I must make an electronic sewing diary...much better than a pile of notes scattered in my drawer.

It was great advice, BJ, so much so that I stowed it away in my electronic sewing diary although I haven't forgotten "3.5" yet! and I swear by it to this day so thank YOU!

:shock: Well, I should look at my notes. It's been a while since I did metallic embroidery. I'll give my own advice a whirl. LOL

Betty Jo, I mean well when I say this. There was a Betty Jo Tatum fabric artist who had a great guide on using metallics on her blog. I was having the same problems with embroidering with metallics that you describe below. I was getting super-frustrated because I was working on a design I had digitized myself--Chinese good luck bats for the Sedona Star BOM. I know Superior Threads says to use an upper thread tension of 2 but that was giving me the same results on the back side of the fabric that you are suffering with. I looked at your blog entry on metallics at that time http://blog.bjfabricartist.com/search.aspx?q=metallic&sc=t&dt=a&al= and was shocked that you suggested an upper thread tension of 3.5, but I had exhausted everything else that I could come up with on my own, so I tried your suggested 3.5 AND IT WORKED BEAUTIFULLY! The back looked as good as the front at upper tension of 3.5 so that is what I ended up going with. It does sound counter-intuitive on the surface but you may want to give it a shot. Let us know if it works and hang in there!

I posted a quick reply and it seems to have gone into space.
I said ....If you are using Superior threads get in touch with Bob
Good luck
Anne

Hi all. As some of you know I use metallic threads a lot in free motion quilting and embroidery and usually manage to get it so it has no problem at all. But I have been trying to get the same kind of good results when I use my embroidery module on my B830 LE. I need to get this to work better. Even with the best threads I get tangles of the metallic that is loaded in the top thread on the back side. If I lower the tension on the top to one, as Bob suggests for the Superior thread, it leaves lots of loops on top (using Superior or Presencia metallic threads with Superior Bottom Line on the bottom). I have found it looks best on top with about a 2.0 top tension, and default embroidery threading on the bottom. But I still get the snarls or metallic tangles on the back and eventually the thread will break or leave a snarl in the bobbin area that requires great amounts of cleaning. I have the little gadget on that allows you to put the upper thread through the thread lubricant. So I thought something must be dramatically wrong with my machine. But when I went back to "regular" sewing, it sews like a charm with the metallic thread. I think I can get the design done in such a way that it won't come out, and I will be hiding the back because I'm embroidering it before construction and it will be inside the quilt, so I can use it. But I'd like to get better results. I even tried slowing the machine down a lot. Do any of you have any suggestions?

Oh, and by the way. The embroidery module does great with regular threads..no problems at all.