sewing wire

[darkoshi]

My little light-weight "sew mini" sewing machine can actually sew over folded seams on thick cotton pants, as long as I reduce the thread tension down to zero in those sections. Although jean seams might still be too thick for it. In the past it always got stuck on thick parts like that, so I thought it wasn't meant to handle such "heavyweight" items, and ended up manually sewing those parts.

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Comments

[randomdreams]

The drag of the thread feed mechanism is enough to stall it? That seems weird, and makes me wonder why there is almost any drag at all other than enough to keep the spool from spinning from the non-constant pull pattern.

[darkoshi]

Well, thinner fabrics require more tension, and thicker ones require less tension, so that the final seam isn't too tight or loose. It hadn't occurred to me before yesterday that when sewing over a folded seam* which is thicker than the rest of the piece, that you should momentarily reduce the tension for that part. But the inner working of sewing machines is mostly a mystery to me. I've now watched a couple of nice animations of how the stitches get made, which I've always been curious about.

*Eg., each pants leg has 2 vertical seams going down. After cutting the legs shorter, when I fold the bottom edge up, and fold it again so that the raw edge is inside, those 2 folded seams have 9 layers of cloth in them.