Brother 1034D Serger | Tips & Lessons Learned | SEWING REPORT

Using a

serger

doesn't have to be a frustrating experience. I'm going to share some quick

tips

to make your life a little easier. Welcome to the Sewing Report. I'm Jennifer Moore, I help you discover your love for

sewing

and we here with the

serger

brother

1034d

. I love this. I use it several times a week, it is a great value and I am going to share with you some

tips

that I have

learned

through real practical experiences that will hopefully help you avoid making mistakes. Same mistakes I have, so let's get started. This isn't going to be a full tutorial, but what I'm going to do is show you some little things that I've

learned

just by working with this machine that has made my life a little less frustrating, so the first thing I would recommend is to always make sure to try the exact piece of fabric you will use for your project before you start

sewing

the real deal, because what happens.

There are different fabrics that will behave differently with the serger, so you want to make sure you use the exact same fabric so you can ensure all the settings are correct. So here I have some double weaves. I have this bed. sheet that I used, this is a 100 percent cotton sheet and some canvas. All of these fabrics will require slightly different settings on the serger so I'm going to show you what I'm talking about here so I have this piece of knit fabric and there are a few things you can change about your surgery which is differential feeding and that means which will stretch the fabric a little or gather it together as it passes through the serger.

You can also change the stitch length so that the stitches are further apart or closer together and you can change the stitch width so that is the width of your locking stitches. Now in full disclosure this machine can do a lot of different things but I really only use it for that thread overlock function because that's what I bought it for, you can do a lot more with it but we're not going to get into all that , there is a crafts class today, so I do recommend it. about using your serger and I will link it in the description box that you can check out.

I bought it but haven't gone through everything yet, but it goes through all the different functions the overlocker has. and different things you can do with it, but I personally find it a bit fiddly to convert things or change settings, so I like to keep it as is because that's really what I bought it for. a function which is to finish the seams, so I'm going to go ahead and put this double weave here, so make sure that when you use your serger you want the knife to be in one of the highest positions to start with. and always make sure you raise the presser foot before you put the fabric on it so we'll just make sure that's the case and I've noticed the double weaves it does.

I actually have this on the wrong setting just for demonstration purposes, if you put this on the lowest setting, it will really stretch the woven fabric and give it that wavy lettuce edge that you don't want. Yeah, look, this isn't going so well, that's why you want to try things out. so I actually want this on the highest gathering setting and this will actually push the fabric through it. See how much easier it was. The reason it's doing that is because this is kind of a fluffy fabric and you'll see that my fabric here. it doesn't have that wave or curl, so you want a higher differential drag for real fluffy fabrics, you want to have it lower for something delicate like chiffon or even like knits, you don't want to have it. on the lowest setting but you want it, you don't want to have it on this puckered setting.

I'll show you what happens when you put a cotton fabric in a gathered setting. It won't be pretty. Also, always keep a pair of scissors with you, you will definitely need them, so I want to put this cotton fabric here just for demonstration purposes to show you what it will be like if we are going to feed this cotton fabric. here now we have the differential feed on which the fabric is going to gather, it actually doesn't gather as much as I thought, but maybe that's because it's a very stable fabric, but you don't really want it gathered for cotton. or look at this like maybe 1.5 something like this, this is usually a better setting for cotton or woven fabrics.

Another thing I've learned the hard way is that when you work with stretch fabrics, you say you're putting a neckband on a neckline and you always have the neckband a little shorter and you'll end up stretching it as you sew it. You want to make sure the stitch length is a little bit higher because what's happening is if you're stretching the fabric. and you already have it at a very narrow stitch length, when you put it back in place it will be very concentrated, so what you want to do is, if you are stretching it, you want to make sure that your stitch length is not in the lowest. study and you want to make sure that maybe it's even on the highest setting because it's going to be a little bit more focused after you're done so I'm going to show you how it's going to work so I'm going to start sewing this knit fabric and I'm just going to cut this little bit off. here.

I love having sinners next to the overlocker, it just makes your life so much easier and I'll show you what happens both ways when you have it in a narrower stitch length and in a. wider stitch length so it's actually a pretty wide stitch length so you'll see I'm stretching the fabric as I do it so when it goes back into place it's actually more of the length of stitch that you want now if I put this in a narrower stitch length and stretch it out, it's going to be very, very close together, in fact, too close together, so let's try it right, so you can see what it looks like, this is too concentrated and in fact, If you do this on a cotton fabric or if you're not using a round nose needle, you can actually tear the fabric, so that's not what you want, it's too close, that's why you want the stitch length is on the upper side.

I've actually done it with a few different neck bands and it wasn't pretty, so I don't recommend doing that at all, so this is what you really want, so this is a good sew, just make sure you keep that in mind if you are using a knit fabric that you are going to use. to stretch you while you search, let's try this canvas here and again. This is another reason why you should always test your leftover fabric, so let's try it in a few different configurations. I'm going to move my stitch length down to three, but I'll show you what happens if it's on the lowest differential feed setting or the highest differential feed setting.

Okay, this is on the lowest setting, now this is actually stretching the fabric a little bit. While it's feeding, I'm going to turn it to the highest setting now and see how it works. This fabric actually seems pretty stable and both ways seems to work pretty well, but you wouldn't know it. That's why you always want to test your fabric in different configurations to see how it looks. Here's a mistake I've made more than once and it's a little embarrassing: I picked up the presser foot and forgot. Put it back down, so I'll show you what it's going to look like if you don't put the presser foot down.

This is what happens, so sometimes you know you might start looking for something and then for some reason you have to do it. like raising the presser foot to readjust something and you forget to put it back down, this happened and you'll get this super ugly finished edge and that's not good so always keep that in mind and make sure you're always remember to stand firm, otherwise Otherwise you will get a little dirty. Childbirth or surgery hasn't really required much maintenance, but one thing I do regularly is make sure to clean the inside after every There are a couple of projects, so I'm going to take the front off and show you how dirty it is.

I use Q-tips and then I also use these Clorox Triple Action Dust Wipes to help me get these things fully working. I will link them below in the description box if you are interested in purchasing them. They are amazing and I use them for so much more than just cleaning the serger and I will basically only use the swabs for writing. to remove a little bit of this lint and then you can use the dust wipes to grab some of this stuff and it will really do it. It's not recommended that you use it as an air blower just because you don't want this stuff getting into the machine anymore, I basically just use this and you can even put this on the head of a cotton swab and just use it and this won't push it around as much, in It will actually grab onto all the dust and debris out there. in the machine you can also use this for the top you can use it for anything but keep in mind when you clean it you will get a bunch of trash underneath so I keep a trash can near whatever I'm doing and then keep sweeping this up and throwing it in the trash, this is how I clean my serger by changing the threads, which everyone struggles with.

Personally, I think starting from scratch is the best way. I've seen some tutorials where you don't like it. your old thread into your new thread, but you don't want to damage your tension discs, so I think the easiest thing to do is start all over again, so to change the thread, just cut the threads, pass the tail and now you have a nice clean path to work with so just take out the old threads and I'll change from dark gray to pink because my next project will have pink and blue fabric so I thought this would match a lot more than the dark grey, okay, let's place our new sheets here and you'll just pass each of these through here and I've gotten to the point where I can actually rethread the serger in less than five minutes unless I have some problems. every once in a while you do it but I hope this time it all works out and I have these spool caps on the spool holders and they are for every time you use a serger cone.

Great, I'll use of course the tweezers that come with the machine to make my life a little bit easier when you get to hard to reach places, there we go well, so what I do is, one by one, I'll just place them on through the metal supports here and then of course you. I have to start with these are all color coded, you have to start with number three first, third, so I'm just going to put these on and I'm going to put them all through the tension discs just to get them started, okay, too there are the tension dials so now you have to check them and I have to start with a green one and literally this machine is color coded so once you get the hang of it it's actually not that bad so I'm just going to guide you these go through and then this one goes so this is one of your loop threads and I just need to make sure I put this in here and if you're having trouble, make sure you cut some salt to give it a cleanser. and to your thread and you really need to pull it through there and then use your pliers to grab the other end so this is the first thread and of course you want this to go under the presser foot.

Why are these tweezers amazing? Now we're ready for the fourth thread and this one is blue, so you just want to make sure that you put them through these two metal guides through this little hook here and then you'll get started. To get the section out here, you put the thread here, put it back in and then you're going to pull it through this little stop here, but then you want to make sure and it even has it in the image that you want to make. Make sure that when you're passing this, it goes under this top hook, lastly, here we go.

I've got this right so we have the hardest thing to do and it's three and four threads so now it's the easy breezy part that is threading the needle yeah I don't know why this is the order it's supposed to be in you need to do three, four, two and one that's the order you thread it so this one is actually pretty easy all you have to do is Guide this over here and this is more like threading a traditional sewing machine and then you just have to do it and you do it clockwise and then counterclockwise so again for some reason I always like to spit it out which is probably not the most hygienic thing but you know it works and then you try to get your tired eyes see through the needle, okay, this went well, here we go and you always want to make sure that you want all the threads to be under the presser foot, so let's go.

To test this to see how I did with the threading, also a note is that a number three thread cone will use by far the most thread because this is the linker, so one thing I've been doing is that when you're switching the serger cone threads, change it a little bit, otherwise this one will run out of thread long before the others, so if you're mixing them up, you know, maybe put in number 32, number one and then move on . around like you flip your mattress so it doesn't get too much wear and tear on one side so we're in the home stretch guys and I don't think I actually don't think I need to cut it out it looks pretty clean yeah obviously obviously you can use a needle threader if you have one.

I just don't know, apparently I only like to torture myself, so I'm doing it this way, why is that okay? I think it worked, so it's making thethings are a little less like you want to throw the serger out the window. Use the clamps honestly from everything that came with the serger. The tweezers are by far the most valuable thing besides the third overlocker, so now you're ready to try it out and then start cleaning up, hopefully, hopefully we're okay, put your little catch basket back, let's try this again and hopefully it works. It came out better than last time, okay, remember we keep the presser foot down and I want to go slow, okay, okay and we're in business, this is how you change the thread on your serger.

Obviously, sometimes it's not always a walk in the park, but it's a necessary evil to use a search engine. I haven't thrown it out the window, so win for me and I hope you found these tips helpful again. I'm Jennifer Moore with Sewing Report, if you like these types of videos, feel free to subscribe. channel and be sure to hit the like button so you can show me some love. I'll see you next time for another video. I like to do fabric tours, some technical type videos, and sometimes just show things I make, so I'll see you next time.