romille

I am a newb...

So my hubby has taken up clay shooting as a hobby and asked me to make him a cleaning mat for his shotgun out of some material we had laying around. It is a layer of canvas, double faced pre-quilted fabric, and PUL. (he had the canvas and quilted fabric left over from a brief desire to sew dog coats, and I had PUL from making baby changing pads)

I stitched the PUL to the quilted fabric, then put that right sides together with the canvas... flipped it right side out after stitching. I used straight stitches for everything with a 1/4" seam allowance. It ended with the laminated side of the PUL on bottom, the canvas on top. It looks good, the trouble is that the thread isn't behaving when I try to finish the edge with a top stitch.

While stitching the quilted material to the PUL the bobbin thread ran out, and I guess the second bobbin wasn't wound well because I started getting a lot of loose loops on the back side. I switched to a different bobbin and it fixed that right away.

Using that same bobbin thread (that did well on the PUL/padding layer) I tried to do a top stitch after turning it right side out. Same thing with the bottom thread, only worse. Lots of loops and messy threads. I ripped those stitches out and seemed to have a lot more bottom thread than I should.

I have never sewn anything so thick... Do you guys have suggestions on how to get the thread to behave? Or should I be trying a different thread, foot, stitch, whatever? I tried adjusting the tension a little, but it didn't help. I am using a cotton thread that I had from piecing a baby quilt. (which was my first ever project... a couple months ago) I only tried moving the tension from 4 up to 5, should I be trying some more tension settings?

Thanks for reading this long post...