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Arts & CraftsHow to Sew

What to Do If Thread is Caught in Your Sewing Machine

Transcript

Hi, I’m Cynthia Mann and we’re here today at Birch Fabrics in Paso Robles, California. This is also the home of Fabricworm.com. Hi, I’m Melissa Lunden; I’m the resident seamstress here at Birch Fabrics. I teach sewing lessons here, prepare blog tutorials and sew samples of Birch’s line of organic cotton. And I am here today to talk to you about sewing. Now, we’re going to talk about what to do if the thread is caught in your sewing machine. The first thing you’re going to do is panic and call your mom. And then when she doesn’t answer, you’re going to look at your machine and figure out what’s going on. Most likely, your bobbin thread wasn’t wound properly. Either it’s too loose or there was a problem in the pickup. And what you’ll do is take the bobbin out of the machine, try to clear out any extra threads, and then make sure the bobbin is loaded properly. So if you found that your bobbin is jammed and the thread is all caught, the first thing you’re going to do is take the bobbin out. It’s easy to do it on this machine because it’s a top-loading bobbin, and the bobbin the case is clear so you can see exactly what’s going on. I pull out any extra threads that are caught, and I would make sure first and foremost that my bobbin is wound nice and tight.
The biggest thing is to make sure that your bobbin is loaded properly which means that when you pull the bobbin thread, the case rotates in the opposite direction. If it’s too loose, you’re — it’s going to give you problems, and you’re going to have to unthread it and just rewind it. If you try to do anything else, it’s going to just keep giving you problems. So once you’ve rewound your bobbin and it’s nice and tight, you want to make sure that it’s loaded properly. And my machine has a little handy diagram that shows you if you’re doing it properly. You can see it right here. You’ll reload your bobbin, and you might — while you’re at it — just reload your top thread too because that’s usually part of the problem, and then give some test stitches and see what happens.


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How to Prepare & Mark Fabric for a Sewing Project

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How to Use Voile in a Sewing Project

How to Understand Basic Sewing Terms

How to Use Jersey in a Sewing Project

How to Sew with Cynthia Mann

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How to Sew a Topstitch on a Sewing Machine

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What to Do If Thread is Caught in Your Sewing Machine

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