Saturday, January 31, 2015

A Cautionary (thread) Tail....

Besides being a quilt and pattern designer, I moonlight at a quilt shop....duh, where else would an avid quilter moonlight?
Anyway, the shop I work at also does sewing machine service and repair and I have seen a lot of incredible mishaps when it comes to sewing machines.
I will share these tidbits of insight with you to help prevent these little disasters from happening to you.
This one I was amazed at, I had never even thought this could happen, read on for the
cautionary tail.......

Does your machine have 2 spool pins? You know, a vertical one, and a horizontal one. 
When you have your machine threaded up using the horizontal spool pin, do you sometimes "park" a spare spool of thread on the vertical spool pin? 

Like this....


 
Well, I know I won't be doing that anymore and here's why.......

all wound up
Yikes! This came out of one woman's sewing machine. (No, it wasn't mine) The tail of thread that is loose and hanging down can get sucked up in the machine (via the hand wheel area) and gets all wound up inside on the main drive shaft thingy. Of course the machine stops working eventually, and that's why she brought it in for service.  You can see that it happened with more than one spool because there are abut 4 colors of thread that got all wound up inside.  Her machine was much happier once this was removed!

all wound up 2
What's even more amazing is, this was the second machine within a month that came in with this issue. The other one only had one color, but a whole bunch of it.

So.....think twice about "parking" your spare spools on your spare spool pin. 
Happy sewing!