Baby Lock Machine Training: Utility Stitches & Feet | Quilt Beginnings

hello it's pam again at quilt beginnings in dublin ohio and today we're going to focus on your basic utility stitches and the feet that come with the machines so when you turn your sewing machine on if it's sewing or sewing in embroidery so i'm working on the solar so i have sewing and embroidery but if you're on a crescendo or an aria or one of those machines you're just going to have the sewing field so anyways to get started we're going to go ahead and touch the sewing category and when i touch the sewing category depending on which machine you're on you may have your categories across the top of your machine or you may have the categories going down here so depending on which machine you're on the screen may look a little different but your icons are going to be very much the same so when we turn the machine on and we go to sewing you're going to notice that the machine always defaults to stitch 03 and if you look at the top you're going to see that that is the straight stitch in the middle so what happens is if it defaulted to stitch a one and i come over to here you're going to see that that's straight stitch left position and it puts your needle in the far left position you can set your machine so it comes up to that stitch but you want to make sure if you do that that you have your open plate on so i'm going to remove my plate from the solaris and show you that this one has an opening right here some of the plates have a single hole opening and there's only a single hole in the middle so that's why the machine defaults to stitch three so it's straight stitch in the middle so that you if you don't have on the right foot or you don't have on the right stitch plate you're going to be okay you won't break a needle so we're going to leave the machine at the default and we're going to go to stitch 103 and that's where every machine defaults to when you look at this you're going to see that it tells you what foot that you're going to use so we're going to be using the j foot people ask me all the time where are the feet marked so if i take off my j foot and to take a foot off you simply push on the black button on the back of the ankle and the foot falls down and if you look at your foot all of the feet are marked and you can usually find it right in the middle and there's a j there it's hard to see on camera but that is the j foot the foot letter should always be facing you when you sew so some of the feet feel kind of weird when you put them on for example the buttonhole foot so just know that the foot needs to be facing you you're going to see that the foot has a little bar here and if you look on the side of your ankle there's an indentation so if you look from the side it's very easy just to push this foot straight up and click it on now some people like to take and drop the foot on so if you press this and drop the ankle it will go on but if you have a foot with the flange it makes it difficult to do so this is straight stitch in the middle and when we look on our screen you're going to see that there's width length and on some machines it has left right shift and tension so what this means is these are the defaults so if it doesn't have left right shift if you change the width on a straight stitch you're simply changing your needle position anything that's in a black box is the default so if i want to change my length if i depress this this is making it a longer stitch and if i press and hold it stop so 5.0 that would be a basting stitch now i'm going to come over here and i can hit reset and it takes it back to the black box if you change anything on your machine from default when you turn the machine off and back on it resets so if you change a stitch and you really like it and you want that to be your default you simply need to depress memory and it will save that in memory and when you turn your machine on it will always come to that stitch so some of the machines don't have the left right shift but the width is what would change the needle position here if i change the left right shift it moves my needle position so you have one or the other and you can play with that so when you turn your machine on it comes to straight stitch in the middle okay so i just want to show you the different functions on here so i'm using white thread on denim fabric so you can see it so when i depress my presser foot and i start and i'm going to slow this machine down so you can see the machine is just simply going to sew out of the box so it's not doing any tie off stitch it's just sewing notice when i stop on most of your machines it's not going to it's not going to put the needle down and raise the presser foot if you look here this has already been depressed okay but out of the box this is not depressed so when i'm sewing every time i stop the needle stays in the down position but i can't really rotate my fabric and when i get finished if i wanted to do a tie off i would have to hit the reverse button and cut the thread so let me just cut the thread and show you it had a lot of steps to do this so you have some fast easy steps on your machine and they're right here so this reverse button and your scissors if you have both of those depressed it tells the machine that you want to do a tie off when you start sewing some of your machines show that the needle can end in the down position or the up position but the machines also have what we call a pivot function so if i depress this key it gives you the pivot function so now when i start sewing it's going to do a tie off so right now it's going to do a tie off in the form of forward backward forward so if you watch i'm going to kind of do it in slow motion it's doing three stitches forward three backwards there's my tie off and it's sewing notice now that when i stop because i have the pivot function now i can pivot i don't have to put my presser foot back down i simply step on the foot pedal and it goes again and when i stop sewing needle down press her foot up so it gives me the pivot function now when i get to the end because i have those tie offs engaged i can either touch the reverse button or the end of pattern button so i'm going to touch the reverse button it does three backwards three forwards cut the threads and lifts the presser foot so i don't have to handle all of these it does it automatically so i wanted to explain the difference between stitch 103 and 104 if you look at stitch 103 you're going to see two little hash marks at the top that's telling you that your tie off is going to be in the form forward backward forward if you look at my fabric you're going to see that there's the thickness of thread right there that's usually covered in your quarter inch seam allowance if i choose however stitch number 104 you're going to see that there's a little dot at the top so what that's going to do if my tie off is going to be in the form of three little stitches all in one place so that if you're sewing on thin fabric lingerie or you have a really small seam allowance you don't want to see that tie off so now when i step on the foot petal it's going to do three little stitches in one place so we're doing one two three and then it starts sewing again when i stop needle down presser foot up this time if i go to my end of pattern button it's going to do a tie off at the end of the pattern and in this case it's just a single stitch so you can see here that my tie off you can barely see there is a knot there but it's not the heavy knot like we're seeing on this one so whenever you look at your stitches on your machine if you see two little hashtags like on stitch 101 your tie off's going to be in the form forward back forward and if you see a little dot like on stitch 102 or 104 your tie off is going to be in the form of three little dots if you touch this one it does a forward back forward tie off and this one does the single tie offs and those are going to change a little bit when we get to decorative stitches so you want to play with that again if i wanted to change my length my width i change it here and if i hit reset it puts it back to the default let's look at a zigzag stitch so i'm going to go to stitch 109 and again it might be different depending on what model you're on but when i depress 109 it shows you my zigzag stitch in real time and it shows the j foot okay so if i do a zigzag stitch and i'm just going to do a little zigzag stitch right here you can see it did a tie off when i stop the needle goes down presser foot up but if i play with my length or my width so let's make the width wider and you can see as i press and hold and i make it wider it changes real time on the screen and i'm going to make my stitch narrower shorter and you can see that i'm getting a pretty heavy zigzag stitch so i want to show you the difference when i go ahead and stitch this stitch it starts doing a stitch and you're going to see that all of a sudden the fabric stops feeding so this shows that we're going to use our j foot but i want to show you the difference between two feet so this is a beautiful satin stitch but it's eventually going to stop in the machine and the reason why is the foot so this is a j foot right here and i'm also going to pull out my end foot so if you pull both feet out you're going to see that they look very similar on the top the j is marked here the n is marked here if i turn them over you can see that the j foot stops so it's open to here and then all of a sudden we've got a solid back so what happens is that zigzag stitch is going through when that zigzag after you've gone about oh 3 8 of an inch there's no place for that zigzag stitch to form but if you look at the end foot i have an open channel here so whenever you're using a heavy satin stitch even if it says a j foot i would recommend changing to an end foot so that that zigzag that heavy whatever stitch it is but it's just a heavy thick stitch it can form right underneath this channel so if you have an issue using a zigzag or any of the decorative stitches that are very tight you're probably going to want to put on your end foot so that it has a place for that stitch to go underneath the foot okay so that is your zigzag and your straight stitch okay so next let's look at a stretch stitch so a lot of people get home and they start sewing and we as quilters sew on cotton fabric but all of a sudden they'll sew on something that's stretchy and they'll use their regular sewing stitch so i just want to show you real quick that if i were to use my straight stitch just a straight stitch in the middle and i start sewing down and i take it out of here what's going to happen is when i pull on this it's going to break the thread so just know that there are different stitches on your machine for different kinds of fabrics and different applications so if you're looking for your stretch stitch on most machines it's stitch 05 and if you're unsure if you look up here it says triple stretch stitch so whenever you're sewing on stretchy fabric a it helps to use a jersey needle and when i'm sewing on this if you think about this when you're using a stretch stitch this is going to get stretched over something a cuff your waist whatever so you're going to pull on this just a little bit because no matter how we sew this unless i'm on a serger when i pull you're going to expect a thread to break so if i use my triple stretch stitch and i go ahead and put my presser foot down i'm just going to pull on this a little bit but you can see that the stitch it does kind of a forward back forward thus the triple and it causes the fabric to it will pucker a little bit because it's a stretch fabric but when i get finished and take it out of here i'm going to show you what it looks like and this i can pull on and it doesn't break if you have any questions your feet are in your book but when i pull up my triple stretch stitch on your baby lock machine and this is a really nice feature there's a question mark so if i touch the question mark and i go into pattern explanation it will tell you what the stitch is and what its application is and then it shows you at the bottom what the defaults are so if you have any questions on what something is used for don't hesitate babylock has a built-in pattern explanation and it'll tell you what that stitch is for okay the next stitch that we're going to do is the overcasting stitch okay and on the overcasting stitch we're going to use the g foot one thing that i wanted to show you is a lot of your machines come with this really cool tray so the solaris has three trays some of the machines have one tray but as you press your feet in here if they're incorrectly when you turn it over nothing's going to fall out now if you're constantly using your utility stitches this part of your machine also opens up and this fits beautifully in there so it only houses one tray at a time but if you're sewing this general foot tray is the one that i would keep in while i'm sewing okay so to do an overcasting stitch and overcasting finishes the edge of something so the overcasting stitch is the g foot so i'm going to take my g foot out i'm going to pop off my j foot and put my g foot on the one thing i want to show you about the g foot it's mark g but there's this little flange right here so the idea when i'm doing my overcasting stitch is to put my fabric right up against this flange so that um it's your your marker for the fabric so i'm going to go ahead and put this on and there are several overcasting stitches they're listed in your manual but they're also shown here right on the screen so if i go to my overcasting stitch on the solarus it starts at stitch 116. so it always looks like a stitch that has a straight line and it kind of bows out to the right and when i touch this stitch you're going to see it shows that i need my g foot and it's an overcasting stitch so 116 17 18 19 20 they're all for different things so if i go to my question mark and my pattern explanation 116 reinforces light and medium weight fabrics i'm on jean fabric so i'm going to go a little bit heavier again if i don't know i'm going to hit return and close 117 let's see what that one's for i'm going to go to my question mark my pattern explanation and it says heavy weight fabric so that's what i'm going to use for my jean fabric again use the built-in tutorials so now when i place my fabric here i want to put it so that my fabric is right up against the edge of that foot so my fabric's going to go right up against that little flange same as if i were using a quarter inch foot and i'm just going to step on it and here is an overcasting stitch so it doesn't replace a serger but it's certainly quick if you just want to go ahead and finish one edge of a fabric okay the next stitch is going to be the blind hem stitch and the blind hem stitch is going to be in category 2 and it is so up here or on the side is where your stitches are and the blind hem stitches run from 201 to 204 thereabouts depending which machine you're on so this is a blind hem stitch and this is what we use often to do hems especially on men's pants or hems of a skirt something like that the hardest part about the blind hem stitch is getting the fabric in the machine correctly so when we do a blind hem stitch it's best if you press it and we usually take and fold the fabric up twice so that there's no raw edge i'm going to try to make it easy for you to remember if this were a pair of pants or a skirt okay and think of as an adult pair of pants i don't want the pants jammed up in here there's not enough room so we always want the bulk of the fabric to be on the left of the machine so it's hanging off the machine bed we are also going to work from the inside of the pants so pretend this is my pants and what i've got here is i folded it twice the bulk is hanging to the left of the machine and the inside of the pants are showing what you want to do then is you're going to fold it and this is the hardest part to remember i'm taking my fabric and folding it back like this so the bulk is still hanging there this is my hem this is the pants so i'm going to show you that again it's folded over twice i'm simply folding my fabric back one time and i want about a quarter inch to show and what i'm going to do is i'm going to drop my presser foot and i want the flange right up against the fold and this takes just a little bit of practice but you can get good real quick you always want to sew on fabric and if you think about it on a blind hem your hems are circular so you've got a finished pant leg or finished skirt legs so you are always going to be sewing on fabric and i usually start near a seam but i'm going to sew and i'm using white thread i would not be using white thread on black fabric but i want to make sure that i'm pushing my fabric into the fold and i'm doing this from an angle and it's going to take three stitches on the folded fabric and then it's going to bite the fabric i'm going to pull this out and when we look at it you're getting three stitches here and then it bites the fabric three stitches and it bites the fabric so now when i pull my pant leg back like this and open it up i have a little bite like that that's what you want your blind hem to look like so again it was in the machine like this i pressed it against my fold it does three or four stitches and then bites the fabric when i pull it open this is what i'm going to see on the inside but you're not going to use white thread you're going to use something that shows and when i turn my pant leg over it looks like this if you get large stitches you need to make an adjustment you can do it with your width or how close that fold is but this is a pretty good stitch length right here it's going to hold and it's not going to show so that's your blind hem and again you have several different blind hems to choose from and you can go to that question mark pattern explanation and see which to use on stretch fabrics which to use on woven fabric and which ones to use on heavy fabric okay the next thing i wanted to mention was the strength of this machine so let's pretend we were doing a jeans hem so here's a seam and i cut the fabric so that you can see that there's a seam in here and i'm going to fold this like i was doing a decorative hem on a pair of jeans so now i have the fold and i folded the fabric over twice so i'm going to go through this thickness and i just want you to see that the baby lock machine can sew through all of this so i'm going to go ahead and just sew through because people worry is this machine would i break a needle can i go through and you can see that it's sewed right over all of that no problem at all so it'll go through many layers beautiful stitch so don't be afraid to sew on any kind of fabric okay so as we move through the categories we kind of touched on category one which has a lot of your straight zigzag stitches all of that and if you look here on some of your machines you can scroll through like this or if you have a bar or an arrow here we can scroll through this and on some of your machines you just have an arrow here and at the top so you can scroll through so these are a lot of the stitches that we use for everyday sewing category two is some decorative stitches some other stitches which we'll get to in just a minute category 3 is more of the same category 4 is where we're going to find our buttonholes so if you touch the buttonholes you're going to see that the buttonholes that look complete those are one-step buttonholes in other words you just put it on touch the go button and it makes the buttonhole the buttonholes that don't look complete towards the bottom those are buttonholes that you're going to have to do some measuring on and it takes a little bit of finesse to do that so basically the bottom line is if your button fits in your buttonhole foot you can do it as a one-step buttonhole i'm going to show you this in just a second if the button is too big and it doesn't fit in the a foot then you're going to have to do a manual buttonhole where you're actually going to have to measure it now if you have an embroidery machine the embroidery machine has buttonholes built in and so you can do buttonholes up to four inches and that makes it easier so just make sure if you want the easiest buttonhole that you've got to choose a button not one of those gigantic decorative buttons but something that fits in the in the a foot so we've got two different kinds of buttonhole feet for the baby lock machines most of them with the exception of the solaris comes with this a foot and you can see there's the a and as i mentioned before the a needs to be facing you it's going to hook onto your machine at this little bar the same way that all of your feet go on on this foot you're going to see that you have a silver bar and a white plastic bar this moves up and down at the back of the foot if i pull this down the button has to fit in the back here so i'm going to take my button and i'm going to pull it down okay if your button is bigger than this space so about an inch and a quarter you're going to have to do a manual buttonhole or go to your embroidery field if you have that so i'm going to go ahead and push this button in here okay and if you are on one of the other machines not the solaris the way this works is the distance between the silver bar and this plastic bar is the same distance as your buttonhole so if i were on a destiny or an ariel path not a pathfinder that's an embroidery only but if i were on any of the crescendos arias any of those machines my buttonhole foot is going to clip on like this okay so we're going to hook this on and you can see this slides back and forth on most of your machines there's a little gray plastic piece up here that you're going to pull down and you're going to pull it down behind this silver piece what happens is when you start the machine that silver piece it's going to move and when that great tab hits here it knows to make the tack and start back the other way so if you understand the way the machine's working i think it makes it easier to understand how the buttonhole is forming if you don't pull that bar down the machine is going to give you a message on your screen it's going to say pull that bar down you have to pull it all the way down don't be afraid you can't make a mistake the baby lock machine tells you exactly what you have to do if you're on a solaris your foot is going to look like this and your button is going to go in the front of the machine so we're going to pull yours back and forth like this and you don't have to worry about that gray piece there your buttonhole foot has two pieces and what that allows you to do is if you have fragile garments or things with a lot of threads in there you can slide your fabric in between so it doesn't grab your fabric your buttonhole foot is going to fit on the same way the a's going to be facing you and again you can either drop this down onto the foot or push up on it okay and then if you look at your foot no matter which one you're on you're going to see that there are these three little red tick marks pretend you are making a t in there the top of the t is where the buttonhole is going to start and the way the buttonhole works it starts at the bottom of the buttonhole and works backwards so if you had several buttonholes that you had to put in you want to line up your fabric so that if i formed an imaginary t it's going to start at the crosshairs of that t so once i have my foot on i've got my button in if i'm on a solaris it's in the front if i'm on one of the other machines it's in the back i'm going to lower my presser foot and again on the solaris i've just got this between the two layers so you can see and when i drop this i'm going to choose my buttonhole so let me choose this one and if your machine allows you on some machines you can adjust the length and with the stitch so if you don't think that the buttonhole is has enough stitches in it feel free to adjust your width or your length i always say practice first to make sure you like the look of the buttonhole but i can either use the start stop button or i can use my foot control to run it if i'm going to use my start stop i have to have the foot control disconnected so again when it's green you can go and i'm simply going to drop my presser foot press the button and it's going to do my buttonhole okay so here's the finished buttonhole and again i can adjust the length of the width and the easiest way i find to cut the buttonhole is just to put a pin through here and use my seam ripper and cut up that way when it hits the pin it stops and it doesn't break the button whole stitches okay the next thing we're going to do is actually sew the button on okay so now we're going to sew the button on and i don't sew any buttons on by hand anymore because this machine sews them on so easily so what we're going to use to sew the buttons on is the m foot and once again the m is marked on here you're going to go on your machine and you're going to look for the first stitch after your button holes which is usually stitch 423 and when i touch it you're going to see that it says button sewing and it tells me to use my m foot you may notice automatically that it drops the feed dogs okay the m foot is a very interesting foot for a lot of reasons so first of all if you look on the side here there is this plastic thing that shifts forward and back it's going to be really hard to see on camera because i know it's hard to see in class but when i pull this forward it puts a plastic piece across this bar right here so i pull it back it's off and when i pull it down it puts a plastic piece there so if you are a garment sewer you know that if you are sewing a button that's going to be a functional button not a decorative button you need a little bit of play in there so think about if you purchase a wool coat sometimes you feel like the button is just hanging off like it's almost going to fall off well you need that extra thread in there so the wool coat when you button it it has a place to go so if you're doing the thicker your fabric is the more you need of that loose thread there which is called a shank so with this pull forward that creates a shank and it's a very generous shank so you do want to play around with it i remember when i had my first sewing machine we used to put like a toothpick or a pen underneath your button when you sewed it on so you'd have a little bit of giving the button well that's what this does you're going to find it's very generous so i would start by not using that but if i were using really thick fabric you do want that button to be a little bit looser the second thing that you're going to do is you're going to put this button and we're going to put it on the bottom this bottom ledge and stick it into the foot so it's going pushing down on the metal and the idea is to get the buttonholes lined up with the two red dots now if you've got a four hole button you want to do the bottom two holes first and it's going to make sense when i actually stitch this out so i put my button in with only two holes showing i've touched my stitch 423 and now i'm going to go and attach the foot to my machine on this metal bar okay once i have my foot attached i'm going to put my fabric underneath here so that i can see what i'm doing and we always want to check our buttonhole always always always manually check your buttonhole what i like to do is just pull a little bit of thread out to ensure that it picks up the bobbin thread and i'm going to drop my presser foot and we want to manually hand crank our wheel our hand wheel towards us one whole revolution and you can see that i can see that it's cleared that buttonhole if it doesn't clear the hole just take your seam ripper and adjust it so that it does now most of your buttons have a default it's a standard width so your width on your machine is probably going to work but we've gone to these really big buttons today so if you have a bigger button you may have to adjust your width but i want to hand crank the wheel to clear the first hole and then to make sure clears the second hole it has to clear both holes once it clears both of those holes again i can either use my presser foot or i can use the start stop so i'm just going to touch the start stop and it's going to do my button it's sewing it on if i have my tie offs depressed it would automatically do a tie off so i'm going to go ahead and depress those and i always run it twice i figure if once is good twice is better because i never want to sew that button hole on again so i'm going to go ahead and run it a second time okay okay again i like to run it twice just because most of my buttons are decorative buttons and i don't want anybody pulling the button off but when i'm finished when i put my presser foot up the reason why i did the bottom two holes first is to take this off i've got to pull it forward so this way i can just nudge it forward just a tad line those buttonholes up again so that they line up with the holes drop my presser foot but always check so i'm going to check again make sure it clears both holes and then hit my start stop and when you're done you're just going to pull it forward so if you look the bottom buttonhole was run twice the top one was run once it's all a matter of preference but i've got a nice button sewn on very quickly and i do a lot of decorative projects where i add a lot of buttons and it really is quick to do it this way also i do a lot of projects that have embellishments added so if you were adding let's say a freestanding lace flower or a little butterfly or twine or something like that or anytime i have to do a bow i will use this tactile to tack it down really quickly i like to sew smart i don't say fast i like to sew smart so feel free to use that stitch to tack anything down that you need to tack down the next foot that everyone gets in their treasure of feet is the eye foot which is the zipper foot and the eye foot allows you to move the needle over close to zipper teeth or cording or things like that now the eye foot either goes on the left or the right so it can't go in the middle you can either sew so if i were putting a zipper in i can move my needle to the left or if i'm on this side i can move my needle to the right so basically when i put the zipper foot on and i'm going to choose the left side when i put it on here and i drop my zipper foot if i go to my width or on the case of the solaris if i do my left right shift it moves the needle to the left position so that i can get as close to that zipper as i want to or if i'm doing cording i can get as close to that cording as i need to so the zipper foot's just a standard zipper foot that allows you to get close to things that would otherwise get in the way because if i had a regular presser foot that would come down on the teeth or my cording or whatever it is that i'm attaching to my fabric okay so the feet that come with most of the machines fit in this one tray and the one foot that used to be included that isn't included anymore is the v foot and that's your vertical stitch alignment foot and basically it was just a foot that has a long measurement about an inch long to the right of the foot so that if you were doing really accurate sewing on garments and you needed to get to the 16th of an inch it has that measurement on there it's not included with the machines anymore but it's certainly a foot that we can get for you and if you have any questions give us a call we can tell you um other feet there's all kinds of optional feet listed in your manuals and we can get any of those for you okay if we come back up to our navigation plate we kind of went through some stitches in category one two three four as buttonholes but another cool feature that is on the machine is directional sewing which is category number five so on some of the machines you can only sew left right forward and backwards on some of the machines you also get the 45 degree option and then on the solaris and some of the upper end machines you also get those but you can do them in a zigzag stitch as well as a straight stitch so if you were going to sew like a let's say a label on a bag it's kind of hard to maneuver a bag in and out of here turning it without jamming things up so think about it if i took off my accessory plate i could put my bag onto here lay my label on top of the bag and without turning my bag in any way i can sew in multiple directions so for instance let's say i wanted to sew towards the right on this machine i'm going to touch stitch 505 and when i drop my presser foot it's going to sew towards me so towards the right so here it comes sewing towards the right so you could see how easy that would be to add on to a bag now if i want to sew down or forward i would hit the key or the icon that shows the coming forward and on this machine it's stitch 507 so again when i start it it's going to sew forward and then if i wanted to sew back to the left i would touch my stitch 504 on this machine and it's going to sew to the left so you can see how easy it would be to put a label on a bag without turning it okay another cool feature that it has is and again i could finish sewing my square i've got the option of doing a zigzag stitch so if you were adding a label and you wanted to do kind of a satiny stitch around the edge but then think about binding let's say that you want to do that 45 degree angle on your binding i can touch this stitch number 508 and it is going to sew at a 45 degree angle so there are a lot of built-in stitches here that make sewing on your baby lock really easy so you can see i without turning the bag i could sew an entire square or i could do the 45 degree angle in my sewing okay and then the last category is q or quilters category and a lot of people ask what this category is these are stitches that are in your other categories but what happens is these are stitches that they say quilters use a lot so p or piecing you know there's the zigzag you've got your blanket stitch so if you wanted to you could go into your settings page so i'm going to go home first and i'm going to touch my sewing category and when i touch sewing you see that it comes up to straight stitch in the middle and my default in utility stitch is the straight stitch in the middle if i go into my settings i could go and again it might be different depending on which machine you're on but if i scroll through where you see initial page i could turn it to q and touch ok now when i turn my machine off and back on it's automatically going to come up to the cue or quilter stitch so i like to leave things as they are default um and again when you change that you have to turn it off and back on but the cues is just quilter stitches and you can set your machine so that it automatically goes to that category so one thing that i wanted to mention at the top was the laser pointer and on some of your machines the laser pointer is down here and then i will cover this more in depth when i do the upgrades on the machines but if we touch the laser pointer and on the solaris you've got a main and a subcategory so right now just the main category is on so i can change the color and let me see if i can make it white okay so i can change the color of this line and i don't know if you can see it on this fabric but anyways you can go in and play with that and what that does is i can move my line over to a quarter inch so that i could use that as a quarter inch foot so on most of your machines it's just going to be down here you're going to play with it and it allows you to set your guidelines but this will be covered in a future video when we go into the upgrades on the machine okay the other thing i want to talk about real quick is free motion quilting because people ask about that all the time so in free motion quilting we are still going to use our stitch 103. now if you are on the other machines other than the solaris you're going to see a line down here if you're on a solaris this is your edit button so i'm going to touch it here to bring that up so if you're on solaris touch this and the rest of you are going to see something that looks like this this little thing that looks like a flying staple is dropping your feed dogs so when i touch this it drops my feed dogs so with this highlighted my feed dogs are down so now i can do free motion quilting and free motion quilting there's all kinds of classes that quilt beginnings offers that you can take to learn how to use rulers and do free motion quilting but i just basically want to show you there are several feet that come with the solaris most of you got the o foot which means it's open toe and it is also used for a free motion quilting there are several other feet like echo quilting detail quilting etc but you're going to see that this is not a snap-on foot it doesn't fit on that bar on the ankle so for this one we're going to have to take off this entire piece so some of you got a screwdriver it looks like a quarter with a hole in the middle a lot of you got this multi-function screwdriver and there's three places this one allows you to get easily to these screws if i put it in position two for those of you who have a plate that uses screws this works really well on those screws and then for those of you who have embroidery machines if we push this all the way in and you're going to push it all the way in until this screwdriver actually shows in here and it's got to be in all the way this is what you use on your hoops to tighten the hoops so a lot of you are having a hard times tightening them just move this so it clicks into position three you can see the screwdriver in here and it's used to tighten your hoops but i'm going to take this back to position number one and i'm going to loosen my screw now this screw to loosen i'm going to screw it towards the back of the machine or counterclockwise don't take that screw all the way out it's really hard to get back in but i like to keep this ankle connected to a foot because this is really easy to lose and if you lose it you're not going to be able to sew until you get it replaced so i usually leave this hooked on when i put on one of my other feet this if you see the little opening here approach it from the back put that part over the screw and then tighten this and you want to make sure whenever you change your ankle on or off or put one of these feet that go over the screw that you tighten it remember your machine is doing about a thousand stitches per minute so you want to make sure that this is on good and tight so we're doing free motion quilting the feed dogs are dropped you know i'm just going to grab a hold of this thread and we usually do needle deal needle up needle down needle up pop up the bobbin thread grab those and we're off and free motioning now again that's a class in its own but the one thing that i want to point out is when you unact deactivate your little staple so now i've told it i no longer want my feed dogs down when i take that off my feed dogs don't come up and people will call in and say my feed dogs didn't come up that's correct you have to take a stitch for them to come up so if you just go to your hand wheel and crank it once you'll see that your feed dogs come back up and you're back in business so that kind of concludes utility stitches again we were in sewing in the utility stitches kind of gives you an overview of the feet that come with the machine how to activate those stitches and i hope you found something useful in the video and look forward to our next video in which we will cover decorative stitches see you then

Channel: Quilt Beginnings

Views: 4,313

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Id: j_OurBlbx2U

Length: 48min 3sec (2883 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021