It works on chain piecing because the previous piece is getting pulled along to the back, pulling the front (new) piece in.

As we trend toward the fancy machines, we are getting wider stitches and wider holes in our throat plates. My 14000 has a 9mm stitch width and the throat plate is the worst I have for starting small items. I use a piece of scrap paper that I leave by my machine when I am doing tiny sewing on the big machine. My Juki which is straight stitch only seldom has a problem, but the little pieces of paper are an easy clean solution if it does.

If you hold the loose thread tails tight behind the machine, it normally won't eat the start end of the first piece either. This was a common thing taught to new sewers 50 years ago when I learned to sew, and is still required with vintage machines that will pull the thread tails back into the bobbin area and cause a real mess at the start of every seam.

Once you have sewn one piece, the thread "tails" are now held tight and it won't happen again unless you leave a lot of slack between your pieces. with newer machines, you can sew quite a ways with no fabric and not have the thread break, with many vintage machines, if you went more than two stiches with no fabric, you'd break thread unless you went very slow and kept the thread snug behind the machine.

Every time I sew, I'm amazed that newer machines (which to me is like 20 years or newer) can sew so well without holding on to thread tails when starting. Both my Juki and Babylock can form a stitch with no bobbin thread tail at all.

I do not use a spider instead
I keep pieces of another quilt beside my machine and use them as the leader and ender when working on a project.
Thus after I have made about 3 quilts/other items I have all the blocks for a quilt top. I call it my FREE Quilt.

spider?good grief. i just got used to calling a scrap of fabric a leader or ender! sigh.

Thanks for this post. I always forget to chain piece. I have 20 pieces tomorrow that will need to be "snowballed". I will definitely chain piece. I'm also going to add a jar with 1" pieces next to my machine as a reminder to do so.

I always heard it called a 'security blanket'. ;-)