But I had this cute heart garland pinned for awhile and thought it would be a perfect project for a low skill sewer like me. I even had everything already on hand so it would be a no cost project. The only problem was that the sewing machine and I haven't talked since December and I was thinking it wouldn't be happy.
I was right.
My problem was threads that were getting pulled down and caught up in the lower bobbin area - which after extensive Googling I found out is called the birds nest. This is appropriate since every time I tried to sew something I ended up with a nest of threads wrapped around this whole area.
So I took everything apart, clean and oiled my machine, and re-threaded.
Same problem.
I adjusted the top and lower tension.
No difference.
I turned it off and left it sitting on the kitchen table to think about what it had done.
I think it laughed at me.
In a last ditch effort the next day I re-threaded it again adjusting how the top thread spool was
secured. And for some reason it worked.
Wrong |
Right |
Because I was working with stuff I already had around the house, and I don't follow instructions exactly, I did make some changes.
1. My strips were 2 inches wide - it worked better with my scrap pieces of felt and the size of felt balls I had (they were 1/4")
2. I didn't have a marking pen - so I just used a scrap of paper as a template to cut my hearts
3. I cut my heart to be 1/2 inch thick (instead on 3/4) - it just worked better with the smaller height and smaller felt balls
As I said before this was a super easy project and required basically no sewing skills. If you want to give this a try I would suggest the following
- Mark with a small dot where you will thread the hearts. When you are marking the cut lines (which would probably result is more uniform sizes then my template method) mark with a small dot where you will thread the hearts. you can mark on the inside - or the outside which will be covered by the felt ball. I eyeballed it and the hearts on my garland are a slightly different heights and depths.
- Using clear fishing line. I lost my fishing line (lost, because since I haven't been fishing in 20years I know I didn't use the enormous spool up) so I used while thread instead. I find this bunches and tangles a lot and is more noticeable.
- Make extra hearts. Since they are so easy to make you might as well make more while you are at it. I would have liked to have a longer garland but I already put everything away when I was stringing the hearts so just left it