A few years ago my sister went on a trip to Barcelona. While there, she was kind enough to pick up a t-shirt for me.
It's been wearing quite well over the years, but being a tourist t-shirt it's not exactly the highest of high quality, and so the hem at the waist has been giving me a little trouble.
If you crack open your copy of the United States Government Master Specification for Stitches, Seams, and Stitching of 1926, you'll quickly recognize that this is an EFa-2 stitching using stitch type 406. This stitch type is a chain stitch, which means that if a stitch is dropped (as is clearly the case here), it will continue to unravel all the way up the seam any time that the looper thread is caught and pulled.
In fact, I previously had an issue with this hem coming unravelled, which I temporarily repaired using my standard domestic sewing machine (which was all I had at the time)
Of course a standard domestic machine produces a stitch type 301 (and can also produce a 302 when used with a twin-needle, and a 304 if you engage the zig-zag feature... or a 305 if you use a twin needle with the zig zag feature, although that's a very uncommon thing to do). The straight lockstitch, while very secure, has the downside that it does not stretch with knit fabrics, and so it is not the stitch of choice to use for hemming a t-shirt.
Thankfully I happen to now have a coverstitch machine, and a very fancy one indeed which can do a stitch type 605 if it's set up with all three needles and the upper looper. Or, for this project, the more mundane stitch type 406.
But before we get to that, we need to clean up the hem to get it ready for sewing, so it's out with the old.
And after trimming some of the excess fabric that had previously been folded up under the looper thread, it's in with the new. I decided to add some lightweight knit fusible interfacing tape here to help stabilize the hem a little bit. It'll keep it from curling up and being unruly, as well as give it a bit of body to resist the tunnelling effect you can sometimes get when applying a coverstitch hem, where the looper thread on the back pulls a bit too tight, and causes a ridge between the two lines of stitching on the front side.
And then I just run it through the machine easy-peasy to create the finished hem.
But I just performed a little magic trick here: I only actually have one spool of matching thread, so how did I thread both the looper and two needles? Well, easily enough: I wound a pair of bobbins to hold the needle thread.
Of course, the keen eyed amongst you will also notice that this isn't my Brother CV3550 coverstitch machine, but in fact my Singer Professional 5 overlocker/coverstitch machine. Why would I be using that one, you ask?
Well, if you scroll back up and click on the video showing how the type 605 stitch is formed, you'll notice that there's quite a lot going on below the fabric. The needles have to come down behind the looper to pick up the looper thread, then the looper has to retract and then slide behind the needles to pick up the needle threads, and then the needles retract, the fabric advances, and the cycle starts all over again. This is pretty much the most complicated and finicky sewing mechanism that you'll find on a domestic machine, and my Brother was not having a good day.
In particular, it was not managing the threads on the bottom side quite well enough, leading to the looper picking up the previous needle thread loop along with the two new needle threads that it was supposed to grab. This unfortunately completely jams the machine when it happens, which requires fully stopping the seam, undoing the mess that it made, and starting from the beginning all over again.
I spent a good 2 hours trying to figure out what was going wrong with the machine, and I have a bit of a hunch, but more on that in a future post. For now, the easiest path forward was to use the Singer, since it was behaving itself much better, and I was able to successfully sew the hem with it.
And it looks pretty damn good if you ask me.
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