Decorative Stitching on the Serger

Today I’m playing with decorative stitches on the serger. What? You thought the serger’s sole purpose was to make boring seams on things? No! Seams can be fun, too!

The stitch we are looking at is called the ladder stitch. It’s a two thread stitch, and is surprisingly strong. I stumbled across it while making fleece socks because I could not get my serger to do a nice flatlock. I was skeptical that it would be a strong enough stitch, after all, it’s called a decorative stitch. But, having used it on fleece socks that were then used by a teenage boy, I can tell you, this is a strong stitch!

Let’s take a look.

For this stitch, I’ve got Maxi-Lock in the lower looper and a heavyweight decorative thread in the needle. I’m also using a 90/14 topstitching needle. You’ll want the bigger needle eye to get the heavyweight thread through it. The needle is threaded by way of the upper looper. What? Right, that sounds pretty weird. But it looks like this:

Here’s a close up of where the needle thread is hopping out of the upper looper to go to the needle:

For the decorative thread to be on the outside of the garment, the fabrics are sewn right sides together as usual. I’m going to use this on a hoodie, so my samples are stitched on Polartec® WindPro® fleece. Now, I’ve also done this with MaxiLock in the needle and Wooly Nylon in the lower looper and sewn the fabrics wrong sides together so the Wooly Nylon makes a ladder on the right sides. When I do the MaxiLock/Wooly combination, I use my regular ball point needles.

Once it’s all set up, you can just run the fabric through. And then it looks like this on the top:

Here’s the bottom side:

When you first open up the two pieces that you’ve sewn, you can’t see much –

But when you start to pull the pieces you’ll see the decorative thread peek out.

Just pull the pieces until the seam flattens out. The front will look like this.

As long as you are using sturdy materials, go ahead and give your fabrics a tug, this is a strong stitch!

And the back will look like this.

Here are some samples I sewed up. I’m making a hoodie for the boy, so I wanted to give him some options.

Hopefully I’ll have the finished hoodie to share in a day or two!

Happy serging!
Kelly