The Upholstery Forum

Hello all
I have a first gen consew 206rb and I've reupholstered the seating faces of both front and rear seats of an IH Scout II.

For the rear seat (which was in pretty good shape) as a bit of an experiment I unpicked the seat and died the side naughahyde black, and added a layer of sunbrella on the seating surfaces. For the front seat I used new vinyl material for the sides and was able to sew the seat seams inside out feeling the piping through the fabric so the piping foot ran along the interior fabric, sewing through the piping .

This wasn't easy but I got it done. for the rear seat I'm having lot of trouble getting all the layers of material into the throat of the presser foot and following the piping edge through the 'inside out' material. I sewed the piping to the seating face and am now trying to attach the sides.

What techniques do people use to sew the piping 'blind', do you use a bigger piping presser foot to compensate for the extra material or is there some better way?

Thanks

@olivermarks , really good question and I run into this with my Consew as well. For me it is just a slow process and often the material will not feed and I have to manually pull it through. When I cannot feel I use the edge of a crew driver to feel the edge of the piping just in front of my needle. I am wondering if the machines like Juki 1541 are handling this better.

Have you guys tried raising the step height on your machine? If its set too low, the rear foot doesn't lift high enough to smoothly feed the material past it and it will hang up and not want to feed properly.

Loosen the nut or thumb screw here, slide to the top if the slot and re tighten

Thanks - yes I'm maxed out on that setting. It all just fits but my big issue is what BigRig described - you have to feel the piping inside the sandwich through the top layer of material just ahead of the presser foot, I'm finding it really hard to accurately sew against the edge of the piping and have broken a couple of needles trying also. Some kind of device that bears down on the workpiece to force the piping to raise up the fabric I'm sewing through could work, I was thinking of pressing a forked trim pry tool onto it to see if that works. The only other alternative I might try is clipping all around the edge of the workpiece and drawing a line to sew against, sandwich tends to shift though...

Sorry, i misinterpreted it as a machine feeding issue. Are you talking pre made cord or are you sewing the cord and pieces all at once?

I pipe a lot of the things I make and I struggle with this issue.

Ideally, you want the stitch to be right up tight with the piping cord, but having that extra layer over the piping shifts the stitch line away from the piping, especially if you compensate for the extra layer with a larger diameter piping foot. With three layers of work sandwiched (and it is four layers of fabric) the stuff in the sandwich does shift around, just as you say. That makes it even harder.

Since I have no skill, I substitute staples for skill. Yep, I staple the whole mess together and then drive the needle into the cording. Of course, I use a cording foot. Sometimes I do have to go up a size if the material is overly thick. If I don't then the cording foot won't follow the cording well enough.

And ya know what? Nobody watches me sew and nobody takes apart what I have sewn and sees the staple holes. They just say "Geez, dude, you made that? That's totally bitchin'; it looks just like it was made in a Chinese sweatshop." The fact that you used staples to get the job done remains a secret between you and whatever deity you make a part of your life...

Its good to have a few sizes of welt feet to compensate for material thickness.