Heather Thomas

Correcting Sewing Machine Tension for Free Motion Quilting

Heather Thomas

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Duration:   8  mins

Description

Sewing machine tension can be frustrating to deal with because it can determine how good or bad your stitching looks. While you may have your tension set correctly for piecing and sewing, you may find that you need to make adjustments when switching to free motion quilting. Heather Thomas shows you how to adjust your sewing machine tension for free motion quilting to achieve the best stitching possible.

Know Your Machine

Whether you are dealing with tension issues or are doing any other kind of sewing machine troubleshooting, it is important to know your machine. Sewing machines have tension on both the bobbin and needle thread. Most machines have some kind of dial located on the top of the machine that allows you to make adjustments to the needle tension. Heather explains that the needle tension dials will be labeled with numbers anywhere from zero to nine and will usually have what the manufacturer considers to be ‘normal’ tension marked in some way.

For the bobbin tension, machines will have either a front/side load bobbin or a drop-in bobbin. Front and side load bobbins can be adjusted by turning a small screw located on the side of the bobbin case. Drop-in bobbins don’t have the same kind of bobbin case and therefore you are generally limited to making changes to the needle tension to adjust your sewing machine tension.

Adjusting Sewing Machine Tension

Heather demonstrates what bad tension can look like when free motion quilting on a small sample. She explains what a common tension issue called ‘eyelashing’ is and shows what it can look like on both the right and wrong side of the fabric. She then explains how to fix the issue by adjusting the needle tension in small increments and test stitching after each change. She explains how important it is to make all changes to your sewing machine tension in small numbers and how and why those changes have to be made while the presser foot is in the up position.

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10 Responses to “Correcting Sewing Machine Tension for Free Motion Quilting”

  1. Angela Croutze

    <strong> I have a Brother Nouvelle 1500s. After FMQing for at least 30 plus minutes my upper thread has suddenly started tangling on the bottom of the quilt. This has never happened before. All I did is move to a new position on the quilt to start again and suddenly tangles. I've tried to adjust the tension, I've changed the needle, and I made sure the side loading bobbin area is clean and the bobbin is correctly in place. I am stumped and would appreciate some advice. TIA

  2. Patti Adams

    <strong> What causes skipped stitched on the top? I tried a couple different feet, threads and needles. What I’ve had the best stitching with is Isacord and klasse top stitching needles. This isn’t a practical solution, because I don’t want to have to buy Isacord for every free motion project. I have a computerized babylock.

  3. Brett Schiewe

    This is one of the worst and misleading bit of advice on tension I have ever seen, you never advise anyone to adjust the bobbin case as the first thing for a tension problems you start with the upper thread first and only go to the bobbin tension as the next step if adjusting the top thread tension gives unsatisfactory results. This is my opinion only.

  4. maryjobo

    Great information and excellent presentation! I never knew about raising the presser foot before changing the tension but it makes total sense. Thank you!

  5. J

    Does it take any time, or stitching length, for th energy tension to apply? Does some amount of thread have to pass thru the disks for the new setting to ‘settle in’, or is it fairly immediate?

  6. Jacqueline

    Ok, I agree, but what number do you put it on : higher (bigger number) or lower (smaller number). or do you have different on other machines. I have a Bernina 750QE and find a smaller number better ! Jacqueline Bonnier

  7. jeannieholler126

    This "free video" is framed with American Cancer Society" video and 2 other distracting companies information. This keeps it from being user friendly. The ACS ad is taking a long time to load and I cannot get past it to see the Sewing Machine Tension video - frustrating.

  8. Kay

    <strong>NB Ticket#20207 You indicated that you changed the tension, but didn't show us what direction you adjusted it. Can you share that please?

  9. Nancy

    I get "eye lashing" when I turn curves. I have tried going up on tension and down...slowing my sewing and speeding up. I have a brand new Babylock Destiny II...so I am still learning how it works....different suggestions have me frustrated as some say speed up others say slow down, and go up on tension....go down..... My old machine used to be perfect.... What gives??

  10. Judy Roberts

    This is a great help. I like free motion quilting but never knew what to do about the "eye lashes" Thanks so much Judy

One of the most difficult things to deal with when you're free motion quilting is a machine that has tension issues. And I'm talking about the tension of the agreeableness of the stitch with the top thread and the bobbin thread coming together and forming a very nice, tidy stitch. A lot of machines will not let you futz about with the tension, they have such a highly computerized system that it, the system itself, wants to tell you what the tension is going to be at. And if that system works, that's great, but a lot of times it doesn't. If you're having tension issues, it depends on what's happening and what type of machine you have as to what you can do about it. A lot of times it ends up being a point where the machine has to be maintained by a maintenance provider, a repairman. However, that being said, basic tension issues are, generally speaking, something that you are doing inappropriate to the machine. And so, I always say the very first thing to do is, if you've only recently changed something up, you've changed from regular sewing to free motion sewing and all of a sudden you have tension issues when you didn't have before, or you change thread or you put in a new bobbin, generally speaking, something is either threaded wrong, or the bobbin is put in wrong. And if you simply redo those things first, before even thinking about changing the tension, sometimes that fixes it. Other times it truly is the tension, and perhaps you have moved the tension dial and forgotten that you have, and you simply need to move it back to the normal spot, or you're asking your machine to do something that it's not regularly calibrated for. So a lot of machines are never calibrated to free motion quilting, and so the tension has to be moved. Others are calibrated in such a way that they can free motion quilt or guide stitch without changing that tension at all. So you need to know your machine so that you can understand the expectations that you can have when you're doing free motion quilting. Most machines have either a top loading bobbin, which is what this machine has, or they have a front loading bobbin, it goes in the front here. Every once in a while you'll have a machine that has a side loading bobbin. The ones that load on the side or the front are rotary bobbins, and you can control the tension on those by simply screwing or unscrewing the screw that's on the side of the bobbin case itself. Now when I say screw or unscrew, I mean that you take your screwdriver and you turn the screw a quarter of a turn. Check the tension again, see if it's better, if it is, leave it, if it's not quite good enough, turn it a corner of a screw again. Don't get in there and just start screwing that screw multiple rotations, the whole case will fall apart. It's little tiny increments no matter what type of machine it is. However, if you have a drop in bobbin like this, the tension is calibrated in the bobbin for you and there's really not a whole lot that you can do to change it, unless you can go into the computer itself and change that. You're left with only being able to control your top tension, and it's almost always in about this position on your machine. Some tensions go from zero up to nine, other tensions only go from zero up to seven or six, and most of them have a little point where they've marked that is the normal tension, so it's got a little line somewhere around the three and a half to four and a half mark. Here I am free motion quilting, and as I got started free motion quilting, I ended up having some pretty gnarly tension issues here. This is called eyelashing, where the bottom thread is pulling that top thread all the way through and making a loop instead of interacting with it inside the layers of the quilt. What happens if I continue to accept that is that it's gonna have long areas where I can just catch on things and the thread can break and it's just not going to look attractive at all. So I need to change my tension, and I'm gonna do that in small increments. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna start stitching, and get a feel for... what that bad tension looks like, and I can see that it's bad from the front and the back. The back I'm seeing all these loops, and here I'm seeing some big, big loopy things happening here. The tension is just way too loose. So when my presser foot is in the upwards position, not down, I'm gonna go ahead and change my tension by one number. And then I'm gonna check it again. If I change my tension when the presser foot is down, I have done absolutely nothing. When the presser foot is down, my tension disks close, they close up around the thread and they can't be adjusted. So make sure that your foot, presser foot, is in the upright position. Then put it back down again and practice stitching or do some sample stitching. Check the back and see if it's improved, and it's definitely improved, which means I'm moving my tension in the right direction, in this case, I didn't have but one direction to go, but it's still not perfect or really good, so I'm gonna lift that foot up again and change it by one number again, and stitch some more. See if I like that. Now, it's starting to look a little better, but I'm still getting some pull, and I can see that because it's actually pulling the fabric and acting almost like it's snagging the fabric, so it's still not up to par. Raise that presser foot, move to another number. Now I'm getting closer to the range that my machine says is the normal range, so I'm probably getting to where I should be. And that's starting to look better, but we've still got some fullness there, so, one more number up. And okay, it's looking better and better all the time. So I'm doing that in little increments until I get it to look the way I want it to look, and I'm gonna do one more, and I think I'm gonna be exactly where I need to be. And I'm gonna check that to see if it easily lifts up, which it doesn't easily lift up with the point of my scissor. If it did, I would know it's still too loose. If I like the way it looks in tight curves, which I think I like it, but I'm actually gonna try tightening it just a little bit more, and seeing if I improve that, and if I do, I'll leave it there, if it doesn't improve, I'll go back to the previous number. And I do, I like that even better. It won't lift up, and I actually like the indentation that's being made here a little bit more on top, it's not sitting on the surface as much as it was before, and my tension looks really good. So make sure that when you're changing your tension that two very important things are happening. You always change your tension with your presser foot in the upright position so that the disks of the tension disks are disengaged, and that you do it only one number at a time at the most. Sometimes you're gonna do it at half a number at a time. But you are in control of your upper tension, and it's yours to kind of fiddle around with until you have a stitch looking exactly like you want it to look.

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