I learned to sew 60 years ago. All that experience isn’t always an advantage. Back then, a sewing machine needle lasted months and months through project after project and garment after garment. Now, needles get changed after every project. Or that’s when they are supposed to be changed.
Sixty years ago, there weren’t many choices in sewing machine needles. You could buy needles for light weight fabric, needles for mid-weight fabric, and needles for heavy weight fabric. There weren’t ball point needles because there weren’t knit fabrics available to the home sewer. We were sewers, not sewists. I still hate the word sewist. It reminds me of a John Wayne movie, The Shootist.
Embroidery needles were for hand embroidery because machine embroidery wasn’t available for the home sewer.
Now, sewing machine needles come in lots of sizes for lots of different uses. It’s hard to keep up. I was having problems with my new embroidery machine. I had ordered some embroidery thread from Superior Threads. I was surprised to see they recommended a size 90/14 embroidery needle. I thought size 90/14 was just for heavy fabrics and I was embroidering on fabric I thought needed a size 70/10 needle. And so I bought some size 90/14 embroidery needles from Superior Threads. I had hit a sale and got free shipping. No telling how much the additional thread storage boxes, which I haven’t purchased yet, are going to cost me.
I inserted the size 90/14 needle into the embroidery machine, and magically stitch problems disappeared.
When compared to my embroidery machine, my iPhone 15 is brick that dials numbers and holds photos. Today’s machines, sewing and embroidery, are so complex that any tiny mistake in threading results in me trying to rip out embroidery stitches. I was taught that there are three things you can do to solve something like 90 % of your sewing problems. Clean the machine, change the needle, rethread the machine. It’s still a good way to solve sewing problems.
Most of the time. Sort of.
I keep the manual next to the machine. That’s how I discovered that I’m supposed to put my finger on the bobbin and hold the bobbin down while I thread the bobbin thread through the track that leads to the thread cutter. That solved a whole lot of stitch problems. I’ve never had a machine that required me to hold down the bobbin while threading the bobbin thread through wherever it has to go.
But now the embroidery thread is being carried to the back of the fabric indicating the tension is too low. I had lowered the tension to help with I forgot what, but it did work for a while. Now, I had to raise the thread tension to neutral. I had slowed the stitch speed to solve some problem I was having. But once I started threading the bobbin properly, I could increase the stitch speed.
I had some dye failures. One resulted in a brown tee shirt with more freckles than a room filled with red haired kindergarten kids. Jim suggested I consider it a tee shirt to wear while working out at the gym. Okay, but it needs embroidery. Everything I own needs embroidery these days. And so I got out some of my new embroidery patterns and played around.
Not the best choice of thread colors for this one. Two of the colors are too similar to be used in the same pattern and one of the variegated threads isn’t working with this pattern. Fortunately, this is a gym shirt.
I thought these might work for a quilt that needs quilting. Probably not. The quilt has lots of ferns, and I don’t think fancy leaves would be an addition.
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