Thread: Trying to meander and THIS happened... (help)

Okay expert quilters, new quilter here. This is my FIRST TIME trying to meander. I'm working on a sewing machine cover. Sewing on a Singer 7436. I'm going along trying not to cross stitches, trying to keep my squiggles nice and tight-ish and even and I was pleased with the top considering it was my first time meandering. And then I flipped it over... SAD! This loopy stitch happened a few times. What is happening here and how do I fix it? Should I rip-it rip-it and re-do the ENTIRE thing?!

PS - This picture shows the bottom/back

Those are called eyelashes... You probably need to increase the tension and go a little slower. They will go away with the right tension and looooots of practice.

Your pattern looks great for your first go!!! It's hard to get consistent meandering.

Your top tension is too loose or the thread has slipped out of the tension disk. This happened to me and after I tightened the top tension 1 full turn, no more eyelashes.

I had the same problem, frustrating to say the least. I both those little bobbin washers and I don't get them anymore.

I don't know if this is related or a completely separate problem but I assumed I was going too fast, so I tried to go slow on another part of the project. It's a smaller area so I was going to try to meander tighter. When I did that my sewing machine was skipping stitches or something. The top thread would completely miss the bobbin thread and then pick it up again. I did rip that out right away and took a picture and came straight here!

misskira - This has a NAME? Appropriate... it looks like eye lashes. It makes me feel better that this happens often enough to have a name. haha.

andir - This is the underneath. I'll try to rethread. My tension is set at "auto" right now. When I turn the dial it goes to + 1, +2, +3 and the other direction is - 1 -2 -3. What's the difference? And when I pull on the bobbin thread it's nice and smooth. Rethreading now then going to dinner. I'll check back tonight!

Those happen to everybody.

It may be your tension, it may be your speed (you need to find the right hand speed/needle speed ratio). You might even need to just go slower on curves, but you are good on straight-aways.

However, it could also be your needle (so put in a fresh one), or your fabric. I'm a somewhat experienced FMQer and got eyelashing on my last project. It only occurred on ONE fabric of a patchwork piece. The rest of the quilt everything was perfect. I ended up having to go really really slow, and ripping out a ton. Changing to a new needle helped a little bit, but it was a horrible pain. I had to turn the quilt over to check every section over this one fabric. I hadn't had any eyelashing like that in like 6-months, so I was not happy!

Good luck!

The one good thing about eyelashes...they don't take long to get pulled out and start over!