Adjusting Bobbin Tension for Textured Stitches

If you have a front loading or a side loading bobbin, you have the opportunity to have a lot of fun with stitching. These are some tricks that thread painters use a lot and art quilters use a lot, and I think more traditional quilters could really have some fun using too. What we're gonna do is we're gonna loosen our tension on purpose, our bobbin tension, to yield these very funky stitches. So if we look here, we can see a regular stitch going through the surface of our quilt, and it's a very nice, straight, decent stitch. Then I'm gonna take my bobbin out and I'm gonna loosen the nut on the bobbin by one full turn, and I can get this wonderful stitch. And here I've loosened it by two full turns and moved back and forth. You can see here what that back and forth looked like from the back, and got this wonderful stitch. It's called mossing. And here I've loosened it three full turns, it is just a mess, and stitched wonderful straight lines right next to each other to create this very very textural. You can feel it, it's just so raised off the surface, and then you have those straight lines right next to each other on the back. So it's really fun to kind of mess with your tension. So I've loaded up my machine on top with just a regular cotton thread, and here's my bobbin, and here is my bobbin case. Now, you have to understand that your bobbin case is built to release your bobbin at a certain tightness, I guess you would say, and each machine is a little bit different. The average machine likes to be able to drop the bobbin ever so slightly at a very basically slow pace. And like so, see how the bobbin starts to fall down when I shake it? That's how, that's the regular tension. So you don't have to mark your bobbin case, you don't have to get an extra bobbin case. You just have to know what it should feel like when you let it drop. If it has to be shaken to let it release, that's what your machine likes for its tension. If it just slowly releases, then that's what your machine likes for its tension. Just know what that answer is, so that you can take it back to its normal tension after you've played with it. I myself don't wanna spend an extra $125 for another bobbin case, but some people do. So the first thing I'm gonna do is a full turn, so I'm gonna turn that screw all the way around and loosen it one full turn, and then I'm gonna stitch. So I'll put it back inside the machine and I'm gonna stitch this gentle curvy stitch line that I did here, and you're gonna see, hopefully, that it's just out of tension, so it's making this kind of feather design. If it doesn't make the feather, it means I didn't loosen it enough. It's just starting to feather, not enough for me, it's not interesting enough. So before I come back, I'm gonna loosen it a bit more. So I'll come all the way to the end here and I'm gonna take this out, and you can see that it's just started to misbehave, but it just looks like it's misbehaving. It doesn't look really cool, so I'm gonna loosen it a bit more. So of course, before you put this on your quilt, you're gonna want to practice, you're gonna want to have a practice piece here to make sure you like the way it looks. So I'm gonna loosen it by about a half of a turn and hopefully that will be enough to give me this look that I'm going for. That's a little bit better, but it's still not great, but we're starting to get that feather a bit, so we'll loosen it again and we'll just keep doing this until we like the way it looks. And again, you have to have this willingness to play with it. That willingness is important. Well, we're almost there. So what I'm gonna do, and this sometimes makes it easier, is I'm gonna switch to my free motion foot. Often when I switch to my free motion foot, because free motioning is a little less controlled, it actually does a little better. So I'm gonna do that first and then I'm gonna loosen it one little bit more. We'll see. Now we're starting to get a bit more of the feather. There we go. Very good. So we have this wonderful feathery look. I think we're loosened enough also to go ahead and do this mossy thing, so I'll show you how that one's done and it's done by moving the quilt back and forth ever so slightly. So I'm simply gonna go back and forth, basically in a little swirl back and forth. Oh yeah, it's mossing wonderfully. And then we get that wonderful wonderful look. And then to yield this final look, we're gonna stitch in lines that are really close to each other, kind of straight but it doesn't have to be straight. They could be wavy but they're just lines close to each other. Back and forth, back and forth, and this is wonderful as the bark of a tree, an animal's fur. And you get this fabulous raised, actually dimensional poofy design from your stitching, all from simply changing your bobbin tension. So give it a try, don't be afraid. You can always get your tension back. I'm gonna show you how fast and easy that is. I'm gonna get my tension back right now. So I'm going to take that bobbin out the last time and I'm gonna tighten it back up so that as I try to drop my bobbin out, it drops out in a way that I'm used to, which for my machine is tighter than the average machine. It's a little too tight right now, so I'm gonna loosen a bit, and I think that's it. See how it's starting to drop? So I'm gonna put that back in and we're gonna get ourselves a nice little stitch with good tension. Well, it needs to be a little tighter. So still kind of loose, but it still, it's just about the play. And whenever I tighten or loosen it, I usually do it by about a quarter turn, possibly a half turn at the most. But if I can get that mossing on a tree that I'm doing a landscape quilt on, then I'm quite happy and pleased, so. And there's my normal tension back, all things are good and I was able to play with my tension and create wonderful texture, so give it a try. You'll have fun.