Hey everyone! This is Sarah with sewingpartsonline.com and I am going to be showing you how
to use the walking foot, also known as an even feed foot or a dual feed foot.
I going to show you a few of the cool things it can do, some of the fabrics you can sew with it
and how to install it so you can start using it with all of your projects!
This is the walking foot and it looks a little intimidating at first.
It has a built-in feed dogs
right here
that pull your fabric at the same rate as the feed dogs that are already built in
your machine
So, it grabs a hold of the fabric, pulls it through, and prevents any puckering
or slipping around.
So, I'm going to show you how to install it. First, what you want to do is take off
the foot you have, including the shank that comes with it. Get your screwdriver
and remove this one.
What's important about this is
you want this little arm to go over your thumb
and you want to try to get this cut out
onto the screw right here.
This one goes on the needle holder; this one goes on your screw. So, go ahead and
wrap it around
to the back of your machine,
right here.
Kind of wiggle on the arm. I like to wiggle on the arm first and then
try to wiggle on the
cut out for the screw.
Tighten it a little bit with your fingers. Get your screwdriver to make sure it's nice and snug.
And that's all there is to it.
You can move it around and you are ready to go.
When most people think of a walking foot, they immediately think of quilting,
and it is essential for quilting because it will
pull all the layers at the same time. So, this would be a quilt. You can see you have
minky and the batting. We're going to double it up
and I'll show you how well it goes over
the material and pulls it. Now it doesn't really backstitch, so you need to bring it down
to a zero. Just sew a couple of stitches to lock it in.
Increase it
to whatever length you want
and watch as it pulls the fabric. It is a little loud but
it sews
wonderfully over these.
If this was your quilt,
it's not going to bunch up
or do anything yucky, especially since you spent all of that time
making your quilt.
We can double it up again and
it sews like nothing.
When you're done you just bring it back down to zero to lock in the stitches.
And it's as easy as that.
It didn't go anywhere, i didn't have to use any pens, worked perfectly.
It's the same thing with denim. I have four layers
of denim right here. I'm not going to use any pins or any adhesive
I'm just going to put it under
and let the walking foot do its job.
Down to zero to lock in the stitch.
Put it back up.
And watch how
easily
it pulls everything through. Nothing is shifting, nothing is moving out of the way.
This is just a regular 90/14 needle
I don't have anything else special.
The walking foot does all the work.
Perfect.
So, the walking foot is also ideal for slippery fabrics, especially satins
where you don't want a bunch of pin holes. You can just put it under
and the walking foot will make sure your pieces aren't moving out of place.
It's going to keep everything together.
Nicely.
Its not going to leave any funky marks, especially with these Satins where
any kind of puckering is going to show up
any kind of ripples
It will just sew
right through it.
No puckering at all
It will lay completely flat with an iron.
There are some materials that you have to use a walking foot with
I mean, a walking foot is great for quilting, but you have to use it
on these pvc materials.
Or on these kind of plastic or faux leather materials
So, I'll show you,
it grabs the material and pulls it through. With these, if you use a regular foot,
the stitches will go all over the place. But, you can see here that it pulls it perfectly.
The stitches are completely even
and look very nice.
You get these cool, kind of plastic
materials
with no pins. You can't use pins because it will compromise the structure of the fabric.
So, here you go. It goes right through.
no pins. Seam lines up perfectly.
Pulls it right through.
No slippage. Nothing is going anywhere.
You can see with these faux leathers.
These are kind of cool, you can find them in the home dec. department.
and
it will pull it right through. And it saves a lot of time because you don't
spend all your time pinning.
that looks great
So, with the walking foot, it makes applique a lot faster and a lot easier.
You don't have to use any pins. You don't have to use any adhesive
all you have to do
is put it under the foot
put it on a zigzag and let it go.
And it won't create any
funky bubbles.
It's not going to shift around on you and if you put it on a on
really short zigzag, you won't have to worry about any fraying.
it does it really fast.
And really simply.
and like I said, it doesn't really do much of backstage stitch.
Put it down to zero and it will lock in your stitches.
and it works fine
Another thing you can do with the walking foot is it makes
adding binding
go much more smoothly. As you can see
i've got the really
finicky material right here that we can put underneath
you just wrap the binding around which ever way you want
just in case the fabricate in it.
Put it on a zigzag or a straight stitch, which ever you want to do.
and let it do it's job.
There won't be any puckering or any ripples. sometimes when you're
adding binding
it gets really rippled or one one length ends up being longer than the other,
and your wondering what's going on. It's because you need
the two
feeds
to pull everything through.
So you can see,
everything lays
perfectly flat, no puckers, no ripples.
And on the back as well.
Very nice.
So,here we can see the differences between a walking foot and quilting
without a walking foot. This is with the walking foot and this is without the
walking foot.
As you can see, without it you'll get all kinds of bunching and puckering. You can't really
avoided because you'll need the
two feet to pull it through.
With it, every things lays flat and looks really great,
and without it, you run into all kinds of problems.
So, that was the walking foot. Very versatile. Very useful. Eccential for
any kind of quilting or utility fabrics.
I hope you have fun sewing with yours.