It seems that this always happens to me- a 5 minute project ends up consuming your entire day. This morning I ran to Hobby Lobby for fabric for the upholstered headboard. While I was there I found a funky floral fabric that I thought would make a fun accent pillow for the bed. During nap time, I decided to stitch it up quick to see how it looked. “Quick” it was not.

When I looked at the back side of the fabric, I could see that the bobbin thread was bunching. I did what anybody with a sewing machine would do, retreaded the top and bobbin thread and tried again. Bunching was still there. I trouble shouted some more and took out the whole bobbin case, blew out the dust. That wasn’t it either. I changed the needle, tried different thread, tried different fabric, consulted Dr. Google, messed with the tension- which helped somewhat, but not enough. I eventually ended up on hold with Singer for over an hour before speaking with a human.

I understand that the average person probably is clueless. She walked me through threading my machine, asked me if I was using Singer needles and bobbins, and troubleshooted changing tension settings before telling me that I needed to take my machine in for servicing. Not what I wanted to hear. My machine is only 9 months old, so thankfully everything is under warranty, but the closest warranty center is almost an hour away. I already planned to visit my family on Thursday, so I’ll drop it off then, and pray it’s a quick & easy fix. It makes me physically ill to think about being without my machine, but it needs to be fixed.

I write this post so that hopefully someone else who’s having this annoying issue can look here and see they’re not crazy. I’ll update with my diagnosis too. Here you can see the top of the fabric vs the back. The zigzag stitch is the worst. The different lines are different tensions. The higher the tension, the better the bobbin thread is.

Here is a close up of the back of a straight stitch. The thread kinda loops.

And here’s my pillow. I’m in love!