To everyone getting a new sewing machine, as well as everyone who is working on last-minute holiday presents:
If the decorative stitches on your sewing machine are coming out ugly, there's a few things to try.
Your decorative stitches are basically embroidery, so give the project the same support you'd give a machine hoop embroidery project.
Bobbin: embroidery bobbin thread is much thinner than standard sewing thread. This really cuts down on the bulkiness of the stitch. If you want your decorative stitching to lie flat, you want to reduce bulk. You're having problems in a satin stitch, where the thread piles up on itself, makes a knot, and stops feeding? Embroidery bobbin thread will help prevent that, because it takes a lot more embroidery bobbin to make a knot big enough to stop the feed teeth. It's also thinner, so you can fit more on a bobbin and need to change your bobbin less. Embroidery bobbin is usually only available in two colors, but it's made so that your top thread will wrap onto the back and look prettier.
Stabilizer: For any hoop embroidery project, you need stabilizer. You can also put it behind your fabric in a decorative stitch. This will keep the fabric lying flat, and support your stitches. Some decorative stitch patterns will have the stitches very close together, and many woven fabrics can't support that many stitches. Stabilizer is meant to provide that support. There's versions that tear away (my current favorite is tear-and-wash), or that stay in the fabric permanently. If the back of your project isn't visible, keeping the stabilizer in there will show off your stitches and make it more attractive.
You can buy a single promo pack of tear-away stabilizer for like $5, and if you're only using small strips of it to reinforce decorative stitching, it'll last you a really long time.
Thread: If you're doing a project with decorative stitching, you might as well use a decorative thread. Embroidery thread, must like my dear cat Teensy Buttons, is very pretty, but not very strong. While you don't want to use most machine embroidery threads for construction stitching, it does decorative stitching really well. If you're doing satin stitching, the shininess of the thread will really emphasize the stitching. For decorative stitching that's composed of single lines of stitching, switching to a 40wt embroidery thread will make the design stand out more.
Very pretty. Nothing going on in her head. We love T-Butt.
Anyway, when people call my store and are having decorative stitch problems, that's exactly what I tell them: Switch to embroidery bobbin, add some tear-away stabilizer, get some embroidery thread, look at how cute my cat is.
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