Backstepping on the Bernina 820/830
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 2:18PM Did this confuse anyone else as much as it did me? When I demoed the Bernina 830 back in February, this was one of the features I totally flipped over. How many times have you been happily stitching out a row of gorgeous decorative stitching, only to have your thread break and ruin it all?
You’d have to be both a mathematical genius and have the luck of the Gods to be able to perfectly back track over your existing stitches after re-threading.
Enter the amazing backstepping feature! The 820/830 records the last 200 stitches in memory (unless you clear it) and when you press the quick reverse/backstepping button, the machine stitches in the exact needle points where it stitched previously. How amazing is that?
Only each time I tried it, both my presser foot and needle would raise to rethread the machine, which of course rendered the ability useless.
None other than Bernina’s software engineer finally got through my thick head how this feature works, and I’ve got it now, and I want to make sure you get it too!
;)
Unthread your machine. (We don’t want to wait all day for a thread break). You can select straight stitch #1 and presser foot #1C for this exercise. Begin sewing. The 820/830 will sew a few stitches, and then the broken thread animation screen will appear. If you sew with your machine’s needle position in the permanently down mode as I do, both your needle and the presser foot will be down now.
Press the needle threader button. (This is the part I wasn’t getting!) The needle will raise, releasing the tension discs, but the foot will not, even if you have hovering enabled (which I do, couldn’t live without it!).
;)
Thread the machine, (clear the broken thread animation from the screen), and press and hold the quick reverse/backstepping button and back track a few stitches to secure the thread.
If you want to test this with a decorative stitch, then thread your machine, sew a bit of the stitch of your choice out, and cut the thread to force the machine to display the broken thread animation. Follow the above steps, I think you’ll be amazed!