Advance Your Sewing Skills Session 5: Professional Seam Finishes

When it comes to taking your garment sewing to the next level you can do that with some really professional seam finishing techniques. And I have two very common ones that you'll find in a lot of garments that you'll find either at the stores or in ready-made where are definitely professional. If you're gonna buy like a professional, a nice shirt maybe a suit coat, things like that they'll be done either with a French seam construction or the seams will be finished being flat felt. So I'm gonna show you both of those today. And I have two samples here and you can tell the way we'll be able to tell which one is which is that a French seam finish you won't see any stitching unless there's extra top stitching added. A flat felled seam you will have a line of stitching that you'll see. Normally this would be done in a color of thread that would match your color of fabric but I wanted it to stand out for this that's why it's in white thread. On the reverse side, you can see that our French seam construction you can see one line of stitching here on the wrong side and for our flat felled, there are two lines of stitching. So I'm going to start with the flat felled seam here and show you how to do that. So I have just a couple of squares here. I would align my fabric, right sides together and I would get ready to stitch. Now if this is going to be for a garment say I'm using a commercial pattern I'm following my 5/8 inch seam allowance so that's what I want to stitch on. So that's what I'm gonna stitch our little squares together on and gonna go ahead and do a back stitch at the beginning and end. But other than that I'm just doing a standard construction's stitch at a 5/8 inch seam allowance. Again, I'll add a back stitch to the end and cut my threads. So now I need to do some pressing. I'm gonna go ahead and clip off this thread here. so we get a nice look. What I'm gonna do first and this is how I like to press when I'm working with my seams or doing any sort of flat felling. So I first wanna press just to make sure everything's nice and flat and then I'm gonna press my seams to just one side or the other. So do that, I like to leave it wrong side up just pick up one of my sides and run my iron over it. So I know I have seams pressed to one side. Now I need to do some trimming. So why I like to press my fabric first is because I need to trim off one layer of the seam allowance and I want to do it on the underside, the lower side. So the one that's sort of sandwiched between our actual piece and our other seam allowance. So I'm gonna get my scissors and I just want to trim this. I'm trimming it to about an 1/8 of an inch or just very, very small. Again, I'm being careful I like to make sure I'm leaving it laying flat on my surface rather than picking it up and trying to cut it because I don't to accidentally trim an area that I'm not purposely trying to trim meaning I don't wanna cut any of the fabric from the right side of whatever garment it is I'm making. And I don't wanna accidentally cut the other side of my seam allowance or I wouldn't be able to complete the flat felled seam and I'd have to start over. So now I have that trimmed, we're going to do some folding and some pinning. So I'm gonna grab my pins, bring them over here. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to fold my remaining seam allowance under like so to match up with that stitching line. So I'm folding over and encasing what I trimmed off folding that piece down to this stitching line like so and then I'm folding it back down on itself back towards the fabric. You can see is just creating a nice narrow fold. We've encased our edge we've trimmed and we have a nice folded edge here. And then I just put a couple of pins in place and continue doing that all along the seam. Again, I'm folding the remaining seam allowance under encasing the edge I trimmed off, making sure it's nice and even and then I go ahead and put in some pins and I like to just go ahead and do pins right away. Some people like to fold and then press it first and then take everything over and pin it, but I like to just use a few extra pins and just skip that pressing step first and just go right to the pinning. So now that it's pinned in place I need to stitch to make sure everything is nice and secure. So what I will be doing is I'll be stitching fairly close to the folded edge here of the fabric. And I wanna stitch close to that fold because I wanna make sure that it is nice and secure down to that fabric and it won't have this little fold that could flap up. So I'll take it over to my machine and again I'm just going to stitch fairly close to that fold. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and do a back stitch first. My fabric caught up a little on the corner or at the end there. So just wanna make sure everything is nice and flat under my presser foot and continue to stitch all the way down. I'll go ahead and and take my pins out when I get to them, make it a little easier as I go. Again, I'm getting really, really close to that fold. One last little bit and there we go. Now I'm done. Lift up my needle and take this off and I can show you what it looks like. So you can see right along here I've stitched really, really close to the edge of that fold all the way around so that folded edge is nice and secured down, it's not gonna come up even though it's on the wrong side of our fabric. On the right side, we do have this extra row of stitching that will be visible. Again, if you're using a thread that matches it won't be as visible. But what I wanna show you is you can change the distance that you stitch from the fold. So on this sample I just did I stitched as close to the fold as I possibly could, where on this sample I stitched right along the middle of my folded piece. That way my rows of stitching my stitching to my seam were a little bit closer together. So that's personal preference on your end as to how far you want your stitching line from your fold. As long as everything is nice and secured on the back it's totally up to you. So that's how you would do a flat felled seam. Now let's move on to the French seam construction. Now, this is a way that you can actually sew to where you're finishing all of your edges while you're actually putting your pieces together. It's sort of just a two-step process. So again, we have our two pieces and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start by aligning my fabric with wrong sides together. So again, wrong sides together and I'm going to stitch using a 3/8 inch seam allowance. So we're starting off with a smaller seam allowance than we would normally be doing with the 5/8 and I'll show you why that's important in just a bit. So go ahead and stitch with your 3/8 inch seam allowance all the way along your seam. Go ahead and back stitch at the beginning and the end and just stitch normal. Now, what I need to do is I need to trim this and I wanna trim it to about an 1/8 of an inch or just very close to my stitching line. Oops, got a little off line there. Have it nice and trimmed. And again, this is still this is the right side of my fabric right now. The wrong sides were facing each other. So what I wanna do now is fold my fabric to where the right sides are now together. So what I'm gonna do is take it and fold it putting my right sides together and I wanna make sure I'm folding right along this stitching line. So if I need to use my finger underneath to sort of help make sure everything is laying nice and flat you can do that. Press it with my fingers a little bit, bring over my iron and give that a nice press. So now I have my fabric right sides together. So this is my wrong side up. So now I need to take it back to my machine and stitch the second half of my two-step process. And to do that, we are going to now stitch a 1/4 inch seam allowance. Okay, so I have everything lined up to stitch. Again, I'm gonna go ahead and back stitch at the beginning and the end and run my stitching all the way along. Go ahead and do my back stitch and bring that out. So now when I open it up, get my right sides of my fabric you can see I have a nice seam. Like so it presses open just like it would if I stitched on a 5/8 seam allowance, but on the wrong side you can see I have a nice finished seam. It's encased, there are no raw edges and I could go ahead and do my entire garment like this and then rather than having to go back and flat felt seams at the end of the construction, I can do all my seam finishes while I'm making something using the French seam technique. And then, there is that extra step when you're stitching because you have to go 3/8 inch then a 1/4 but it does save you some time and that you don't have to go back and do any finishing in the end. So this is two different options that you can use if you really want to take your garment construction to the next level and have everything look as good on the inside as it does on the outside.