Remember when I said I wanted to sew a maxi out of this fabric? So, that didn’t work out so well for me. I figured that this dress should have taken me 4 hours, 5 at most with my procrastination, to finish. About 30 minutes in I had to call it quits. Why? Well both my sewing machine and serger decided they absolutely hate something that is in this fabric. Surprisingly it is not the foil sequins! For some reason when I serged it, all the stretch was removed and the serging was incredibly tight. I thought this was just my tension. No matter how I set the tension it did nothing to help, but when I serged on other knits it worked great! Finally, I decided I could live with the serging on the shoulders and moved on to finishing the neckline. Both my stretch stitches and regular straight stitch started skipping stitches and rippling the fabric like crazy. Once again I tried it on another stretch fabric and it worked fine. I even tried quite a few different needles in various sizes and what nots. Nothing made it any better. My final determination was that it was something in the fabric because I remembered the yellow knit jacket I tried making where the fabric had the same issues. Unfortunately, I don’t know what was in either fabric that I can pinpoint as being the problem. Needless to say, I was pretty frustrated by it. This went on for about a day before I came up with what I hope will be a solution. I spoke with my previous employer and he agreed to let me come into the shop sometime this week so I could use the industrial machines there. I am not sure when I will get out there, probably near the end of the week though.
So sorry about the fabric issues. What a let down when we are so looking forward to a new garment and it just doesn’t come together as planned. If you can change the differential feed on your serger that might help. Don’t know if it will work, but it might be worth a try.
I played around with that a little and didn’t notice any changes. I did make a separate trip to Jo-Ann’s and bought different stretch specific needles for the straight stitch and some wooly for the serger. I am hoping both of those things will help make this work.
I was about to suggest using stretch needles but see that you picked some up at Jo-Ann’s. Good luck!