Customize a Jacket Session 4: How to Sew the Modified Pattern Pieces

So now that you've seen how to do the alterations to the pattern pieces, I wanna show you how to actually do the sewing of those pieces. So for something like the collar, all we really did was add a little extra height to it. So the actual stitching of the collar would be the same. So you can see I've already had mine. I've already stitched mine. I have put them right sides together, stitched using my 5/8 inch seam allowance. I started and stopped my stitching 5/8 of an inch from the edge so I can still attach this to my jacket. But other than that, it's just stitched the same. Now what I wanna show you is what you have to do with this fabric to turn it right side out and then what you need to do in order to make it lay flat since it is such a bulky fabric. This goes for this sweatshirt fabric as well as the quilted fabric and the faux leather. So first we need to trim our seam allowances. And this is pretty standard. You would do this for most colors that you're making. You just wanna trim it by at least 1/2, that's what you wanna do. So we're gonna go all the way around the edge and we're just going to trim it. So you get the idea of that part, all the way around the edge, you would trim it. Now, when it comes to our upper edge here I went ahead and kept the curve so I could just show you how you would deal with the curve with bulky fabric. So what I need to do is I need to clip my curve. Now, if this was just regular cotton fabric I was making a shirt or something. I could just simply make a little slit like that and that would be perfectly fine. But since I need to give it a little bit more room for this fabric to sort of bunch together when I turn it right side out, I'm actually going to make little triangle cuts. Now, this is where if you have pinking shears already you can just use those. Or, this is easy enough. And it's not that large of an area that we can just go through and make our little triangle snips. Again and going close to the stitching, not all the way through the stitching. You don't want to accidentally cut too far. But so you do that just around your curved edge. And now I wanna go ahead and turn this right side out. So I can do that, like this, bring my pressing surface over here. And lay it flat. So you can see how, because I made all those little notches, we have a nice curve and it lays really nice and flat. So now what I would do is just press this, but because it is such a bulky fabric pressing doesn't always work. So I may press it, use some steam, take it away, but it's still really bulky. And as soon as I put it on, or even as soon as the first time I wash it, what's gonna happen is these layers are gonna come back apart like this. So I really want to avoid that happening. So what I'm gonna do is some top stitching. So again, I want to make sure that I have it turned right side out. I'm sort of just using my fingers to sort of move it, so I have everything lined up. And I'm gonna put a couple pins in but I don't really wanna have to worry about taking them out when I get to them. So I'm gonna make sure I put them far enough away that they're not going to interfere with my needle when I'm stitching. And go all the way down to the edge. And then we're going to do some topstitching. And normally when you're doing a topstitching on something a little bit lighter weight maybe just a cotton fabric, you can just line it up with a line on your presser foot and then know you're gonna stitch really close to the edge. That's a little harder to do with such a bulky fabric because you have a lot of fabric going underneath the presser foot. So what I recommend doing is actually lining your fabric up with the edge of your presser foot. Now, if I were to just put my fabric over there, now line up my fabric with the edge of the presser foot and start stitching. That's not really close enough to the edge. That's a really big gap of where your stitching line would be to where the edge of your fabric is. And I think it looks a little more professional if you can get a little bit closer to your edge. So what you would want to do is adjust your needle position. Now, all machines are a little bit different as to how it works, but all you wanna do is just move your needle a little further to the right or closer to the edge of your fabric. Now I have moved mine over. Now I have a number on my machine that says where I've set my needle position at. Whatever your number is or however your machine works to move your needle position, just remember that, because if you're doing that topstitching on here, you'll want that topstitching to be the same throughout other areas of your jacket where you do the topstitching. So just remember where you've set it. So you can set it back to that when you get to topstitching in other areas. So all I would do is now just stitch. And I have my fabric lined up with the edge of my presser foot And I'm just stitching right along that edge. Go right around the curve, like so, keeping it nice and flat, and then we will continue on. So, go ahead and cut this. And you can see how now, even when I take my pins away it is gonna lay nice and flat. We don't have any extra puckering like we kind of do here where our fabric wants to come apart where we stitched it. So this is a really easy way to be able to keep everything laying nice and flat. And I mean, I've used some contrasting thread here so you can see my stitching line, but if you have black fabric and you're using black thread, you wouldn't even really be able to see that, all you'll be able to see is a nice professional color. So that's how you do your color no matter how much taller you make it. So the next part that we need to show you how since we made some alterations to it is the pocket. Now pockets can be a little bit tricky to put into the front of a jacket because it doesn't necessarily make sense how they go in and you'd think you'd just be able to sew your pocket pieces together and then sew them in. But there's a little trick on how you can do it to where you actually just sew it in while you're actually putting your front pieces together. So I have a front and I have my side front piece. And see I have notches on everything, so that's where those will be lined up when we get to that point. And I have my larger pocket pieces. Now these also have notches on them and they are gonna line up with this bottom notch. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a pocket and I'm gonna stitch it to each one of these pieces, both the front and the side front. And what I really wanna make sure is that not only if I've cut everything out right all my notches should line up, but also you wanna make sure your pocket pieces line up. So you can see here, when I go to put the pieces together they would be off a little bit. So I really wanna make sure that my pocket pieces are perfectly aligned with each other with the notches on each of those pattern pieces aligned. Let me go ahead and put a couple pins in and then we'll stitch one. So now when you're using a thick fabric like this and you have a really thin lining fabric the pins that you wanna use, you wanna use pins that are meant for this lining fabric. So say for example, here I have a much thicker, this is actually a pin used for quilting, but you can use it on something thicker like the sweatshirt fabric, but I can't really put it through my lining fabric without creating a large hole. So I want to use pins that are suitable for my thinner lining fabric. Now I'm going to stitch this. Now, eventually we will be stitching our side front and our front together at a 5/8 inch seam allowance, so I wanna stitch this on not a 5/8 inch seam allowance. So what I'm gonna do is go back over to my machine and get the center on my presser foot. And the first thing I wanna do is I remember that I just did topstitching, so that means that my needle position is adjusted and I don't want to forget about it and then not put it back and then all my seams that I thought were 5/8 inch weren't actually what I wanted them to be. So if you have to put a little sticky note or something to remind yourself when you've changed your needle position, you definitely wanna make sure that you put it back when you're done topstitching. So I'm stitching, just lining my fabric up with the edge of my foot, because I know this be less than 5/8 of an inch. And we're going to stitch this in place. Okay, go ahead and put one little backstitch to make sure it's nice and secure. And then we're gonna bring it over and do some pressing. So what we need to do is we need to press our pockets away from our side front piece. So I'm just gonna do that really quick like so. And I would be doing the same thing with my pockets to front piece. I would've stitched here and pressed that open. So now, now that I have this nice and pressed, what I wanna do is actually run some topstitching along this. And the reason you're doing this is because that will help hold your pocket in place. So say you have gloves on and you put your hands in your pockets and then you pull your hands back out, you don't want your pockets to be coming with you. So this little bit of top stitching really helps keep those pockets in place. So I'm gonna bring this over. And since again, I have my thinner fabric here with my lining, I can go ahead and just line my fabric up on my presser foot and I'll know that I'm keeping a nice, even line up topstitching all the way along. I have that nice and stitched in place. Oops, sometimes those cutters don't work like you'd like them to. Let's quit and clip our threads. And we have our nice piece that has been topstitched and we know our pocket will stay in place. Now what we'd need to do is do the same thing on this piece here. So I'm just gonna stitch it real quick but I'm not actually going to topstitch it, but we just need to be able to show how our pocket pieces actually go together. So let's run a quick line of stitching along this one and then we can put our two pieces together. Get our machine ready. Okay. Again, this is a less than a 5/8 inch seam, that's what we want. Okay, just like that. Now take this over. And again, we would be pressing it and top stitching it but we can just push it to the side right now. So I'm gonna show you how to actually do the assembly of the front and back. So this is where you need to make sure everything lines up. You have your notches, we're putting right sides together and we're going to line up our pockets. We're gonna line up all of our notches and we're going to pin. Now what you want to do, the most important thing here is you need to have your pockets out here and your pieces over here. Now, if you accidentally forgot about this little part and you just lined your fabric up right sides together and you just stitched, you'd have just some weird flaps on the outside of your jacket. They wouldn't actually form a pocket. Also, if you forgot and still had your pockets in but you went ahead and you stopped your stitching like you need you for pockets, you still wouldn't be able to pull your pockets to the inside. So you really wanna make sure before you do any stitching your pockets are away from your front pieces. So we can line everything up here. I'm gonna put a pin at the bottom. And I'm going to put a larger different pin right here to remind me that I need to stop my stitching and don't continue on. If I continue on, I've just closed off the area that would have been the pocket and that really does mean no good. Let me do the same thing on this side. Put my larger pin here. So I know that I need to stop my stitching and then I will go ahead and line up my other notches like so. And when you're putting a front into a side front there is a little bit of a curved seam, and that can be a little bit difficult if you're using maybe a cotton fabric or even with the pleather fabric, it might be a little difficult. With something like this sweatshirt fabric, it's really easy, it has a lot of stretch and give to it, so you can sew and pin these curve seems very easy. So maybe if this is your first jacket or first sort of curve, you have to work with definitely pick a fabric like this, it's really easy to work with. So we've got our pins in place and now we just need to stitch it. So I'm gonna take it over here. And again, this is a construction seam, so we'll be on 5/8 inch seam allowances, and we're just going to stitch. Right along, I'm gonna go ahead and pull out my pins as I go. And then when I get to this curve, you can't really see it, but you can feel it. That's why you always wanna have your hands up here while you're sewing. But I can feel that I have some bumps in my fabric that I don't wanna stitch over. And if you look under here, you can see I have a fold, a gather of fabric that I don't want to accidentally stitch into the front of my jacket. So I'm gonna pull using this hand here, make sure that lays flat and then I continue on stitching. So I always sort of have this finger here right along where I'm going to be stitching and that's how I'm able to feel and make sure that everything is going to lay nice and flat. So I sort of feel another pucker coming up. And if you look, you can see I have a little bit of a wrinkle here, so I can flatten it back out and then continue stitching. So it's really important to just make sure you're always aware of what you're stitching, aware of how your layers are laying together. Just because you have pins in place does not mean that there can't be puckers between your pins. So I'm gonna go all the way up to where my larger stop pin was, put some backstitching in and stop. Okay? And now I can continue on, on the whole other side of my pocket. So I had a stop pin, now, this is my start pin. I can go ahead and do my stitching all the way to the end. Go ahead and backstitch in place and we can cut our threads. Okay. So now if we open this up we can see that this would be our front and our side front. So if I'm wearing this I'd be able to put my hand into this opening. So that means we've stitched it right. Otherwise, if we actually stitched this close, we wouldn't really have a pocket. Now, if you want to do topstitching here, you can. That's something that I would probably do on a jacket like this, just because it is such a bulky fabric. So I would press this, make sure my pockets are laying out flat. And go ahead and just do topstitching. If you decide you wanna do top stitching that's something that you have to do at this step. The next step is we're going to sew our pocket pieces together, which means you'll no longer be able to stitch one side without stitching the other side of the pocket. So you have to do topstitching at this step. But if you don't want to do topstitching, you can just move on to actually stitching our pocket together. So all I did is took my two pocket pieces, laid them right sides together. I'm going to put a pin in them and I'm going to stitch. And I'm only gonna stitch a small section of this pocket because I really just want you to be able to hear the difference in sound of stitching. And that might sound a little weird, but what I mean is, the needle I have in my machine right now is meant for this heavy duty fabric, this is a thicker fabric. Now this lining is really thin. Normally, if I was going to be stitching with a thinner fabric like this, I would actually change out my needle, I would use a lightweight needle, but since I just wanna demo what happens if you use a heavier needle, I'm gonna leave that one in place. So again, this is a needle meant for heavier fabric. So I'm gonna just stitch. You can hear it actually is making holes in the fabric. It sounds like you're punching holes through paper, okay? So that means you're not using the right needle. The reason you don't wanna use such a thick needle for a fabric like this, is because the needle is so large that it is really having to punch holes in this fabric. Now, we've only done a small section here but if I was going to continue on, I would change out my needle to a thinner one because you can end up getting runs in your fabric. Because it's actually having to put a hole in it, you can actually have little runs in your fabric. So the reason that doesn't happen with a thicker fabric like this is because this is already heavier duty and it stands up to the heavier duty needle. So just make sure you're always using the right needle for your fabric. And even on super small jobs, like a little pocket, you still wanna make sure that if you need to change out your needle just go ahead and take that time to do that so you don't have any runs or anything in your pocket. So I have a front here that I've already done and we have, I've done some topstitching on there to show you, I have our pocket piece, we've stitched it together. And I have the top stitching here and you can see we have a nice pocket, nice larger pocket, we can actually get our hand all the way in. Our front and side front lay nicely together and everything is ready to go. So now our only thing that we need to add onto our front pieces is if we're going to add that zipper. Now, what we need to add is a place for the zipper to actually be attached to. And I'm actually gonna hold this up to the jacket behind me so you can sort of see what I mean. So on this one here, I have buttons. So I just need it to overlap and that's easy. I put buttons and button holes and that's it. On this one, I'm going to attach zipper to this side of the front. And that is easy, you just sew it on there. But then what do you do with his other half of the zipper? There's nothing really for it to attach to. If you can find a zipper that maybe has a decorative tape that you like, and you really wanna keep that, by all means, you can just stitch that to the front of your other jacket piece. But if you want to cover it and make it look like it's more incorporated into the front jacket piece, you'll need to add just a little strip of fabric. So what I've done is just taken my fabric and I've cut just a strip. It's about two inches and it's plenty long enough to accommodate my zipper. So what I need to do is add that to the front right piece over here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lay out my pieces. And I wanna lay them as how they would lay if I had buttons on them. So what I mean by that is I need to overlap them as much as they would be overlapped if I was putting buttons. So what I've done is I've put pins in the top and bottom of each of these pieces to mark where my center front is. So what I wanna do, is I have a pin here and a pin here and I wanna just lay those so they match, okay? So I've got my pins at the top lined up. So I know my center fronts are lined up there. and I'm gonna do the same at the bottom. So I have that lined up. So this has really what the front of your jacket is going to look like. You have your two side fronts, you have your fronts. If you were doing your buttons, that's where the button holes and everything would overlap. In this case, we're going to make a flap so we can have our sides zipper. Now, this flap that I'm going to add on I'm going to show it on this one, that was the side zip, but it's the same exact method if you were doing the cross body zip, it's just instead of putting your strip on like this we would angle it and go like that. But so all I've done is I have everything lined up and really what is important is this edge over here. This is the edge, again, like I showed on the jacket behind me, this is the edge where I'm going to stitch zipper to it. And that's gonna fold under like that. And this is where that's gonna lay, like that. So I want just a strip of fabric somewhere over here that I can stitch, so it really just makes it look like the zipper is incorporated and not just sort of floating out here on the edge. So, to do that, I want to take this strip of fabric and lay it right side down on this piece over here. So, like this. Like I said, I've made it plenty long, so I'm not worried about lining it up at the top or bottom, it's plenty long. And I just want it to barely overlap the existing pattern piece on the other side, just like so. I've got it in place. And now this, I need to stitch onto this front piece. The reason I've just barely overlapped it is because what we're going to do is I'm gonna run a line of stitching right along where I think this pattern piece ends. So, if I wanted to measure, that'd be about 1/2 inch. I'm gonna stitch in 1/2 inch, right? I'm gonna move this one out of the way. And stitch along there. And then I'll be able to open this up, and this is where we'd be attaching our zipper to. So since I have this just laid nice and in place, I'm gonna put a couple pins in just to hold it and then I'm going to stitch. Okay. So again, I'm gonna stitch at least 1/2 inch, or it could be less. So in this case what I'm gonna do is I'm going to line the edge of my strip up with the edge of my presser foot and actually adjust and move my needle position over again so I get to ride around 1/2 an inch, like I said. I'm just guesstimating on this one but you can measure and make sure it's exactly 1/2 an inch if you'd like. I'm just going to stitch. Don't have to worry about removing my pins unless they're in the way, that one was fine. The next one. Okay, grab my fabric down here and just keep stitching. Okay. The one thing I wanna point out when I get to right here, I have my pocket that's over here and now it's out of the way and it was over here but you wanna make sure it is out of the way and you don't accidentally stitch it to the back of this pattern piece. So, just be aware of where all of the rest of your pattern pieces are when you get to more and more areas of the jacket coming together you're gonna have a lot of fabric that's sort of thing in and around your needle and presser foot area. So make sure you're only stitching what you want to be stitching. Okay, take this over here. Take my pins out. Now, what we have is a little tab that we can attach our zipper to. So now what we need to do is actually attach our zipper. And I'm gonna show you how to attach it on this side and the stitching for attaching it to the other side will be exactly the same. So, I have my separatable zipper. So I wanna go ahead and right off the bat just go ahead and separate it over to down here, okay. And I wanna make sure I'm stitching the correct side of the zipper to the correct side of the jacket. So since I've just separated like this, I'm gonna lay it down. I know that this side goes over here and this side goes with this one, 'cause I don't wanna accidentally mix them up or my zipper isn't going to work correctly. So what I wanna do now is stitch my zipper tape onto my little tab I've made. And all I have to do for that is put right sides together. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna line my zipper tape up with the edge of this fabric here. Now I have purchased a zipper that is a lot longer than what I need, and I've done that on purpose because I didn't want to accidentally have it be too short. So I wanted it plenty long for this option. So it's also long enough if I wanted to make the cross body option. So don't worry that this is too long, we're going to shorten it and I'll show you how. So what we wanna make sure is that our zipper lines up with around the bottom of the edge. And I say around because what we're gonna need to do is we're going to need to measure up 5/8 of an inch, and that's where I want my zipper tape to end. The reason for that is because this is going to be a lined jacket or if it's not a lined jacket, at the very least it's going to have a hem. So, you know there's going to be an edge that's turned up and you don't want the edge of your zipper to be caught in that. So again, you go 5/8 of an inch from the edge and then we're going to pin our zipper tape in place. Now, I start at the bottom when I'm doing this because I need to size the zipper from the top. And the reason I need to do that is because, in the normal zipper, say you're putting a zipper in a pair of jeans, you'd be able to size at the bottom because you don't have to worry about the bottom of the zipper coming apart. But in this case, since we do need it to separate and we need that little tab on the end of the zipper, that makes it possible to actually put your zipper halves back together, we need to leave the bottom intact. So we are going to size from the top. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and just pin all the way and let the excess hang over the edge for right now. And then we can trim that off in a minute. So now what I'm gonna do is stitch. So I have right sides together and I'm gonna take this over and stitch. Now, I am going to continue using my regular presser foot. I'm not going to use a zipper foot. The reason for that is you wanna use the zipper foot when you really want to get as close to the edge of that zipper as you can. In this case, because it's a really bulky fabric and I'm going to turn it and I want to topstitch it anyway, I wanna have a little bit of extra fabric there that I actually had the ability to add my topstitching. So I'm gonna go ahead and just keep my regular presser foot on. I'm going to go ahead and line my zipper teeth up with the edge of my presser foot. Then I'm gonna move my needle as far to the left as it'll go. Okay. And now we have that in place. We're just going to stitch. It's just the plain straight stitch keeping our edges lined up here, keeping the edge of the presser foot lined up with our zipper tape. And we're just going to stitch. And we remove our pins when we get to them, make sure everything is staying lined up and continue on. And I'm sort of using my left hand here, I'm using my pointer finger to sort of press down on that zipper tape and make sure it's not moving. Because I spaced my pins out pretty far, so there's the possibility that your zipper tape can move on your fabric and you're really don't want that to happen. Make sure everything stays nice and even. So, keep going. We're almost up to the top edge. Now, just like how we left some spacing at the bottom of our zipper, because we're going to have a hem at 5/8 of an inch, we need to do something with this upper edge of the zipper because it's much too long. So, I'm just going to stop my stitching approximately 5/8 of an inch. I just need to have a little bit of leeway, so I'm able to turn that under and finish it off a little bit. So I'm gonna stop my stitching and put a couple back tacks in place. And then I can bring this over. So let's lay our front piece back out flat. And I have a tab that now has a zipper on it. What we would do now is take and fold our zipper under just like this. And you can press it or just pin it. If you're using a zipper like this, this is plastic zipper teeth, they can melt. So if you're gonna press, just press only on the fabric. Don't get those zipper teeth 'cause you will melt them. So you can see, we would just fold our edge under and I'll just put a couple of pins in place. And all you'd have to do in order to hold this is just do some topstitching, just like you would on any other area of your jacket like you did on your pocket sections, like we did on the collar, all it is is topstitching. So you can see having the little extra space between the edge of the fabric and the zipper tape allows me to sort of push my zipper tape back under, fold the fabric over and put some topstitching in there, and then you'll never even be able to tell that we didn't use a zipper foot to attach this. So we would do that. But let's go up to the top here because I need to show you how to do some finishing. And there's a couple of different ways you can do this. Now, when I first stitched my strip on, I went ahead and just stitched all the way up to the top here. But I didn't do any backtacks because I knew I was going to be taking out just a couple of those stitches. The reason I did that is because if I were to just not stitch all the way up the edge or leave some opening here, when I'm stitching my zipper on, my fabric can sort of move a little on me and I didn't want that to happen. So, I just went ahead and didn't do any backtacks. So I could go ahead and just pull those stitches apart. And we're just going to clip them because I wanna fold this edge under. You can see there we go. We have our stitches clipped like so and what we're going to do is we're gonna fold this edge under, before we fold this over. So what we need to do is remove this extra zipper tape that's sort of in our way. Now because this is just a plastic zipper. All we have to do is just cut right across. You can cut right through it. Now, if you're doing a zipper, like what is on the pleather jacket or you have a zipper that has some metal teeth, you'll actually not be able to just cut through those with your scissors, you can take some pliers and you'll actually have to just pull those zipper teeth out. Just a couple of them for you to be able to cut your tape. But don't try to just take your scissors and cut through those metal zipper teeth 'cause it's not gonna work. So now that we have our zipper trimmed, we can fold our edge down and then we'd fold this over just like we did everywhere else. And we'd go ahead and edge stitch it. So I'll just pin it in place to show you what it would look like, just like that. Get a thicker pin here, just like that. And you can see, we can go ahead and edge stitch all the way along the edge of the zipper and have a nice finished sort of zipper tab that you've added to the other side of your front so you can zip up your jacket. And again, with this other side, we would simply do right sides together for our zipper, stitch right along there, just like we did that. And that's how you make the modification to being able to change your button front jacket into a zipper jacket, whether that be straight up and down, or across body, you just create this simple, easy little tab that just started with a two inch strip of fabric. So go ahead and make those modifications if you'd like to. And next up, we're gonna go over some sleeves.