While I’ve gotten a better handle on how to avoid skipped stitches, I still get them on occasion. I keep asking people with nicer machines if they have this problem too, and the answer is always yes, so at least I’m not alone! Here’s how I fix them and move on with my life.
When I made my first pair of jeans and my machine skipped a random stitch or two I’d just ignore it or backstitch over it since it was black thread on black fabric which blended in. When I was working on my latest jeans, this time with contrast topstitching, a skipped stitch was really obvious and going back over it would also be really obvious. I only had one or two skipped stitches (thanks to getting my tension right and using scrap denim to level out my presser foot), but I snapped a few photos of how I fixed them.
I just take a thread the color of the fabric, come up on one side of the topstitching where the stitch should have been, stitch over the topstitching thread, and tie it off in the back. Then bury the ends in a seam allowance if possible. I’m not sure if this an obvious fix to everyone but me, but it definitely took me a bunch of projects to figure this out, and now instead of getting super frustrated I just finish my row of topstiching, and then tack it down really quickly and move on.
I started doing this with the Caravan Tote with the crazy amounts of interfacing and bulk.
