14-Day Learn to Sew Series - Seams for Wovens

Now, let's learn the fundamentals of sewing a basic seam on a woven fabric. And of course, this is the foundation of most of your sewing. It's very basic, but I want to go through it step by step, just in case it's something that is new to you and to help you develop some good habits. So, first of all, we need to know what kind of seam allowance you're going to be sewing with and this is something that should be marked on your pattern instructions, or maybe even on the pattern itself. Now, when you look at the bed of a machine, sometimes it's really hard to see where that might be. And so, one trick I like to use is to use, this is actually designer's tape used for pattern making, but you can use like a skinny piece of blue painter's tape to mark the bed of your machine. And there's also feet that can help you to see your guidelines, but blue painter's tape won't leave any kind of goo on your sewing machine bed, so it works really well, as does this. Now, I can see on the bed of my machine there is actually a little red line. But I, of course, can see visually much better if I put a piece of tape down. Now this is a 5/8 inch marking for the 5/8 inch seam allowances, actually that's the quarter inch, the 5/8 inch is over here. See it's a good thing I double checked. 'Cause even when you know what you're doing it's sometimes hard to see the lines and that's why it's good to have some sort of visual reference to help you to sew accurately. So that's just a quick tip. Now, of course, when we go to sew we're usually sewing two pieces of fabric together and we're going to put right sides together. Now, this is actually a solid colored fabric so you can't always tell which is the right side or wrong side and that's where, again, sometimes if I'm working with a pattern, I'm not sure which is the right or wrong side, I'll actually mark the pieces with just a little bit of, again, you want to make sure that this is something that won't leave any residue on your fabric but you can actually just use little pieces of tape or something, to mark or safety pin, to mark which is the right side, so you don't accidentally end up with, say, two left sleeves, 'cause that happens really easy. Been there, done that. Okay, now before we sew it, another thing that we commonly do is we'll pin our pieces together. Now pins vary in size and shape, I like very fine pins, this does mean that they can get bent a little easier, but generally speaking, you want to pin at the beginning of your seam or near the beginning. Now you notice that I'm not pinning right at the beginning because I do need to start sewing there. I just want to hold it together, make sure my edges are lined up right at the beginning and put a pin in. We generally wanna put pins in keeping our project nice and flat. Now similarly, i'm also going to put a pin at the end of my seam, make sure everything holds together. So place another pin there and then oftentimes, I will place a pin in the center. Now some of you as you become more proficient may find yourself not using pins a whole lot, other people will always use a ton of pins, that's very much a personal thing. I am not really a pinner, but there are times when I'm working with a slippery fabric or just I need to be more precise that, of course, I'm going to be using more pins. But the very least, one at the beginning, one at the end and one in the middle tends to work very well. So I want to be pinned enough to make myself feel more secure about my project staying together and then I can take it to the machine. So when I take it to the machine, I can go ahead and i'm going to line it up with my markings on the bed of my machine. Now, in my case, again, I put some colored tape down to make it easier to see, so if nothing else, it's kinda hard to see this on camera sometimes but once my fabric is where I want it to be I'm gonna go ahead and lower my sewing foot. Some machines will do this automatically, this machine is manual so I have to lower a lever and I'm actually going to set the fabric so that the edge of the fabric is just behind the needle just a touch. Okay, but it's nice and solidly on my feed dogs. I'm gonna turn my speed up a little bit, and I can just go ahead and take, i'm set for a straight stitch, I can go ahead and just take a couple stitches and then I might go ahead and touch my back stitch and just back up a couple of steps. This is called backstitching and that locks your seam in place by giving a couple of backwards stitches, it means the seam won't come undone. If you don't backstitch it's a possibility it can start to become unraveled at the beginning. Now when I get close to my pin i'm going to go ahead and pull my pin. There are times when you may find yourself accidentally sewing over a pin or leaving a pin in place until right there by the needle. That's fine, I have professional friends who sew over needles all the time, they never pull them out, it makes me cringe but again, it's kind of a personal thing. But, when you leave the pins in place you risk the needle hitting the pin which can bend the pin or break your needle. It's just, in my opinion, not a good habit but it doesn't mean that people don't do it. So, it's a personal thing. So I'm going to sew and as I sew i'm keeping the raw edge of my fabric against my guideline. Now, you want to let the feed dogs do the work. Don't try to steer to much, if you're just going in a straight line give it a little nudge here and there, if you need to, to keep it straight but you want to let the feed dogs do the work. Sometimes people try to oversteer and that's not always good. Now again, as I get towards the bottom of my seam I'm going to go ahead and slow down and i'm gonna go ahead and take a few backstitches just before the end. And then I can raise my foot and lift my presser foot and take my seam out of the machine. So there's my basic seam. So i'm going to take it over to my pressing board because as you sew you will also want to be pressing your seams and it's a good idea to be in the habit of pressing your seam the way it was sewn first. So, in other words, pressing it flat. And then for most seams, again, this is right sides together, I know it's a right side I marked it with tape. I'm gonna take the tape off now so I don't accidentally steam the tape, probably wouldn't appreciate that. You just want the marking for before you pin your pieces together to make sure that you don't accidentally pin a right side toward a wrong side and that sort of thing. But once i've sewn it I also then want to go ahead and press my seam open. This makes my seam less obvious from the right side and I usually do press it. When you press, generally speaking, I will use the tip of my iron to help open up the seam but then I try to go more of a up and down kind of motion than back and forth. So pressing means up and down, ironing means back and forth. Now I do wanna check on the right side to make sure that this looks nice. Now there are tools that I can use, pressing tools, to help keep this seam imprint from happening, it's called a steam stick. I'm not using it at the moment but there are pressing tools that can help to do a better job of pressing. I just want you to get the idea that whenever you sew, you're gonna press, always press. Now finally, for a basic seam, if this is something where this is not going to be lined, it's not going to be hidden inside something, you're going to need to do something with these seam allowances. So these seam allowances can fray, see how I can just pull the threads off the edge and it starts looking kinda ratty? You don't want that on the inside of your clothes or the inside of a project where you're going to see the seams. So if this is a basic seam there are different ways for us to finish it so it doesn't fray and my favorite way to do that is to use what's called pinking shears. This is one of my favorites, these pinking shears you see, have these teeth that look like, I don't know, shark's teeth or something and so these shark's teeth let you go ahead and trim the seam allowance into that zigzag shape that's called pinking. If you've ever seen a flower called a Pink they have jagged edges on the petals like this, but we pink that seam allowance and it's good to have a lint roller nearby to clean up. But you can just pink the edges and that will help to keep the edges from fraying. So that's really they fastest and easiest is to use pinking shears and to pink the edge. But another method that you can use is to simply turn this edge under and stitch it in place. So I'm going to do that, I'm going to turn it under and i'm just going to stitch in place, i'm not going to worry about pinning it, i'm just gonna go ahead and sew it. So i'm just turning that raw edge under towards the back side of the seam and i'm using the markings on my foot as a guide for me to stitch along the edge. Now if I need to I can also move my needle over. I'm just going to roll these under with my finger as I go. Now, of course, if I was going to take more time, I might press this first but this is just a quick lesson. But I just wanna stitch on the edge of the fold to hold it in place. And that's another way to finish my seam allowance. So see, there's the raw edge and I can go and I can trim that up and make it a little bit more neat and tidy, but it won't fray past the stitching line. Now if you have a machine called a serger or an overlocker you can of course use that to serge and finish your seam allowances, that's also a way to finish this. See if I press this, but the whole point of steam finishing is just to keep it from fraying. Now, one last way that we can go ahead and finish this, now this is a seam that you're going to have on the inside of a curve or something like, maybe it's a pair of pajama pants. You can also finish it by zigzagging on the seam allowance near your stitching and trimming it. So if I set my machine for a zigzag, so I need to pull out my little card here, i'm gonna set it for stitch three, that's a zigzag. And technically I should change my foot to a zigzag foot but i'm just going to leave it. So i'm going to sew so that my needle, if I turn my hand wheel I can double check, so my needle's going to go right over to my original seam line when it goes to the left and then it's going to stitch the seam allowances together. We're stitching both of these together, now no I wouldn't have bothered to finish them using those other methods first, I just wanted you to see what i'm talking about. And i'm just gonna stop there. But just as another method of finishing your seams, so here's my, i'm just gonna clip it right here. So in this case, if I chose to use this method, I zigzag right near my original stitching and then I can trim off the excess seam allowance. And again, this is good for things like sleeve seams, like in the underarm area where you just don't want a lot of thickness or again, a pair of pants in the crotch area. Now you need to go ahead and press this to one side. So the downside of doing this method is that it is a little bit thicker, you know, instead of having your seam allowance pressed open it's more bulky, let's press this, it's more bulky in the sense that you have two layers. You have less seam allowance that's left in the project and so you can sometimes get a little bit more of a ridge line pressed into your project. But that's another way that you can go ahead and finish your seam allowances to keep them from fraying. This wool frays very easily, as you can see. Now other methods might include using different types of seams, like french seams and things but those are three good basic methods that you can use with just your regular sewing machine or a pair of pinking shears. So I hope you've enjoyed how to sew a basic seam and i'm excited to teach you how to sew seams on knit fabrics as well.