Sewing Machine Maintenance

Greetings Creative People,

Today, I want to share with you, maintaining the performance of your sewing machines. It's very important to clean your sewing machines as often as you sew. The unwritten rule (which might be written somewhere) is to clean and oil your machine once per month and/or it depends on how often you sew. If you sew all day everyday, you might consider cleaning it every two weeks or between projects. Some people would argue, that it's not necessary to clean your machine that often, however, if you only use your sewing machine once per month or once per year than, they may be right. A sewing machine is just that, a machine, and all machines need to be cleaned and oiled to perform the way it did when you first purchased the machine; it simply prolongs the life of your sewing machine.

Please refer to your owners manual for your sewing machine for specific instructions. In this post, I take you through the process with me while I clean my sewing machine. Before we get started, I have a confession to make, it's probably been about six months since I last cleaned my machine and I have been sewing almost everyday...oops! Despite my desire to ignore my machine, it certainly let me know it needed some oil and a needle change, by being very loud and skipping stitches, ugh! I'm sharing that to let you know that some, if not all, sewing machines have a way of letting you know when they need some TLC, just in case you are not sure when to clean your machine.

Anyway, let's get started:

The machine I am using is a Singer Simple 2263, this is the one I use for my beginner sewing classes also.

I removed the thread, bobbin, bobbin case, the presser foot and needle. Please to turn your machine off and unplug it from the wall before you get started cleaning. Because, I was overdue for a deep cleaning, I removed the throat plate and the entire bobbin case from my machines, as shown in the photo on the right.

These Singer sewing machine needles came with this machine, they are universal (good for most fabric types) this is what I will be replacing my old needle with.

Most sewing machines come with a little bottle of oil, and this machine was no exception, however, I cannot begin to recall where mine is, so I went to Jo Ann's to purchase me another one. Your owner's manual will tell you what kind of machine oil to use, but from experience, never use oil you have laying around the house or in the garage. Since I have a domestic sewing machine, basic all purpose sewing machine oil works just fine. If you have an industrial sewing machine (which is on my Amazon wish list :)), you must use industrial sewing machine oil for your machine.

I removed the cover to the top part of my machine (shown here) to dust and oil all moving parts.

 I'm not sure if you can tell, but in the picture, below this paragraph on your left, can you see all the dust on the presser foot bar and the needle bar, this much dust impedes the performances of your machine and it needs to be removed! I am so disgusted with myself for letting my machine get that bad! Yuk! Even if I don't oil that much, I am usually removing the dust considering that has the potential to get on your project and make it look horrible! Take a look at the photo on the right as I began to remove the dust from the bobbin area, no wonder my machine was getting super loud, I really was trying to get through my project without worrying about this...bad idea! Take a closer look in the next photo on the left, my feed dogs are so dusty, eventually, it would have been hard to move my fabric if I would have continued to let the dust continue to build up.

 After removing all the parts and dusting everything out, the bobbin area, the top of the machine, I oil the machine with one drop of oil, per moving part, per the instructions from my user manual. After oiling my machine, I turned it on and pressed my presser foot as if I were sewing, to let the oil permeate through the machine, I kept the machine running for several minutes or less.

I wiped the outside of my machine down with a soft cloth and started putting all the little parts back onto my machine. I hope you can tell the difference in the after photos.

The final step to sewing machine maintenance is to thread your machine as you normally would and grab a piece of scrap fabric and do some test stitches. 

Just in case there is too much oil or oil dripping from parts of your machine, the drips will soak up on your scrap fabric instead of you next project...please do not skip this step!

My machine looks and sounds so much better, now that I cleaned all the dust out and oiled all necessary parts. After putting everything back together, I believe my machine likes me again...at least, it sounds like it! I did my test stitches and no oil leaked so that's good, now I can move on to my next projects with a well oiled machine...wink! wink! :)

I hope this information is helpful, if you have any questions, please feel free to leave me a comment or send me an email, I will be happy to help! Happy Sewing! Until next time!