Serger: Beyond the Basics Session 3: Taking Gathering to New Level

In this segment, taking gathering to the next level. I'm going to show you different ways to use your gathering foot. First of all, I'm gonna show you how you can do just a single ruffle, very similar to what you do on the machine without the gathering foot. Then I'm going to show you how you can actually attach that ruffle to another piece of fabric that isn't ruffled simultaneously. Then we're going to attach an islet or lace and the ruffle and gather it together.

And finally, I'm gonna show you how to ruffle your islet and then attach that to a flat piece of fabric which will be attached to a ruffle. So you have lots of options. And I think you're gonna find that this foot is absolutely fun, fun, fun to use. And then I'm also going to show you how to change the density of your ruffle. There's two different ways you can do it with both the differential feed and the length of the stitch.

And then finally, I'm gonna show you how you can determine the ratio of ruffle to non ruffle so that you can figure out how to do different projects. So with that in mind, let's get started. Let me introduce you to the ruffling foot or the gathering foot as it's more commonly known. The gathering foot is, looks a little complicated, but it's quite simple to use. What happens is when you want to make a ruffle, it will go underneath the foot, all right?

Your foot will ride right along. Once again your knife is going to come along and trim the edge as the machine ruffles or gathers the fabric. If you want to have a ruffle and have it attached to a plain piece of fabric that is not ruffled, you will slip the fabric through that upper slot and it will go through and the two will come out together and be perfectly finished. So that's the basics of operation. Let's see how it looks in use.

First, let's put our foot on. Just like before, whoops. I don't wanna get my thread caught in there. Just like before we go ahead and get it on the presser foot and then we anchor it in position with the lock button and make sure that it's up. Looking at our info book, we find that we're using a four thread overlock and I'm already set up for that.

And the key to the ruffle is your differential feet, right? The higher the differential feet the more ruffle that you get. In other words, the more your fabric will be gathered. It will be much more dense ruffling if you go up to a two than if you are a down on, let's say a 1.5 and I'm gonna show you some examples of that in a minute. The other option is your stitch length, the higher the number, the more ruffle that you'll get the lower the number, the less ruffle and I will show you samples in just a minute but let's do just a basic ruffle.

Now, again, this is a top heavy foot. So after you lift up the back end you're gonna have to gently pick up your front end. And I like to go ahead and put it right up next to my needle. Now notice I haven't put the press foot down yet. I go ahead and I anchor it down, put my stitch down or my lever down and you can see that my knife is ready to go.

It's not as important on the basic ruffle to anchor the needle down, but you're gonna find it's critical when we do the next step. As I get ready to stitch this I want you to notice that the edge of my machine here is what I'm going to be using for my guide. It's a nice visible edge, and it's going to come into play when we put our second piece in later. So I think you'll find that this is a nice reference point. With this as my reference point, the needle or the knife rather will be trimming off somewhere between a 16th and an eighth of an inch just enough to clean up that nasty edge.

And I like using the gathering foot for the basic ruffle because it has a little more width to it than my normal foot. So it's keeping the gather more even. So here we go. And you can see that it's trimming and it's ruffling or gathering all at the same time. And just like that you have a nice ruffle.

That is much easier than the way we do it on the sewing machine where we're pulling two lines of basing threads and they're always breaking or you're having to zig-zag over a piece of dental floss but you're still having to pull it and even everything out. If you just want a nice, simple ruffle this is the way to go. Now I'm gonna show you how we can attach a ruffle to a piece of fabric at the same time simultaneously. So to do this right side up for the fabric, you're going to put the bottom fabric in which is going to be the actual ruffle or the gather. When you put it in, bring the needle and anchor it in the down position.

What that's doing is helping to hold this for you because once that is down I need to lift the presser foot to take the pressure off of the foot so I can slip this other piece of fabric into the slot. Otherwise the slot is compressed. So all I do is slip that in and I bring it back just so it meets up with the needle. So as you look through here, you're going to see the needle. I'm gonna put the presser foot down there.

You can see the needle. You can see the second piece of fabric lined up. You want to keep the top fabric over against this edge of the foot. If you let it wander away you're going to have uneven seam lines. So you keep it over.

Sometimes it helps if you actually angle it just a little bit. I'm exaggerating this so you can see but sometimes I will angle it. Usually what I do is because now I'm having to watch this piece and this piece, I lightly line them up and watch them go through on my reference point, which was right here. But I can't hold it tightly because the bottom fabric is moving through faster than the top fabric. So you're gonna see it's a very light-handed touch.

You're letting the machine do the work, you don't pull anything, you just guide. And once again, it's trimming the edge and gathering. You won't see the gather here, it's gonna look straight, so here we go. Now when you get to the end, you wanna watch this bottom piece cause it likes to skewer over. So you wanna just keep it in line all the way through and then run it off.

Okay, you can see that your top piece that went through is still flat. But look at your bottom piece, is that slick or what? Typically with the sewing machine we would have had to have made our ruffles first and then attached the top piece and they never go through evenly and they always get crunched and they just aren't fun. This is fun, this is easy, all right? So there we have a basic ruffle and an attached ruffle.

Now, step three. We can get even more complicated. In this case, I'm going to gather my islet and my ruffle at the same time. Now, when I put my fabric in, these are both going to be on the bottom of the foot. You wanna make sure that this is the way your ruffle is pointed.

So put your islet on the correct way so that it too will be ruffled. It will look like that. The nice thing with being able to ruffle the islet is that you can buy the flat version. You won't have that little piece of bias binding on the top that adds bulk to your seams and makes it very heavy. And also the flat islet usually is a lot less money because there's less work to manufacture it.

So same principle, line the two up. We're going to lift the presser foot, put this underneath, make sure it's against the knife. Take one stitch and put the needles down into the two pieces. Take the top piece right side down so it's basically the easy way to remember this is by the time you thread this in and load up the ruffler or the gathering foot the right sides are together. That's the easy way to remember, right sides together.

So we're going to put this in. Again, I'm going to bring it back to the needle. So we're lined up with the needle, we're lined up with the knife, we're lined up here. Now I've got to keep two layers, even as it goes through because you don't want that to skewer off and then you're gonna keep this one level. But you know what?

As to do two, you can do three and it isn't that tough. Here we go. You can see that the knife is trimming it so you get a nice clean edge. You can see that your top edge is staying flat, your bottom levels or layers rather are ruffling. And it just takes a little bit more coordination not much.

And remember, it is not going to come out even because we started with pieces that were the same length and we're gonna discuss how to work around that in a minute. All right, that did not take long at all. It was all done as a sandwich. And here you go, look at that. It's that cute for a little girl's dress?

You've got your ruffled islet, you've got your ruffle underneath and you have the top part, whether it's a bodice or a waistband on a skirt, whatever you want. Used to be, oh, a few years back, maybe about 10, 15 years back. Ruffled pillows were very popular, ruffled curtains were very popular especially in early American type of decor, colonial decor or country decor. We aren't seeing that as much right now but you know what the old saying, wait for it, it'll come back. So when it does, you're gonna have lots of time to practice and you'll be ready for it.

So this is definitely the way to go because that type of interior called for yards upon yards upon yards of ruffles and you just drove yourself crazy trying to make them on the sewing machine. All right, so let me show you one more trick. If you notice when this is ruffled together, it's very very slight ruffling. It's not quite as full as what we had here. And that's because you're adding a second layer of fabric.

The thicker the fabric the less it's going to ruffle for you. That's something you have to keep in mind. So as I work around, I like to ruffle my islet first and then send it through with the ruffle. So let me show you how that works. Okay, we're gonna take our islet, we're gonna load it under the foot, just like we did for the fabric.

You can see where it's trimming away the little uneven edge here from the manufacturer and gathering it at the same time. Whoops and I didn't hold on. That's what happens if you let it get away from you. Right, now, you can see that we have a nice ruffled piece of islet. Now, if you put it through on the ruffle side, again, your ruffle isn't going to ruffle as well because you're impeding it with the heavier islet.

So we're going to put the fabric through alone, one stitch, hold it. Now we're going to take our ruffled islet and our top piece, the flat piece, very gently, you don't wanna pull on this cause you'll pull your ruffles out. So you have to work a little gingerly with it and then load both of those into the top slot, all right. Same process, get a little bit coordinated here. Move everything over so that it's aligning with the reference point as I call it.

Now you could technically go over to your sewing machine and base the two layers together so it rides through here nice and even, and flat. And I would probably do it if I was doing yards and yards and yards, but for a smallest this is it's just not worth your time and effort, just let it ride through loose. Now, when you look at it, you can see that we have quite a bit more gathering and ruffling going on. Compare that to this one. Can you see the difference in the ruffles and even in the islet, how much more it's ruffled?

Now, one thing that you can do that would make it look a lot better than mine did. I forgot to change my stitch width setting. When you run the ruffle or the islet rather through the first time, turn your stitch down so it's not as wide, use a narrower stitch. That way you can turn the stitch width to a higher width when you come back and run it through as the sandwich and it will cover that stitching for you and you won't have that little booboo there. This is the kind of thing when you see it like that, that it looks homemade as opposed to handmade, which is the more professional look.

So we don't want to have homemade, we want it to look handmade. Now, let me show you a couple things real quick. Fabric differs. You never know what you're gonna get when it comes time for ruffling because every fabric has its own unique weight. So you want to go ahead and make sure you do a sample before you start any project.

To get in the ballpark it's good like if you're working with a lot of, let's say quilting fabrics or sear sucker or lightweight summer fabrics make yourself up a little sample. That's what I've done here. And on it, I put that I started my top piece was 20 inches and my bottom piece was the same. I use everything the same length. So I have a 20 inch long piece is what I started with, my stitch length was at four, my width was at 7.5 and four is the longest stitch possible on my machine.

I went with the max differential which was a 2.0, and with that, I got a 13 inch ruffle. I got that by, I usually will just use my quilting mat and hold it down but you get that by measuring from the start to the end of the portion that is on the flat piece. Don't count that little starter cheater end. Count it from here to here. So now I know that this ruffled out at a 13 inch ruffle to a 20 inch flat piece, hold that thought, we're gonna come back to it, all right?

On this one, same size, everything is the same except I changed my differential. Instead of being at 2.0, I went to 1.8. And when I did that, my ruffle change from 13 inches to 15 inches of ruffle. So my ruffle is spread out, it's further apart. When I took it down one more notch to a 1.5, you can see how little ruffling there is, it's almost flat to non-existent, it's really not worth my time and effort at that point in time.

But now I have a 17.25 inch ruffle, all right? So that's by changing the differential. rather than changing the differential, I could change the stitch length. Instead of using this one which was my standard piece of a four inch stitch or 4.0 stitch length that gave me a 13 inch ruffle. I went to a 2.0 or a, yes a 2.0 stitch length and got a 15.5 inch ruffle.

And in between, if I do a three, I actually get a 16 inch ruffle. But here's the catch. Turn these over. I want you to compare the difference here in just the stitch quality, because the length is different. You can see that my stitches are closer together, all right?

That means that this, depending on the weight of the fabric can start to get pretty bulky and pretty dense. This is very, very light. So that's something to keep in mind as you're doing this. This stitch is closer to, oh I guess you could almost call it a basting stitch not quite, it will hold if it worries you and that's how you're getting your ruffle if you aren't wanting to do it with the differential you can always come back with your sewing machine and do a line of top stitching. The top stitching will give it a little more definition so that you see the difference between the flat and the ruffle.

It give us a little more of a 3D effect. It also is an extra security line of stitching. Personally as much as possible, I like to just change my differential feed. And most times if I'm doing a ruffle I want pretty much close to the max ruffle I can get. Now, what do you do with all these ruffles?

Well, let me just show you here real quick. You can stack them. And when you start stacking the ruffles you start getting a fun little effect for skirts, aprons, whatever. And so now the bottom of one ruffle becomes the flat piece or the top piece for the next ruffle. And we're gonna learn more about how to do that when we do our project, our bonus project, that little skirt.

This one I wanna show you what happens. This was the plane islet going through when we just attached it as part of the ruffle and we ruffled the islet and the ruffle together. This is how it came out if I ruffle it first. So right, there is a good comparison. You want to make sure though that you do either or, don't put the islet through the top flat because it will stay flat on top of your ruffle and it will look very, very odd.

So I don't recommend doing that. All right, now I've got one more thing I wanna show you, a real quick math lesson if you will. What do we do with those ruffles? Remember, let me see if I can find my piece here. I had one that was, it came out to 15 inches, that's the one I wanna show you.

All right, here's my ruffle. It's 15 inches of ruffle to 20 inches of flat. Here's my baseline, all right? Little bit of math back to high school, right? You take the length of the straight piece which was 20 inches.

If you divide it by the length of the ruffle you're gonna come up with a ratio if you will, of 1.3. If you do it the opposite way, if you take the length of ruffle and divide it by the flat piece, you come out with 0.75. What does that tell you? Well, what you do is if I know that my flat piece is 20 and it came out at 1.3 what if I need to make a waistband for a little girl which is what we're gonna do on our skirt, I need a piece that's 30 inches long. How long do I need to cut the piece of fabric to make the ruffle so I don't run out of ruffle?

I take 30, I multiply it times 1.3 because this is the amount of ruffle I want and I now know I need to cut a piece of fabric 39 inches long. It's not rocket science, all right. If the fabric is 30 inches long, I've got a piece of fabric 30, how much ruffle can I get out of 30 inches? That's when you multiply it by and that should be a 0.75, I'm sorry and that would give me 22.5 inches. So now I can determine either how much ruffle I'll have or how much of a flat piece I need to become a ruffle.

And this will also be a downloadable as a PDF for you so you don't have to worry so much about the math or if you down the road wonder, okay which way did I do those numbers? It's gonna be there waiting for you. So I think you'll find that this is gonna be fun as we go into making our skirt. And I show you exactly how you can use this math to create your own pattern.