Machine Minute: Easy Ruffles: Serger Tips

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Linda, and today's machine minute is brought to you by Baby Lock and the Imagine serger. Today I'm going to show you how a few simple changes to your serger can help you make ruffles or gathered edges. Ruffles can be tough to make on a regular sewing machine with making two lines of sewing and then having to gather along those threads and the threads can break. With the serger it's easy as long as you understand how your serger works. So what you want to do on your serger (and your settings may be slightly different) is to change your differential feed. In this case, I want to make sure that this is set on A, which is regular serging. If I wanted to change it, this little lever here will do it, but I want it on A, which is your regular serging. Second, I want to change my differential feed. Differential feed is how much the bottom and how much the top feed. So in this case, I want to go up to 2, which means that my top is going to feed in at a different rate than my bottom. In addition, I want to change the stitch length to 4. I'm going to leave my stitch length where it is at a medium. And if you want additional gathers, I'll show how you can do that by pulling the left needle thread. So now we're going to start serging (or in this case, gathering). And you can see it start to gather up in the back. You want to do this with a single layer of fabric. Again, because of its differential feed shift, you're going to get the best gathering results out of a single layer of fabric. If you double over that fabric, it won't ruffle the same way. Now if I want to gather that up a little tighter, I'm going to find that left needle, which is going to be this thread here. Just give it a little tug. Just give it a little tug to make sure it's the right thread. But you can see I'm also able to gather it up a little more just by pulling on that thread. So that's how you make a ruffle using your serger.