Over the weekend, Greg & Mel (and the posse) were here - more on that later. But while Mel was here, we decided to make some Valentine's Day shirts for the kiddos. We made one for Greyson that came out super adorable!
Then we made a turtle shirt for Addi but of course we forgot to take a picture of it. When the kids wear these shirts, hopefully Mel will send me pics of them in them so I can show them to you. Anyways, while we were making Addi's shirt, my embroidery machine started making some AWFUL noises! It sounded like the needle was striking the throat plate of the machine or something. We made it through Addi's shirt but I told her we better wait to do Aubrey's another time after I fix whatever the problem was. I looked through the machine's manual for possible causes of noisiness and it didn't have a single thing! Then I searched all over the internet looking for anyone who had heard their machine making similar noises...still no success. So I decided to just take all the cover plates off and thoroughly clean the machine, change the needle and just look for anything that doesn't quite look right. I didn't know if I'd be able to figure it out or not but since I wasn't able to get any other ideas, I figured it was at least a place to start. I start taking the machine apart and almost immediately I see something that looks like it could be causing the problem...Normally, when I clean out the fuzz and lint around the bobbin casing, I get around this much lint:
Well I guess I haven't been very vigilant about maintenance for my embroidery machine...Bad Ashley! Today I got this much lint out of the machine:
After cleaning it, I decided to check the manual for my Bernina sewing machine to see if it said anything about machines being noisy...and sure enough it said that a buildup of lint is the most likely cause of noises. Granted that's my sewing machine and not my embroidery machine but it still gave me a high confidence that this will fix the problem. So I finished cleaning it up, changed the needle and tidied up the case. Then I loaded some scrap fabric into a small hoop to do a test.
Fail! I must not have done a good job rethreading the bobbin because the shirt got stuck in the feed dogs and all that thread spooled up! Yikes! See the hole in the pic below? But after I rethreaded the bobbin I tried again...much better this time.
The stitching came out great - the tension and balance of the thread was better so the text looked smoother. The crazy noise was gone and it was back to its usual hum. I think I finally fixed it, yay!! After successfully sewing the test piece, I was ready to go ahead and make Aubrey's valentine's shirt. Mel and I had already kind of talked about what it would look like so it was easy as pie.
Check out how great the stitching quality is around those guitars - it's smooth and you can't see any spots where the white bobbin thread got pulled to the top. This machine was seriously a great purchase!
About time I did a sewing related post eh? There should be a couple more cool posts coming from me soon!
About time I did a sewing related post eh? There should be a couple more cool posts coming from me soon!
