New Serger and Some Sewing Projects

I finally got a new serger! To everyone who purchased my half-scale dress form patterns, thank you! I wouldn’t have had a new serger in my budget otherwise. It’s been pretty fun having my sewing turning into a self-supporting hobby.

After much research, I decided to buy a Juki MO-654DE. I’ve only sewn one project on it, but so far I’m very happy with it. I plan to do a thorough review of it when I’ve used it for a while. If anyone has any questions, let me know so I can answer them in the review. I know I had a lot of questions before I bought it, since I don’t live anywhere near a Juki dealer and I couldn’t test it before buying.

I realized that four out of five of my last posts were about sewing machines. I have been going nuts acquiring sewing machines lately, but I think I’m done for a while! Except now that I’ve been sewing a lot of knit garments I really want a coverstitch machine . . . well, that one’s going to have to wait.

To prove that I’m not just a crazy sewing machine lady who does nothing but collect sewing machines, here are some of my recent sewing projects:

I made some elastic waist denim pants for my daughter. She was complaining that all her pants were all too small, so I made up a few pairs of these over a weekend. I made the pattern by tracing a pair of her RTW elastic waist jeans, then making some fit adjustments. For the waistband, I folded knit fabric over the elastic, then serged it to the top of the pants. With no pockets, these were super fast to sew.

I made some underwear for me. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and finally got around to it. To make the pattern, I cut the elastic off of three different styles of my old underwear, traced them on top of each other, and sort of averaged out the pattern, making the fit corrections I thought I needed. After sewing three pairs, I got the fit right. Now, for the first time in my adult life, I have underwear that fit like I want them to.

These are leggings for me. I started with my pajama pant pattern and made the legs narrower. The first pair was still too loose for leggings, so I pinned out the extra and adjusted the pattern.

These are tank tops for my daughter made from her daddy’s old T-shirts. There were some stains on the T-shirts, but I figured she’d stain them herself the first time she wore them anyway, and sure enough, she did. The pattern was a RTW rub-off.

This long sleeved tee was a request from my adult step-daughter. She wanted me to copy a shirt she had. I do take sewing requests sometimes, but my answer is usually, OK, maybe I’ll do it when I feel like it, don’t hold your breath. That way I don’t feel guilty if I never get around to it or if it takes me six months to get to it. Hence the long sleeve tee at the beginning of summer. This was my first project on my new serger. I used a lightweight poly/cotton/lycra blend from my stash. It is super stretchy and difficult to sew, but I adjusted the differential feed and my serger made perfect seams.