Sorry, I haven’t managed to write about this earlier, but I did go away straight after the Overlocking course and haven’t had a moment to write this post.
I don’t actually have an overlocker at the moment, but I’m very much attracted to working with knit fabrics as I spend so much of my time in t-shirts. I decided therefore that I needed to see what an overlocker was like before I make a purchase. Although, I can see myself waiting until later in the year as I have so many good projects to do that don’t actually need one.
I chose to do a course at the Sewing Studio. My baby for the day is the Easythread 160 – an intimidating machine with four reels of thread on top!
The course started with “rainbow threading” the machine. A very helpful idea our teacher, Cherry, introduced for learning how to thread the machine. The machine is colour-coded, so we used a thread of each colour.
Here’s the green thread:
And here’s the red thread:
That one was really difficult to thread!
And finally the needle threads:
Our course led us through a booklet where we made lots of different samples with different stitch lengths, cutter widths and correcting for the fabric stretching on a variety of fabrics. We tried everything from t-shirt fabric to lycra, through to stretchy lace.
But to add spice to the whole business, just when we were getting comfortable with things we were advised to cut our threads and re-thread all over again!
By lunchtime I thought I had it sorted, but when I returned that pesky red thread was causing me no end of problems again. I just couldn’t get it to thread properly.
Eventually I got everything working again. I don’t think I was the only one to find the threading awkward. There was much hunting for specs and I got the distinct impression that everyone else who had come along had an overlocker that usually sat and gathered dust at home because it is such a pain to re-thread.
By the end of the daty I had a folder full of samples on different fabrics and had worked out the use of all the major controls. We also had tried our hands at rolled hems and consumed a lot of tea, cake and biscuits!
Would I buy an overlocker? Well, yes, I think it is a good purchase if I mean to take my sewing further. I felt reasonably confident on threading my machine, but of course all overlockers are different and apparently the one I used, the so-called “Easy Thread” is one of the easiest! I am though extremely glad I went on the course. The Sewing Studio is amazingly friendly and it was a delight to talk to other seamstresses.
Steely Seamstress 
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