I did some more denim jeans mending on my Singer 319W Treadle yesterday. I inserted a piece of new heavy denim into a trimmed out hole of a worn pocket panel. I used a multi-zigzag stitch and a fairly short stitch length, which makes for a lot of treadling. My hat is off to those fore-mothers that had to do all of their darning with a treadle sewing machine. It’s work! Although, perhaps for them, not having to do it by hand may have made it less work at the time.
Then, I played with my Singer 95-40 Handcrank (spinner knob) seeing how it worked doing jeans pant-leg hems with big thread. First, I “made” a jeans pant-leg out of a flat piece of heavy denim that I have by sewing it into a pant-leg shape with a fake (3 layers instead of 4) flat-felled seam on one side. Then I pinned around one edge to turn my hem, and started sewing.
I learned some things about the machine that I hadn’t noticed while cleaning it up and test-sewing by slowly hand-turning the balance wheel. By being able to turn it faster with the spinner knob, I noticed that the feed dog was pushing the fabric forward just a tiny bit before pulling the fabric back for the next stitch. I didn’t see that before, so I ended up adjusting the feed to eliminate that. And I had the presser foot set way too light. The needle would miss stitches coming down off of the flat-felled seam until I put more pressure on the foot.
I have decided that the machine actually gets along nicely with the Tex80 Jeans Thread, so that was exciting. I replaced the light-weight beehive spring in the top tension with a heavier one out of my spare Singer 31-15. The lighter spring may have been standard on the 95-40, I don’t know, but I had an easier time balancing my tensions with the heavier spring. The 95-40 was designed for sewing light and medium weight fabrics, so I doubt that they intended for it to use the larger thread that I’m using, and possibly the lighter spring gave more adjustment control of finer threads.
CD in Oklahoma