The Only Hand-Stitching Tip You Need for Accurate Spacing
Ashley HoughDescription
Many people tend to shy away from hand stitching because of either the length of time it takes to complete the stitching or the difficulty of ensuring that the stitches look nice and even. Ashley Hough shares a fun hand-stitching tip that makes accurately spacing your hand-sewing stitches quicker and easier.
The Right Tools
For this hand-stitching tip, all you need is a ruler and a marking pen. Because of where you will be doing the marking, a regular ballpoint pen is recommended rather than a fabric pen or pencil. Ashley first explains that where you will be doing your marking depends on how you hold your fabric when stitching. She demonstrates how she holds her fabric, explaining that how you hold your fabric may even change depending on the type of hand stitching you are doing.
For this example, Ashley is doing a blanket stitch along the upper edge of a piece of fabric. She explains that once you have determined how you are going to hold the fabric, you can then make marks along whichever finger is closest to where you will be stitching. Ashley shows how to use a ruler to make evenly spaced marks along your finger that you can then use to line up and space your stitches. She shows that for this hand-stitching tip, you can make either just a couple of marks or a line of marks depending on how often you want to have to move your hand along your line of stitching. When you move your hand, you simply line up your last stitch with the first mark on your finger and continue sewing.
While this hand-stitching tip is demonstrated using a blanket stitch, you can use it for other hand-sewing stitches and techniques too. Check out this video to learn hand sewing running and back stitches.
When you're doing hand stitching, like a blanket stitch along the upper edge of a piece of fabric, it can be hard to make sure that all of your stitches are the same distance apart. Now, there's a couple of ways that you can make sure that they are all consistent, and that is by marking your fabric. But that can get a little bit tedious and time-consuming. Also, if you aren't sure whether your marking tool that you're using can be removed from your fabric, it may not be something that you want to do. So a quick and easy tip that you can do is to actually make the marking on your finger rather than on your fabric. Now, what finger you mark and where are you mark it will depend on how you hold your fabric, which is a little bit different for everybody. You kind of hold your fabric whatever's most comfortable for you. So before you make any marks, if you're going to do your stitching along your fabric, just go ahead and grab your fabric and hold it how you would hold it if you're going to stitch. Now, for this one, I'm going to be running a blanket stitch along the upper edge of these pieces of fabric, so this is how I would hold my fabric. So my marks I would want right here on my index finger, because it's the closest to where I'm stitching. So all I would do is take my ruler and sort of hold my ruler like I was holding my fabric, and I can make some marks on my finger. Now, if you have a smaller ruler, it might be easier to do that. Or even just hold the end of your ruler like this. And say we want our stitches to be fairly spaced out. We want them right around maybe 1/8 of an inch or something. So I'm going to take, and on my finger make these little 1/8 of an inch markings. And you may be able to get away with just doing one or two marks, but I like to have enough that I don't always have to move my hand with every stitch that I make. Now I can go back to holding my fabric, like so, and now I'm ready to do some stitching. And I know that if I do a stitch on my fabric, everywhere I have this mark on my finger, that my stitches will be consistently spaced along the top of my fabric, like so. And again, since I've done several marks right along my finger, I don't have to move my finger with every stitch that I'm making. So I can get about three or four in. Do another one here. Grab my thread, like so. And I would continue all the way along. I have a little loop, that's okay. And so you can see now I've gone to this mark here. Now, if I want to keep stitching, all I'm going to do is move my finger, line my last stitch I just did up with one of my marks further in on my finger, and go ahead and keep stitching. So you can see how this is a quick and easy way that rather than having to make all of these marks all the way along the top edge of my fabric, I can simply make the mark on my finger, and use that to line up my stitches as I go. So grab your pen, grab your ruler, make some marks on your finger, and easily space out your stitches the next time you're doing some hand stitching on your project.
This is genius! Thank you!
A simple solution.
Great idea
I tried this and it worked great when I was sewing up a blanket, Thanks Ashley!!!
Awesome suggestion, simple and quite clever.
It is very much easier to work blanket stitch from left to right, but this is a nice idea...
Brilliant! Thank you for this great and simple idea.
Ahh,, brilliant! Thank you for this!
What a great idea. Thank you
what a great idea!!!