I learned a few new things while I was stitching out the six designs for the Christmas wallhanging.
Metallic thread can be a little tricky, LOL. As everyone knows, it wants to curl as it comes off the spool and not feed correctly through the machine. I tried placing the spool higher and lower, in the front, in the back, and off to the side and a number of other ideas to try to keep the thread coming off evenly at a constant speed without curling too much. I even bought a separate attachment for my machine but I couldn't get it to fit correctly so I'm taking it back this afternoon.
Finally, this is what I ended up doing. For any given area of the design where metallic thread is used, there are usually only 500 to maybe 3,000 stitches to the next thread change. I unwound some thread from the spool - just using my best guess of length, and ran it gently through my hand to kind of relax the curl. Then I rewound it back onto the spool. I placed the spool on the table just to the right of the machine and almost directly underneath the spool holder. I ran the thread up through the two loops at the top and then straight into the machine and manually threaded the needle. I never had any problems stitching after that. I'm using a Titanium Organ needle and it seems to work just fine with metallic thread.
It may sound like a little extra work but for me it's better than having to stop and re-thread the top and bobbin thread every time it breaks during the stitch-out of a design.
The other thing I figured out was that these designs stitched out much prettier if I used extra stabilizer. I know, I've seen many videos and heard many people say that it's all about the stabilizer and I believe that. What I didn't pick up on was that it isn't just the type of stabilizer but also the number of layers. I learned while stitching out these six panels, that my machine combined with these designs, stitched much better and looked much nicer if I used three or four layers of stabilizer depending on the density of the stitches.
