PERFECT LACE APPLICATION MADE EASY!

Hello, welcome back to serger tip clips. I get a lot of requests to show special feet and how to use them on the serger, so today I would like to show you the

lace

applicator foot. It's a fantastic little foot for precision sewing

lace

when you're applying it with your overlocker, it's not difficult to use, it's pretty simple to understand, so we'll go over the anatomy and I'll show you. Here's my baby lace applicator foot for a cheer, so let's review. Some of the different parts of this foot, as you can see, have indicator ridges like the other feet and you see five of them, so the Ovation is an overlock cover stitch combination machine, so you can use both the of coverage like the overlock seam with this one. but for today we're just going to use the overlock, this is the little guide that will keep the cord

perfect

ly aligned while you sew it and I loosened the screw so you can see that it will slide to the right and to the left.

Just hold it up so you can see you can see it's going to slide in and there's just a little notch right at the top of the guide that's lined up with it here and these are lined up with the needle that we're going to I'll be using just our overlock needle. right, so these are the only needle indicator words that I'm going to have to pay attention to, but this notch is aligned with the guide on the foot and since I'm using only my right needle foot, I'm going to move that not just slightly to the right of the Ridge needle indicator and I'm going to tighten it now on some machines you may have a little wheel to adjust the guide.

I'm the lace applicator foot or it may look slightly different, but the principles are all the same, so what we're going to do is place a lace header and I'll show you that in just a second against the guide and then the fabric goes underneath, so let me. I'm just showing you what you can do with this foot. There are multiple points you can use when applying lace. For this example, I'm showing you a three-thread narrow that is with the right needle, upper and lower loopers and I have red thread in the machine. just for contrast, so the camera will pick it up and you can see it makes a nice even stitch across the lace and you can even see the edge of the lace heading, that's how

perfect

ly the lace applicator foot will line it up for you, but The reason I did this with a narrow three-ply thread is that it leaves a very flat seam allowance now, if I didn't press it and turn it over you would still see the seam allowance peeking through the lace, but if I wanted to finish sew this to keep the seam allowance in place.

I would press it so that the seam allowance is towards the body of the fabric and I have an example of where I pressed that seam allowance towards the body of the fabric and that gives me that flat seam allowance. seam allowance so I can go to my sewing machine and sew it on the edge in place, that seam allowance will never peek out and because it's a three thread narrow seam allowance and a flat seam allowance, it allows me to get a perfect edge stitch on that and again The special foot for my sewing machine and the edge stitching foot, so now you get very even stitches.

If I were doing this on a sheer fabric, here's a piece of silk organza again. I

made

it in red just so you could see the stitching you might want. changing from a narrow three thread hem to one that is rolled and has an even tighter seam allowance if I had

made

it in a very light pink with this fabric or even a beige that matched the lace the seams would completely disappear underneath of the fabric, but in a case like this with a rolled hem, it would be a little more difficult to sew the edge on your sewing machine because a rolled hem has a more rounded contour and could cause the needle to wobble back and forth. and cannot sew the edge straight. on something transparent where the seam allowance might show a little on the right side of the garment or your project.

I think I would prefer a rolled hem stitch, so that's just the difference between that and there it is ironed. above on the wrong side but again you can see the motif is perfectly aligned throughout the swatch let me talk about the lace header. You heard me mention that a second ago this is the piece of lace that I'm going to show you and this part. That looks almost like little railroad tracks, that's the bead header and that's what I'm going to line up with my right needle and when I go to the machine I'll show you how I do it and the seam will be caught correctly. on that lace Heather and I have another little piece of lace, it's old, I took it from a project and probably when I was removing it I probably cut off the actual header, but again, I don't think it would really make much difference aesthetically if I sewed this on something, it would What I would do on this is just line up the needle just inside this finished edge at the top of the bead, so let's go to the Machine and I'll show you the settings.

I'm a time machine and I have the lace applicator foot attached, but first let's review our settings for this one. I'm doing a three-thread narrow cut, so I have the right overlapping needle set up. I have my stitch fingers unhooked. I can't set the rolled hem anymore, but they're on their own, a killer machine just means the seam is disconnected. My stitch length is just a little under two and I have my cutting width reduced to a fairly narrow one. All tensions, if you have a machine with tensions, are at a normal setting. because this is a stable woven fabric that I'm going to show you, so let me show you how I put the lace on the machine.

I like to sew on a flat surface to cut my legs a little bit longer than the length of the fabric and here it is Why when I go to insert it I want the cord header to be right against this guide and I want to make sure the cord feeds completely straight from front to back, so I put it under to have a little bit of The cord towards the back of the presser foot and then what I do is I lower the needle and make sure it's at the cord header where I want it to be and I do it.

I mentioned in other tips clips before using my needle. like a third hand, once I have it down, it sets the lace so it's where I want it to be, so what I do is I have the presser foot up. I'm going to place the fabric right under the entire presser foot, against the feed. dogs and I line it up so that the knife cuts as much as I want it to cut and let me just put this bead where it needs to be, so I'm going to cut, oh, probably, maybe a hair. more than a quarter of an inch but this is just a sample it can be whatever you want so I'm going to lower the presser foot and I just need the cord to fit the small and keep the fabric straight and I'm ready to go the machine does everything hard work for me now you can see again absolutely perfect alignment down to the smallest fraction.

It's really great. Something I didn't mention before is that you want to sew with the lace and With the right sides of the fabric together on the lace this way, it's very difficult to tell which side is right and which side is wrong, and the general rule of thumb is that if you look at it for 15 seconds and you can't decide which is the right side of the wrong side of the cord, obviously it doesn't make a big difference but technically the right sides should be together so there it is with a 3 strand narrow and it would be the same principle with a rolled hem. but that's on a flat piece of fabric now, if I were sewing in the round, let's say on the hem of a skirt, what I need to do and this is just a little tube that I sewed, I would like to cut what I call a starting gate and that starter door would be the exact same measurement as the amount of fabric I want to cut from the edge so to sew in the round it's the exact same setup where I'll place the cord first and again I like to have a little more length and you'll see why at the end I lower my needle so that my lace is anchored here is my little starting gate, so I'm going to take that and take it to the edge of the knife and this is the beauty of having the fabric all square or having the lace all square until the point of anchoring it because while I'm manipulating the fabric under here I don't have to worry about whether the lace has been torn off so much there's my exit door and let me turn around and again I never like to start or stop at a seam allowance, like this that I'm a few inches ahead of where the seam allowances are and I'm just going to sew around it now that we're going down. all the way down the stretch, as you can see, what I like to do in this case is trim off that little bit of excess lace and there are a few different approaches to that, depending on what type of lace you're using. and where it will be in your project, you can decide what is most suitable for your particular

application

.

I'm lining it up again with the edge of that starting gate so that it lines up with the starting part of the lace and now at this point so that I don't cut the edges of my starting overlock. I'm going to block my knife because I don't need to cut any more fabric, but I just want to finish my sewing in the round, so once I see that it's all the way to the end and I'm just overlapping two or three stitches. I lift the presser foot. I turn the fabric out of the way about 90 degrees and just sew it and it gives me a nice clean finish.

Now I can put that. I can have a double. I would sew a needle or a punch and take it out from the bottom and now you can see a little bit of the overlap on that lace. If you don't want the raw edge to show, you can always do some sort of sewing, but My preferred method to get it to lay very flat is to just take a couple of small hand stitches and join those two raw edges together by hand and it's very discreet and no one will really see it and I think it gives it a nice smooth finish, but if you're doing it flat and then you're going to do the vertical seam first.

You can also do a seam through the lace, that's your choice. There are many different approaches and none of them are necessarily right or wrong. Many of them are aesthetically better than others, but as long as they all hold up, that's important. Thanks for joining me today for the Lace Applicator Serger Tip Clip and as always, if you have any questions or suggestions for a future tip clip, I'd love to hear them. from you and I will keep them on my list if you want to learn more about it. I made a two part four strand magazine, the lace applicator foot and the ruffle foot are included in number 194 so be sure to check it out and 195 covers two feet but I won't tell you which one see you soon thanks