Sewing: Making Friends with Your Serger: Decorative Stitches

Once you’ve mastered threading your serger and are comfortable changing the machine settings to create 2-, 3-, and 4-thread stitches, you’re more than ready to go beyond the basic construction stitches. It’s time to learn just how versatile your serger can be. In this course, brought to you in conjunction with National Sewing Circle, we will begin exploring the fun world of decorative stitches.

Your National Sewing Circle instructor, ZJ Humbach, breaks the class into manageable lectures that let you learn how easy it is to create beautiful decorative touches to take your projects to the next level. There’s no need to rush. Take your time and master each lecture before moving onto the next or come back and review individual segments as needed. At the end of this course, you’ll see how fun it is to just play with your serger.

Stitch Overview is a concise breakdown of how serger stitches are made, the interplay between the needles and the loopers for each stitch, and the role of different types of serger thread with an emphasis on decorative threads. ZJ also gives you invaluable tips for using your owner’s manual in conjunction with this video to tailor the course to your machine.

Decorative Edges shows you how to turn the basic overlock stitch into a striking construction detail. You’ll learn easy ways to distinguish among the 4-thread overlock stitch and the 3-thread narrow and 3-thread wide overlock stitches and then discover how simple it is to create single-sided and reversible decorative edges for each one. You’ll also see how edges pop when you use a decorative 3-thread rolled edge.

Decorative Finishes focuses how to pop your projects with impressive details. ZJ shows you step-by-step how easy it is to create pintucks, decorative flatlock stitching, and blanket stitching.

The Bonus Project: Reversible Baby Quilt is a super fun project that features decorative stitching. Thanks to the quilt-as-you-go technique and a decorative edge instead of binding, you’ll be able to start and finish this cute quilt in an hour or two. ZJ also provides instructions to enlarge the quilt to a throw size. A free .pdf file with instructions is available for download.