We’ve all been there. You are starting a seam on your sewing machine, and the machine sucks the top thread down underneath the fabric. There are some horrific sounds, possibly a couple of skipped stitches and the seam leaves a rats nest of thread on the underside of the fabric: thread barf.

I have used a lot of machines in my life, expensive machines, bargain machines, new machines, antique machines, and no machine is immune. Some do it less often – I feel this is a correlation to Murphy’s Law – the more important it is, the more likely you are to have thread barf. That being said there is a way to avoid thread barf 100% of the time!!

I’m talking about using Leaders and Enders! If you chain piece, you know part of the joy in chain piecing is that you sew from one piece to the next smoothly with no possibility of thread barf. The top thread is neatly tied up in the existing line of stitching and cannot misbehave. Using Leaders and Enders just mean you start sewing on a piece of scrap fabric, so that when you start sewing on your project piece, you are already established in a seam, so you smoothly start the seam on your new piece. When you finish the piece, you sew off onto another piece of scrap fabric, and clip the seam to free your project piece. A second benefit is you never have to lift your presser foot and you don’t ever release the tension discs on the top thread. You basically never stop sewing, you are just chaining from Leader to project to Ender (which now becomes the next Leader) to project to Ender and so on.

But Wait! There’s MORE! Yes it gets even better!!! You don’t have any thread tails to go back and snip with this method which means your floor (and your sweater) are not littered with thread that you have to clean up.

If you are really organized and ambitious, you can piece two projects at a time. Bonnie Hunter talks about this regularly using one project as her leader/ender seams, while piecing her main project. I have friends who work a modified version of this, piecing scrappy 4 patch blocks as their leader/ender seams. I’m easily distracted by shiny objects and very often find myself doing nothing with main project and sewing only leader/ender project pieces. Sigh. So most of the time I stick with scrap fabric for my leaders and enders but I still reap the benefits of no thread barf, no threads to trim or clean up and not having to raise and lower my presser foot.

The cover photo for this post shows leaders and enders in use. Give it a whirl and see if it removes the dreaded thread barf from your sewing life. My goal this year is to train myself to sew scrappy 4 patch blocks as my leaders and enders. There’s some cutting that needs to happen and some organization of my sewing space, but I think it’s an achievable goal for this year. TWO PROJECTS AT THE SAME TIME!!