Do you have that well know love hate relationship with your overlocker like most people?. Its a beautiful day and you’re minding your own business, Serger is working beautifully, trimming away those seams, giving you that professional edge finish to your work, then BAM! Everything goes wrong.
Overlock strips of scrap to find the correct settings for your project.
There are a number of reasons why your overlocker is ‘acting up’. Let me help you…
First of all, I want you to clean out all the fluff built up in the machine. It causes problems to the new thread feeding through the system. Get the build up between the upper and lower knife blades and make sure all of the guides are clear, set the machine to default (factory) settings and lets go…
1 – Loops are hanging over the edge of the fabric
Loops are hanging over the trimmed edge of fabric.
What Happened?
Well, this is an easy one actually, and very often the solution is overlooked.
The loops are perfectly formed, the fabric hasn’t been puckered or stretched, so we know the tensions are perfect and so is the differential feed.
The loops don’t have enough fabric to sit on.
SOLUTION cut away less fabric so there’s more for the loops to hang onto. Adjust or move the knife over until you’re trimming off less fabric. Turn the dial to a higher number
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2 – Thread is being pulled when I stretch the fabric.
Distorted tension on fabric after it’s been stretched
This time you sew something very stretchy and it all looks great but when you pull the fabric to check the stretch, you find your overlocking threads are pulling out rather than stretching with the fabric.
Then rather than spring back into shape when you let go, the fabric puckers, loses shape and now just looks an ugly mess, argh!
What Happened?
The threads aren’t long enough the reach out as far as the fabric can stretch. You need to allow more movement and more thread to be able to flow and stretch further, but you also need secure threads that allow that longer thread to come back into its loopy shape.
SOLUTION Loosen the upper looper thread. You need to adjust it so that when you remove the fabric, pull it right across, it’ll stretch beautifully, but then springs back into shape without any puckering or loopy threads hanging off.
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