Waggons West Etsy Shop

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

The Mystery of the MIssing Stitches


I was working on an a batch of patches for a customer.  I finished the first tray.   They were beautiful.  I love her little bird design.  Then I had to shut down for a day.  I set up my machine to finish the order.  Awful.  I hadn't changed a thing on the machine, the design, the thread, the fabric, Nothing.  So out came the trouble shooting.  New needle.  Clean everything.  New bobbin case.  New design.  Re-thread.  Re-load.   Twenty, count them, TWENTY test patches later and nothing worked.  It kept dropping the same stitches.  The same stitches that came out perfectly the day before.  UGH.  I was ready to haul the machine off to the shop. 

And then I noticed something.  There were ripples in the fabric between the patches.  In the perfect batch, the ripples were vertical.  In the crazy skipping batch they were horizontal.  The fabric has a light stretch too it.  (It was the only white pair of jeans I could find.)  By rotating the design on the fabric so that the direction of the stretch was 90 degrees off it came out perfectly. 


Crazy.  But lesson learned. 

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