My Serger

I love my serger.  Peggy talked me into buying it years ago when we realized we really were in the business of weaving kitchen towels.  If you have never used a serger, it's sort of like sewing a zig-zag stitch on your regular sewing machine but so much better.  It will do stretch edges for anything made of knitted fabric.  It cuts the edge smooth and binds it so it won't unravel.  It is a godsend for a 12 yard run of kitchen towels.  It will cut and bind each edge quickly and easily.

Having said all that, the serger is a piece of black box magic.  It is a complicated spaghetti bowl of 4 threads where each thread needs to be in the exact right place, under the correct tension and with the correct stitch length in order to work.

Suffice it to say, the serger came set up for a 4 thread locking stitch and I have never attempted to change it.  Now, I realize I am a fairly intelligent person and I have a pretty good grasp of basic engineering.  If there was a good reason to change to either the left needle three thread stitch or the right needle three thread stitch I could probably make it happen.  But the four thread stitch works just fine for me.  Right up until it doesn't.

I was not having a great day when I pulled my natural colored cotton towels off the loom.  We had sick animals and all the rest.  When I sat down at the serger it had decided it was on vacation and not about to work for me.  Well, rats.

Peggy, of course, graciously offered me her serger until I could take mine apart and figure out what wasn't working.  It was a lovely offer but all I could see was me doing something horrible to her serger so I declined.

Fast forward to this past week.  I had zig-zagged the ends of my train of towels to get them washed and dried.  I had cut them apart.  Now I was either going to have to zig-zag them on my sewing machine or take a close look at my serger.  I chose the latter.

As usual, the worry of how horrible it would be to fix the serger was wildly over-exaggerated.  It took me all of 15 minutes to pull out all the threads and rethread each one.  I could have finished it sooner but my hands are too big for the small spaces and I couldn't find my tweezers.

Now the serger is working perfectly!