Turning the Fabric on a Sewing Machine

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com my name is Neal Jones with A Perfect Fit Alterations, 102 Main Street, Burleson, Texas, our phone number is 817-447-3522. Now we have gotten to the stage with our understanding of the machine where we’ve been able to sew. Now we are sewing, we have a very fine thread here, we have a little coarser thread right here and we’ve done that with this control over here. Now there’s another control that we can talk about and we’ve discussed it a little earlier but we can see the practical use of it now, if we push this control right here, it makes the needle stop down into the fabric. Well at first thought, you may say how can we get the fabric out of there? The purpose of that is to be able to raise the pressure foot to turn the material without the material getting out of place so that it will appear that we have a continuous line of stitching as it goes around the corner. Then we’ll replace the pressure foot and we’ll continue to move along, we do it again and we turn and we have got a nice line that follows the stitching all the way around. Now in order to move on to another very common stitch, this is of course a straight stitch and this the kind of thing you would use for hemming pants, as you can see, here’s a end of a pant leg and also the same machine is versatile enough where we can use it on jeans here and you can see with jeans we use a contrasting thread in order to give a design which will match the rest of the jeans. Now there’s another very common thread that we would use in basic sewing which would be used for making repairs and doing other things with fabric and that would be the zigzag. Now in order to get to the zigzag, we would need to go back to this control here, we can see the selection dial, we would turn that and it would correspond with number 14, which is the picture of the zigzag and the little light would light up at the bottom. Now the other thing we would make sure of if we weren’t an experience sewer and that we would go to zigzag on the patterns and make sure that we have the correct foot. Well we do have foot A on the machine at the moment, so obviously we’re okay. Now the other part of the zigzag, we would come back to this control right here, now this control, as you can see from the picture, we would turn this control and make it come back until we have a wide zigzag. When the zigzag comes into place, the needle moves from side to side, so that is why the selection of the foot is so important. The only other thing we need to do with zigzag is we normally have to increase our upper tension just a tad but we always sew on a test piece before we do the sewing to make sure that we have our machine adjusted correctly. As you can see, there’s our needle going back and forth and we are sewing a zigzag. Now we can adjust that zigzag in several directions, we can move that zigzag a little closer together by adjusting this control right here and we can pull that back and then that’ll make the zigzag a little different. So there are a lot of different ways and as we get into understanding and working with the machine, then we’ll be able to do all kinds of different things on it. "