Pintucks and edge finishes

When I first started doing the twin needle stitching on my jacket collar yesterday, I tried taking each thread through as many separate guides as I could, but put both through the one thread guide right above the twin needles on my Bernina 1230 and that seemed to cause things to jam up, however once I took them out of that guide, it seemed to work OK. Guess I should also try running both threads through all of the same guides, though, to see how that works.

I also couldn't figure out how to set the tension on my machine since when it was on normal, my two rows of stitching just lay flat on the surface of my sweatshirt fabric and tightening the tension up didn't seem to change that much, but when I loosened the top tension, that did the trick, I guess because that meant the bobbin thread was pulling harder, however I didn't want to adjust the bobbin tension unless I had to and luckily didn't.

I'm still debating about adding more rows of pintucks on the back of my collar, but am afraid that would be too much, however since I'm using fairly big stitches, as I did with most of the sewing I've done on this sweatshirt fabric, it wouldn't be too hard to take out, so I may try adding rows of stitching between my original rows today, I'll have to look at it again before I decide.

The worst part about this project has been trying to figure out what to do with the edges of the jacket since even though it's OK to leave boiled wool edges raw, this sweatshirt fleece doesn't lay flat or look all that nice when used that way, however when I tried to zigzag yarn to the edge of the back yesterday, even though I was using a walking foot, the bottom got all stretched out, so I cut that off and decided to try using a regular three thread serger stitch around the outside of my jacket since I knew I could reduce or increase the pull of the feed dogs on that machine. That worked OK, aside from the corners which I still don't know how to do on a serger, so have to figure out some way to get rid of all those serger tails.

The bottom of my jacket still doesn't lay as flat as I'd like, though, esp. on the sides where it's supposed to go from a short front to a longer back, so I think I may end up evening those up if I can figure out how to mark the bottom edge of a jacket. 

I use my old Singer skirt marker for marking the hem on dresses, so may be able to use it for a jacket, if I can figure out some way to make the marker level with that jacket hem. Since I only have white powder for my skirt marker, that probably won't be visible on my white sweatshirt fabric, but I once read about people using cinnamon in their pounce pads when marking a light colored quilt, so maybe I'll put some cinnamon in my marker and see how that works.

Afraid these may be notes that interest no one but me, at least not in this detail, but someday I can go back and read what has and hasn't worked and that may actually be the best use for blog in my case since I am so new to garment sewing, but maybe a few other novice sewers might happen to read what I say and learn a few things from me as I have from so many other bloggers in the past!