Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Needle Styles and Threads

There are different families got some fabric swatches over here I'm gonna grab to show you there are different needles that you use for different fabrics that you so with, and I won't spend a lot of time on this because I have so many things I want to show you, but I'll just kind of give you an overview of this because you may or may not be aware of that. There are differences, and this might solve some problems that you've been having so needles if I could just go to the next slide there our basic needle styles, of course, their specialty needles as well, but there's a regular point needle, which is here, those air for the woven fabrics. And we have a ballpoint needle, which are for the knit fabrics. We have heavy duty needles here, which are for very, very heavy duty fabric, and we have actually needles for leather. So here with the differences are is your regular point needles. If you look at the diagram on the monitor, the one on the left has a sharper point. The one in the middle ...

is the ballpoint needle and has a little bit more rounded point the heavy duty needle is it has a bigger hole in it or what we call an eye of the needle because with a heavy duty needle that's, usually for very heavy fabrics like layers of denim for outdoor fabrics, things like that and when the thread goes in that one, you need a bigger eye because the threat is thicker of a thick thread won't know won't usually go through the eye of a smaller needle. So back over here to my table top, where I have my different styles here, going to talk about the regular point needles and examples. If you take a look at the package, what you want to look for is style twenty twenty for woven fabrics, or you can use a style two thousand this is a chromium needle. They have a special coding or composition to them. They're a little longer lasting than twenty twenty needles you can sew with them longer before they need to be replace. We often recommend these for machine embroidery because of the hours of stitching that embroidery does at a time when it's embroidering a design, but you can use either of these with great confidence in your ninety nine sixty but there, and also I might just do a little sidebar here you want to use singer needles in your singer machine. Other needles other brands of needles are just a tiny, tiny tiny bit longer than singer needles and you might feel like you're selling successfully with them at first but after maybe three, four hours of sewing if they're going to be rubbing down in the lower area of your machine and you might start getting skipped stitches you might even cause damage to your machine. So you definitely want to use singer needles in your singer machine and if you have any questions about that you can certainly contact our customer service department at singer not be happy to talk with you about that further. Here I have an example of some woven fabrics which are fabrics that have a warp and weft thread there woven fabric where stretching its are emitted like almost if you think of looking at how a sweater is needed. The stitches air knitted like that on a knit fabric woven fabrics are woven. Here is a address weight wool this one is a cotton velvet or you might think of it is velveteen some folks called it velveteen this is a cotton silk blend this is a silky here a couple of different versions of a silky this is a flannel here's, another kind of metallic e fabric this even though it looks like a marbled looking fabric it's actually just a print on a quilting cotton this is silk do peony this's it like patio furniture, kind of fabric and outdoor fabric, his burlap and denim. So these are examples of woven fabrics that she would use either a style twenty twenty for a two thousand chromium needle. Your knit fabrics are things like this s where you have this one is ah, stretch floor it's got four way stretch here's, a t shirt kind of fabric on upon thine it nice firm weight of knit fabric, that very famous baby blanket fabric that everyone loves here's, a four way stretch swimsuit type of fabric ribbing stretch rib and sweatshirt fleece or polar type police. So those are examples of knit fabric for which you would use a ballpoint needle, either. The chromium version of that is a two thousand one, the regular the excuse me, the, uh other style is the twenty forty five and it says knit fabrics. Some of the packaging may look different wherever you go, some some of the even older styles of packaging or kind of a blue colored package. But as long as you're looking for twenty twenty or two thousand for years womans or twenty forty five in two thousand one for your knits, you'll have the right needle. The other thing you want to look at here are the sizes of the needle you'll notice here I've got eighty or eleven ninety or fourteen one hundred or sixteen the same for all of these and the smaller number means a thinner needle and the larger number means a thicker needle sew it just kind of goes hand in hand with fabric weights you would use the smaller needle for for thinner fabrics the medium weight for like your cottons and linens and so on the heavier needle for the thicker fabrics we also have this heavy duty needle that even goes bigger that's a size twenty twenty says heavy duty here size one ten or eighteen that's even bigger than what you have in these packages and that would be for your you know, really heavy duty things like lots of layers of denim or canvas so make sure you're using the right if you use too small of a needle like if you tried to do really heavy duty sewing with, say, a size eleven needle your needle is going to just bend and break it's like you have to use the right tool for the job so that use the right style and the right size for what you're selling. We also have leather needles and leather needles our style twenty thirty two they come in a couple different sizes as well and this is where what you would use for sowing your pleasures um here's here's oilcloth and see the shiny shiny vinyl here's this is an actual leather skin here swayed cloth finals. You would use a wedge point needle it's slices into the the fabric rather than making a hole so you'll get a cleaner cut into your leathers. And they also have a larger eye, because normally these air sewn also with sort of like a more of a top stitching type of threads, so the eye is a little larger to accommodate the heavier threads you use for those. Okay, so that's enough about needles. The other thing I want to do then is tell you a little bit about threads, because this all goes kind of hand in hand. Now, over here I have an example of, uh, all purpose thread and these two that I'm showing you right now are just happen to be from coats and clark. There are several different styles on the market today. Some of this is their older style school, and this is what they're newer ones look like wherever you're shopping now today on the reason I wanted to bring this up, though, is if you remember some of the some of you who have these there's a little slit on one end where when you pulled first, pull that thread out, too unreal it off the spool. Sometimes you have this up on your machine, and as you're sowing, your machine gets stock or you might have broken a needle, and it could be that your thread when it was unreeling kind of got stuck in that little slit. You just want to make sure flipped that school over so that that split is pointing over to the other side and you won't have that happening more. The threat is perfectly fine. You just want to make sure that little slip doesn't give you an obstruction while you're selling, but what they've done today know they've got this groove on here that your threat just slides into so they did away with that slit and they just talkin like so and it's really nice. But anyway, this is all purpose thread, garment construction, sewing curtains, sewing pillows all purpose thread perfect for that. Now, when you want to do decorative machine sewing like we were talking about just a little bit ago, you may want to use something like a ray on thread and ray on threads are meant for simply that is machine embroidery or decorative machine stitching. I've got a few different brands here. This one is from robison anton this is sulky, these air sulky as well they're just a couple of smaller schools. This one is from codes, says machine embroidery and they're generally and thirty weight or forty weight the thirty weight is thie heavier of the two and the forty is the thinner of the two on the spool is usually marked somewhere with what it is here for example on the coats says forty wait right here on these sulky schools for example some they even these even indicated with a separate color but the thirty weight says sulky thirty that means that's the thicker one here this is sulky forty it's the thinner thinner one but these if you compare it to an all purpose thread and you look at the difference between them you can see the sheen or the shine on the spool and when you do beautiful decorative stitching like some of these that you have built in your machine they look completely gorgeous here's an example of a ray on thread we've got some of our stitches here where we did this is a stick your machine is capable of doing stitch elongation where when you select the stitch you can say one x two x three x four x five x that's what this is here how I can take that same stitch and we just sewed it out at the five different options you have and look at here with the round thread what you're able to do it it has got that beautiful shine to it with these little drawstring jewelry pouches that we made okay, so the rayon threads are great for that right now you would never want to do garment construction with a ray on threat because it's very weak as faras that would be concerned it's strictly for decorative machines sewing I'm for decorative stitching I mean and when you do your decorative stitching what you want to put in the bobbin when you do that is some bob and phil this one happens to be from robison anton it is they're both polyester but they're spun much finer and they both make a black and they both make a white this one's from sulky the difference is that because they've spun much finer you can get a lot more of it onto your bobbin eso you're not having to re thread you're bob and as quickly if you're doing a lot of decorative machine stitching it'll also give you less density on the back side of your work with your decorative stitching so you do depending on the color of your fabric or the color of your thread you choose either the these years they just come in black and white um and then you would put your ray on in the needle for for all purpose sewing you put the same thread in the needle generally as you have in the bob and you don't do a bob and phil for construction this is this is like a decorative stitching scenario here this is construction also for decorative stitching you might have um, see if I have another one over here. Here it is the top twelve wait here is, um some other ones that are good projects stitching, but you'd want to use a bigger needle for these. This is from sochi. This is called this says right on the package. Thirty weight this one says twelve wait, the smaller number means it's even thicker yet so you definitely want to make sure you've got a large enough eye on your needle pull the thread when he thread your machine, pull the thread and make sure it moves without any obstruction on and you'll know them then it'll stitch okay, if it's tugging at all, you need to go to a bigger needle, though it has a bigger eye toe work with these, um, here's another thirty weight from coats and clark so whatever is available to you wherever you live, we also have a jeans thread this thread eyes it even says jeans or top stitching on it, these common very popular colors for doing exactly that is hemming genes that kind of similar colors that you find in commercial jeans I've seen blue, I've seen white, I've seen gray like a pale blue, but this probably most common color is this gold and it is a very it's a thick top stitching thread for which you probably want to use a size sixteen needle when you saw this to make sure it goes through the eye of the needle because the I'll be a little larger. So for your hemming up your kids, jeans or hemming hemminger genes, if you need to alter them after you buy them, that would be the thread you want for that there's an outdoor thread that would be great for any of your outdoor patio furniture type things it's treated with a special material or coding so that it can withstand getting wet, and so that's a good choice for that overall purpose thread for stitching your outdoor projects. And then we have our monofilament nylon thread. Ah, this one is from coats. This one is from sulky there's, other brands as well, and they will all make a what the darker one is usually called smoke, and the lighter one is usually called clear, and you would choose them depending on the fabric color or the trim color I like to use thes for top stitching trims onto things when I do things like the sequin bag here I used to smoke colored monofilament to zigzag over the sequence so it blends in well with the color here. If this was white sequins on white, I might have used something like this clear one like that so you just decide based on your project but those air for where you just kind of want to have it used to attach trims usually and I have it sort of just disappears so you see the trim but not the stitching and then we have our metallics and a reason I want to bring this up is I often hear people say that their machine doesn't like metallic thread and actually it's probably just that you're not setting up properly to sew with metallic thread so there's different kinds that got caught on something there okay anyway here's a um there we go the general metallic thread that does beautiful, beautiful stitching I have a christmas stocking here somewhere that we did some were here on this quilt this gives you an example of where we use metallic thread and I can open this up more later we talk about free motion work, but here's an example of where we use metallic thread to embellish hour it comes in different colors it's not just silver and gold like for holidays. It comes in all kinds of different colors, but you can use it for free motion work. You can use it for satin stitching, but what you want to do is set it up correctly in your machine and use the right size of needle if you're the machine isn't what shreds metallic thread it's, usually the needle is that the culprit there? So you either have an old needle, adult needle or not the right sized needle, and the other thing is, is the's usually are better when they're sewing in the upright position, and so what you would want to do there is put your auxiliary spool pin in your machine and have the threads standing upright so it's feeding off the machine straight into the machine instead of twisting when it's laying a sideways here is an example of that two. This is one of those more filament type of threads. If you feel this with your fingers and look at it really close it's not twisted like a thread it's flat, and it would almost remind you of old fashioned christmas tree tensile if you look at it real close and when this starts to twist that this can also stretch so feeding them flat into the machine by having them sit on your spool pin that's a good way to keep those from twisting and then making sure that your needle is has a large enough I to accommodate it. So that's just a quick little thread lesson. Hopefully that may be resolved some of the stitching issues you may or may not have been having, regardless of what kind of machine you have.