Straight?

I've been attempting to work on my straight stitching these past few days. I purchased a yard of red and white striped fabric with quarter inch stripes then cut it into fat quarters. I put a stiff interfacing on one of the quarters and I'm trying to stitch a straight path along each red stripe with black thread using the various decorative stitches on my new machine. This is a bit different from simply stitching a straight or zig zag stitch down the stripe as the machine moves both forward and backward when creating the decorative stitches making control a little more interesting. But still, I figure if I can do this, then I can do simple stitches as well. So far ...

I've been moderately successful. Examination of the red stripes reveals that I seldom stray outside the quarter inch path. Because my machine is a 7mm machine the widest stitches are close to one quarter inch in width while the narrower ones are generally 5mm. (Pardon the mixture of metric and imperial measurements. One quarter inch is 6.35mm.) If I can keep the stitch centered in the stripe I figure I've got approximately a sixteenth of an inch or approximately 1.6mm tolerance or one quarter of the width of a stripe. If the stripes were not present, I doubt that this sixteenth of an inch variation would be noticeable, but I could be wrong. Either way, it's a good exercise, if a bit boring at times. Got to watch the boring element as that's when my attention and my stitches wander.

When I finish this fat quarter, I intend to make it into something -- don't know what yet. Then I think I'll embellish another fat quarter by stitching on the lines between the stripes rather than down the middle of the stripes. Maybe a color other than black? Maybe simple stitches -- those decorative stitches eat thread!

In the meanwhile, I've a correction to make.

In an earlier post I reported that my new machine didn't have the extra presser foot lift promised in the description and the machine was, therefore, unable to sew through several layers of fabric and batting for a project I was trying to finish. Turns out the extra lift is there; it just requires a bit more force than I was initially comfortable with. YAY! This means that I can do the projects with thicker fabric and layers of batting that I wanted to do when I purchased the machine.

Still in love with my new Janome.

dks, 6 Dec 2025