Serging my way to neat edges

Please excuse the bad quality pictures, but my mobile camera doesn’t behave in low light conditions. Same as Gerry, just that he does it in any light conditions.

My birthday this year was nothing special, there was nothing to remember and some things to forget (like a gastroenteritis), we didn’t go out to celebrate (the only think I can do outside involving putting things in my mouth is drinking plain water) and it was Monday (who doesn’t hate Mondays?). But there was something at least that helped to bear it. This was the year that I got ill, that I broke my nose, got a vocal cord paralyzed, lost friends (a side effect of being chronically ill); but it’s also the year that I got a serger! During months and years I’ve been suffering in silence about my poor and messy edges. My sewing machine has a faux overlocker foot, and I was all the time between zigzags and faux overlocker stitches. But none of them made me 100% happy. A few times I opted for French or flat felled seams, but it was more work and in some cases the fabric and the project called for something else. I delayed the purchase first because we were living in a tiny apartment, and then because I had a lot of sudden expenses (health, new apartment, health, and health). So I always said to myself that I could live with what I had, that anyway nobody was going to see the inside of my clothes. But Koen came with this present on the day that I needed to be cheered up the most.

As this machine is something that I wished but also something that was a bit out of my reach, all related to it was a mystery and almost magical. The truth is I knew nothing else than it made neat edges. Period. I didn’t know how you get those results. It was like the principles behind a car engine. No idea. Well, maybe I knew a bit more about this last topic. But Koen foresaw this and included also this wonderful book:

Yes, Gerry already chewed up the borders when I was not paying attention. It seems he’s not only interested in my pins: he’s also interested in serging my projects!

I caught here the engineer infraganti while he was trying to fix my serger tension. Thanks to him I learned to thread it from scratch, that think that should not be named.

The first day I was worried that I was going to feel overwhelmed by so many new things, techniques and concepts, but I broke the ice with my new machine but serging the edges of my last project. It took me some scraps to reach the right tension, but this looks good to me.

I’ll show you what I made in my next post. It’s something that I wanted to make for quite some time, and I’ve finally found the perfect pattern.