BlueTuque: Oh For Juki's Sake!

Sad. All of November come and gone and I didn't even have a chance to write anything new! It was a busy month, that's for sure. And Adam spent three of the four weeks sick with some virus. The incredible part was that the only time he was healthy was during the five days we were in London England for my cousin's wedding (smack in the middle of the month). And thank Goodness for that because a sick 10-month old would have made the 8-hour flight seem even looonger, I'm sure. So I am grateful for that but I'll write about London another time. This post is to celebrate the very satisfying victory where six weeks after posting about my newly-arrived Juki, I finally got it working. Good grief is right!

When I first opened the Juki I was so intimidated about threading it. I think it took me 10 minutes per thread to make sure I didn't miss any guides or loops. Now I can honestly shrug my shoulders at having to re-thread the Juki. That's because I've done it dozens of times over the past few weeks.

Now, to clarify, I didn't spend all of the past six weeks troubleshooting the Juki. As I said, we were busy with London and nanny interviews (don't get me started) and a long list of other things...but whenever I could find some time during Adam's naps I would attack the Juki. And I always lost. The thread just kept breaking on me when I used the pedal and I threaded and re-threaded and tri-threaded that thing to death. I fiddled with the tension, I used the manual wheel. I went crazy. Every time I got to a point where it looked right with the manual wheel I'd give the pedal and go but the thread would break after about two inches of serging. Frustration set in.

I started suspecting that my thread was just weak, seeing as I picked the spools up from the bargain bin at Fabricland. I talked to a few people about serger thread and they said there was nothing special about it. That threw me off. Finally I read online from a fellow blogger that the quality of thread was very important for sergers because of all the fast-moving complicated parts. Worth giving it a try right?

So the last time I was up visiting my parents I grabbed my mother's bag of old thread spools and found what I thought was decent quality thread (at least better than the discount ones I bought to "test" the Juki). They were mismatched in colour but I didn't care. I just needed to test out this theory, and besides, different coloured thread would help troubleshoot any tension problems.

Well guess what? After threading the Juki with the new spools of thread it hummed beautifully on the very first try.