Sunday, December 30, 2012

My machine eats my fabric!

I'm wondering if anyone else has this problem.  I have a new Babylock Grace sewing machine. I bought it in October. 

When I'm sewing two pieces of fabric together, everything is fine. But when I'm sewing together two rows of pieces - say, HSTs, - the machine wants to eat my fabric.  It happens nearly every time I go over some intersections where there are several layers of fabric "bunched" together. About 8-10 stitches AFTER I sew over the seam/intersection, something grabs the fabric behind the needle, the needle starts to sew in place and then turns sideways.  I have to stop, take it all out, unstitch, and resew the area that has been grabbed and bunched up.

I took the machine back to the shop where I bought it, and tried to reproduce the problem with Teresa. It happened ONCE.  But at least she understood what I was talking about. Off it went to the repair guy, who returned it after a week and said something about adjusting the feed dogs. 

But after only a week or so of using it the problem has returned.  I will be taking it back to the shop again.  I think tomorrow morning I'll grab a few scraps and reproduce the problem so I have some examples of what's happening. I didn't have that before.


I was just wondering if anyone else has experienced this.

1 comment:

Shannon said...

Hi, Cyndi. I have had a similar problem with my Babylock, too. It seems like sometimes when I sew over a seam intersection where the fabric is "thicker" at that point than in the rest of the seam, that the presser foot will get hung up on the bulk I just sewed over. It's especially bad on knit fabrics for some reason. I found that using a shim to sew over the bulky intersection helps a lot. There is a commercial gadget you can buy for this, but I just use a small piece of folded card stock (actually a strip cut from the backing of a package of needles) under my presser foot. When I get to the intersection, I push the shim under the back of the presser foot and keep sewing. Once the needle gets over the bulky part, the shim pops out the back and I just move it to the front of the presser foot and keep going, being careful to go slow and move it back as needed so I don't sew into it. Once the bulk has cleared the presser foot, I put the shim aside and keep sewing. This has helped a lot. It makes my stitches look a lot better, too.