to the side, up, and then on the diagonal as well and backwards and to the side again. And it also will start at the normal size and it can taper down and curve. So, I mean, who knew that? So, and in these classes, they also give you some handouts that you probably wouldn't necessarily, say, research on the internet, say, cause you wouldn't really know to look for these things, but they talk about threads. They talk about threads that shed a lot, some threads aren't as good as others. Some can dirty your machine up easier, quicker. So, I learned a lot about threads and I learned a lot about needles, what needles to use on knits and silks and cottons. And so, as you can see, there's a lot of different things that you can learn from just taking a quick little class. And I wanted to show you a few little stitches just and what you can do for yourself at home, if you say don't have a sewing machine retailer close by, you can just make your own little swatch on your own at home, just simply by pushing some buttons and playing and not messing up a project or doing anything like that. You can just discover something about your machine and play and maybe have something that you wanna use on all your projects. So this one made a flower motif and I wanted to show you this one, cause this one's a really big one as well, just like that swirl. So you won't wanna, you'll just kinda want to lightly guide your fabric, because you'll find that your fabric will travel quite a ways with some stitches, as you'll see here. And that's why it's important to play, cause like I said, that big stitch, I would have been very shocked had I used it on a small project. So on some machines, they'll actually show you a little grid on the screen, if you have a screen on your machine, and it'll kinda show how big your stitch will be, but even that sometimes can be a little bit deceiving. So I still, I encourage you to just play and kinda get to know your machine that way, and then start creating something fun.
Loved the video. Quite a few have asked what model this Brother is but I did not see any answer yet. Could you please tell us the model number/ name.
I thought the video could use some improvement as far as sound...I could hardly hear her speak. I am also wondering and reading all of the comments, searching for the answer to "what is the model of the Brother sewing machine she is referring to in the video. I don't see where this question has been answered.
I have A book that I put Together with all my different stitches. I used White muslin along with a mid weight backing and sewed the stitches, numbered each one and also inserted the stitch length/width. I then Cut them out into business card size and inserted into business card plastic sleeves and into a binder. Very organized and I can Look at any stitch and decide which one I like And what number it is within my machine. I have Pics. if interested email me.
Thank you guys for this video as well as many others I've saved to my playlists and have purchased! I'm a new premium member who's been sewing almost 2 years. I have 2 sewing machines (1 mechanical Heavy Duty Singer 4423, and the other a computerized Brother HC1850), 1 combo embroidery and sewing machine by Husqvarna Topaz 40, and 2 sergers by Singer (one is a 4-thread and the other a 5-thread combo machine). Thanks for the content you guys provide! I've been meaning to actually stitch out the decorative stitches on swatches and notate them in my sewing notebook! Just needed an example to see how it's done. This video was a real help. I was able to pause it and see the kinds of details she documented. Again - thank you for the content!
i have had my sewing machine for many years but am just reaching a point in life that permits me time to sew "just because". i found this information very helpful. discussing practice stitches on different types of fabric. Also, she mentioned buttonholes which the idea of terrifies me, but her encouragement was timely for me. Thank you for making this information available.
I enjoyed the video very much and as some before me, I would appreciate if you told me which sewing machine she is using. This has not been answered. Tks
Good grief, what a bunch of Negative Nellies! I thought Tara did fine and gave helpful information.
eager to learn
I agree this was not a helpful video nor a dynamic speaker. I didn''t learn anything that could have been prints as "keep a notebook of stitches you learned during your classroom training".
I thought the video was helpful also. I am an organizing nut and I appreciate seeing how the lady has her sewing machine information organized in her notebook. I also think it's a great idea to make swatches of stitches to see how big they actually are. I'll be making myself a nifty notebook too! :-)