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To lower the feed dogs, this lever right below the bobbin can be slid to the minus side.
The teeth are the part that is right underneath your presser foot. When you slide it across,
they do go down, so nothing is actually touching your fabric.
Keep in mind when you go to raise them back up, and you slide the lever back to the left,
you do not see those feed dogs until you take a stitch. If you even hold onto your thread
and do a needle up and a needle down, you’re going to see, those teeth will come back up.
Just keep that in mind. If you’re going to go back and forth, nothing is going to
happen. They will go down, but they won’t come back up.
We lower the feed dogs down whenever we want to do free motion stitching. I lower them
down when I actually stitch on a button, so those teeth aren’t tapping the bottom of
the button each time the needle is going down.
Another thing that you can do is, when you are putting really thick fabric in, you’ve
lifted the presser foot higher, and it’s still really thick. I have been known to lower
the feed dogs down, and get some extra space. Look how much room I have. I can get all my
fingers underneath that foot. That has also helped.
Then, just slide them back, and as soon as you take that first stitch, they will come
up and start stitching.