 Hi you guys, Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel, Inside to Him. All right, let's start by talking about what we need to do whenever we are getting ready to start a brand new project. First things first, I am going to assess the maintenance that I need to make on my serger. And if you can see inside the mechanism is a little bit, you'll see it's a little bit dusty and there's a lot of like little fabrics, scraps and stuff. So I want to make sure I can clean that out. So in order to do that, I am going to trim off, take off all my serger thread cones. And yes, this means I'm going to have to rethread it. That's perfectly fine. No big deal. Pick them all off. And then I am also going to get those threads out. Okay. To get the threads out, we're just going to hold this gently and all of those remove. So now we have a completely thread free machine. We are also going to remove the needles. And I have this nice little organizer that I put together. And it holds everything that I need for my, all my machines. So to remove them, you just get your little Allen wrench that came with your machine and you pull them out and you can hold on to those if you've only used them a couple of times. If you've been using them for a minute, then time to throw them away. Let's put, let's put this with this so that we can find that again. And now I am going to take my entire machine and the mat outside because this is a messy process. Okay. And before we put our needles back in, we are going to talk a little bit about Serger knives. This is what they look like. The ones that work for my sewing machine are the Honey Sew, Overlock, and then a whole bunch of numbers. I will link in the description box the ones that I use. I think these are pretty standard, but if you've got a specialty machine, you might want to check with your dealer first. But for my brother, 1034D, these are the ones that work for me. And I hate to admit how much practice I've had at replacing the knives, but I have a really bad habit of leaving my pins in when I surge and then running over a pin. And when you do that, you ding the blade and then it's pretty much useless. But I also have had, I've gone to surge something before and the blade is just not cutting through and the fabric is like really janky and it's not like a nice clean cut. So if you experience that too, then it's time to change your knives. And like I said, it's super simple to do. You have your little screwdriver that came with your machine and there is a screw right here. You simply put your screwdriver in the screw and unscrew that and be very careful because you know there's lots of little itty-bitty parts and you want to keep everything intact. So you have a screw and a washer and then you have your upper blade like this. And you have your lower blade, which is under its own screw. So you want to remove that as well. Simply unscrew it. Make sure to keep that washer and screw together. Okay, same screw, same washer. So if they get mixed up, that's fine. And then there is your lower blade. So you have upper blade, the hooky one, and the lower blade, the one that is cut on the bias. And then you have two screws and two washers. The screws and washers come with the machine and these are the replacement parts that you get in your little pack. So to put these back on, I literally just changed these. So I'm not going to swap mine out, but I just wanted to illustrate how easy it was to do. I don't want you guys to be intimidated. Your searchers are your friends. Don't be intimidated. Okay, so you're placing the bias blade so that it is flush with the base plate of your machine. So it goes in something like this and you can, there's like a little groove that it sits in and then it can slide up and it can slide down. And obviously you want it to be right in line, right flush with your machine. Hold that in place. Sorry about this lighting. When daylight savings ends and we've got all these funky hours and it's getting dark so early, I never know when to come in here. I just forget what time is the best time to come in here and film. Plus today's weather has been absolutely bonkers anyways. Okay, anyway, so we've got that in there. Make sure that it is flush. Like I said, you can still move it and then completely tighten that screw. And then the hooky one goes in with the hook facing toward you. And you can see again, there's a little part right here with a groove in it for the blade. And you just simply slip that in there, slip the screw right over top. And this one doesn't have as much wiggle room up and down. So just put it in place and then lock it in. Easy peasy. Now you've got brand new blades. Alright, so now we are going to replace our needles. We're going to pretend that these were new and different needles. And you simply raise your needle, what's that thing called? And I like to just go in two at a time. So I just slide it in there. There's a flat side to your needle. The flat side faces back toward the back of the machine. I swear when I'm not filming this, it goes much easier. There we go. And then you slide it off. The one on the left is going to be a little bit higher than the one on the right. You just want to make sure they are pushed all the way into the top of the machine. And then lock it in with your allen wrench. Okay, so now I'm going to show you how to thread the sewing machine. And you're going to take your serger thread. Yes, I've used non-serger thread before, but I like having the serger thread also. I just think you go through so much of it that you wouldn't want, here I need to tell you guys what I'm doing, that you wouldn't want to just use regular thread. It's too expensive to do it that way. But you don't need a ton of colors. You'd be surprised at what kind of blends in and what looks okay. And I always match the inside of my garment, not necessarily the outside. So a lot of the knits that we are sewing, for example, like printed ponty knits on the inside, those are white. So you just need a white thread for that. You don't need anything super, super fancy, but a white, a black, a gray, navy. I mean, if you're doing a sweater knit in like a bright fuchsia or something, yeah, you probably would want to get thread just for that. But you don't have to, it's up to you. Okay, so there are these, you're going to start with the one in the third position. One, two, three. And there's these little metal hooks. And so you just want to slide your thread under that. And then the third step, so step one is to feed it through here. Step two is the metal hook. Step three is to get it to lay between, there's like two little discs in here. So you push this little arrow to the right and slide the thread down in there. And you can feel it catch, especially if you have it set on a super tight tension. You can release that and it pulls easier. Then you're just following the numbers of the instructions. So two, three, four, five is here. So we're going to hook it under five. We are going to hook it under six. And then we are going to hook it over seven, following the green instructions that match the green wheel all the way through and through. And then the last step for the green is to insert your thread through that little hole. And I get my tweezers and pull that thread all the way back and through. Okay, one down, three to go. Again, you take your thread, we're going to go to the far end this time, hook it through number one, slide it into two, pull back on three and lay the thread between the tension discs, releasing some of that. So you can pull your thread through. And then you hook five, six and seven are kind of together. Eight gets its own little hook. And then nine is you pull back this little arrow, you slide your thread into this little hook that's there, push this all back and then thread it through the hole that's here. And again, we're just following the instructions for the blue dial, the blue instructions, and there's little illustrations and everything to show you how it's done. Get your tweezers and pull that thread through. This one's a little finicky, you know, where it's placed. So I always pull it toward me and then back through like so. That way it doesn't get twisted at all. Okay, now for the third one, we're going to move to space number two. We're going into one, locking in two, pushing back three, laying it down till it catches, then releasing the tension. And these are going to go around the corner. So around the corner, up and around for five, back down again. And then they get slid into this little behind this little bar and then get threaded through the right needle goes first, right needle, left needle. Okay, okay, now it's nice and flat. Make sure it's behind the bar. Alright, now it's behind the bar. Alright, fourth one is going to look a lot like the third one. A lot like the one we just did. Up through one, slide on two, clip into three, release the tension. And I am releasing all of my tension to four for now. That's where we are going to start whenever we work on our fabric. And then we'll adjust from there. I'll show you what you're looking for. Thread it through the eye of the needle. And I have some Serger needle threaders, which work really well. So if you're having trouble with this, check those out. You can get them very inexpensively. Alright, now we have our Serger completely threaded. Okay, always, always start with a scrap. This is a Pontina that I have a scrap from my project. And you just want to make sure that your tension and everything on your machine is okay. So lift up the presser foot, place the fabric underneath the presser foot and the blade and press the pedal. Turn it on. So now we have this surged. So what I am looking for to make sure that the tension is balanced is that these threads along the very, very edge are nice and tight against the fabric and that the thread that's running through those is sitting at the very, very top of the fabric or the top of the seam. And that is not happening here. It's actually rolling to the back a little bit. So when that happens, I know I need to tighten my loopers. So I'm going to move this and the smallest adjustment makes the biggest difference. So for illustration purposes, I'm going to ping it all the way up to a seven to show you what a seven looks like. This is going to be what happens when it's too tight. So this is too tight. Now you can see that that thread has rolled over onto the other side. It is hard to tell the right side and the wrong side at this point, but you can see the difference here. See how there's an extra row of stitching. That row of stitching is supposed to be on the very, very top. So let's try and do it correctly. Let's put it at like four and a half. And let me show you what that looks like. Okay, so four and a half is a little bit closer. We're going to go all the way to five just to get it perfect. All right. Can you see the difference there? Can you see how that row of stitching is sitting nicely on top of the seam? So you can tell it's just little micro adjustments over and over again until you get it perfectly like you want it. You can get really nitpicky, but every time you adjust one of the dials, another one is affected. So just be careful. But I highly suggest just playing around with the dials go way up high, go way down low, and just see and learn what difference it makes. You can also thread all four of these in different colors so you can tell which one is which if these diagrams aren't inherently like obvious to you where they apply to the thread on the fabric, thread it in different colors and then you can see. Okay. So your inclination probably would be to go and snip the edge of this like so, but you can see what you've done is you have cut away the end of your thread stitches and they're already starting to come undone. This is like what would happen on a sewing machine if you didn't back stitch. So the way to prevent that is to use a fun little tool called a little hooky. I demonstrated how it works in my gift guide video. So I'm going to insert that little tutorial here. It's super, super easy to use and just ensures that your serger tail gets tucked back into your fabric like so, gets tucked back into those serger threads, and so you don't have anything coming apart. You snip it here and all of this stays intact.