Gathering with an overlocker

When I bought my overlocker (aka - serger) I didn’t realise how many cool things I could do with it besides finishing seams. My favourite is gathering – ruffling a piece of fabric is soooo easy now.

I’m going to show you how to do it on my machine, you should be able to follow the general principles to do the same thing.

First you have to make some adjustments to your settings;

1. Turn the tension of your needle threads almost as high as they will go. I found that when I turned it all the way up the threads were a little too tight to sew properly.

2. Turn the feed up as high as it will go. This way the feed feet will bring in the beginning of the fabric quicker than they get rid of it which means that the fabric will naturally ‘buckle’ as it goes under the needle.

3. Turn the stitch length to be a bit longer than normal. My machine has a mark at about 2 and a half for normal sewing. I switch it to 3 and a half.

And that’s it.

Now when you feed the fabric through to sew a seam it gathers as it sews.

 You will need to experiment with your machine to see at what rate the machine gathers it. This is what the same fabric looks like before and after it has been gathered.

Also – don’t forget to put the setting back to normal when you finished – otherwise you’ll be ruffling stuff you really didn’t mean to.