Advance Your Sewing Skills Session 2: Expand Your Stitches

So the most important part about sewing, no matter what it is you're sewing, is the stitching. You wanna have nice even stitches, you wanna have the correct seam allowances, and you wanna make sure that everything is consistent. So when you probably first learned how to sew, you just turned on your machine and you just stitched with whatever the machine turned on with, which is normally a construction stitch, which, as a quick refresher, is your 2.5 millimeter stitch, that's your construction stitch, and that looks like this here. You can see it's a very small stitch, and that is what you want when you're doing construction stitching because you want it to hold up to wear and tear, especially if this is going to be a garment or something. The other stitch you probably learned right off the bat was a basting stitch, and that's this one here.

That is a much longer stitch length, usually the longest that your machine will allow you to go, so either a five or 5.5 millimeter. You have your long thread tail, so you can easily grab one and pull it out to remove your basting stitch, or like we talked about earlier, you can use that seam ripper, and your basting stitch is done within your five eighths inch seam allowance, so that once you do your basting and then do your stitching, you can choose to leave it in place or you can remove it. On some fabrics when you're stitching, the little holes from your needle can still be visible, so if that's the case, you still wanna make sure that that stitching was done within the seam allowance so nothing shows up on your actual right side of your project. Now the other types of stitching that you'll see more in garment patterns and when you're really getting into making sure you have a nice professional looking project is ease stitching and stay stitching, and it might be something that when you're reading through a pattern for the first time, you see that step and you sort of just gloss over it. I know I did that for a while when I first started sewing because I saw stay stitch an upper neck edge.

So here I have just what's going to become a shirt eventually, and they were always saying to stay stitch this upper neck edge, and to me, I was like, "Well I'll just be careful with the pattern piece. "I won't stretch it too much "and I won't have to worry about it." Well, why you want to do stay stitching, and what it is, is it's just a line of stitching anywhere from one sixteenth to one eighth inch from the edge, it needs to be very close to the edge, and it is a very very small stitch length, so about two millimeter stitch length. And because a neck edge, because your grain line is going this way, a neck edge is on the bias, there's a lot of stretch or give right here. So you want to do this stay stitching so this remains a little bit more sturdy and doesn't distort at all when you're working with your pattern pieces. It's also important that you leave that stay stitching in place, because even once your garment is constructed, you still don't want to have any pull anywhere around those edges that are on the bias if you don't want those seams to pull.

So it's something that's really important to do and you want to make sure that you are doing it very close to the edge, again, a very small stitch length, and you want to leave it in place. So I've already done the stay stitching along the front neck edge, and a lot of times it'll tell you to also do it along the back. So obviously I only have half of a shirt here, you can see this is only half of the back, so I'm just going to stitch this one little half of the back here to show you what the stay stitching is gonna look like. So again, I'm going to set my machine up for my very narrow stitch length, which is my two millimeter, and I want to get very close to the edge of the fabric. So if you have a top stitching foot, which would be your one eighth inch guide right around the edge of your fabric, you can put that on.

I like to line things up along the edge of my regular presser foot. I do that because this is normally the first step when I get to constructing a pattern, so I don't want the first thing I am doing is changing a foot, only to put another foot back on. So I like to do as much with my regular presser foot as I can. So I line up my fabric with the edge of my presser foot and I move my needle position as far as it'll go to the right. Now, when I'm doing stay stitching, because I wanna leave it in place, I'm gonna go ahead and do a back stitch at the beginning and the end.

Now, when I'm doing stay stitching, I'm doing it because I don't want to distort or have the fabric stretch in any way, which means while I'm sewing it, I'm being extra careful not to pull or push my fabric as it goes underneath my presser foot. My hands are just here simply to guide it around that little bit of a curve that is in the neck edge. When I get to the end, I'm gonna go ahead and do a back stitch, and I'll take that off the machine and show you what it looks like. So normally when you are doing a shirt, if you have a front neck edge and a back neck edge, well these are two separate pieces when you first start out with your shirt. So you do your front and then you do your back, and then you start doing the assembly.

What I like to also do is right over where the seam is, where my front and back come together here at the upper shoulder, I would then go back and actually run a little bit extra stay stitching just over that seam. That makes sure that everything is, again, nice and flat how I want it. It's also going to help keep everything together. So when you're putting maybe the collar into the shirt, if it's going to have one, there can be a lot of stress on this upper shoulder seam here, so having an extra row of stitching to help connect the front and back pieces can really help make sure everything stays right like you want it to. Also, we'll stick with our shirt theme here, we have what's called ease stitching, and that's another one where you can sort of just maybe discount it or think that it's not an important stitching, but it's not so much that it's really important to the construction of the stitch, but it really does make it much easier when you're putting your garment together.

So ease stitching most commonly is found on sleeves. So what I have here, as you can see, is a little three quarter length sleeve that I've already stitched together down the underside of the sleeve, and I have gone ahead and run a line of what's called ease stitching along the sleeve cap. If you've ever put a sleeve into a shirt or a jacket before, you find that there's a lot of extra bulk right up around the shoulders. Now, if you're making a shirt that you purposefully want to have a really full shoulder, and you want to have some gather in it, then it's okay to have a lot of bunches or maybe some puckers, because that's the look you're going for. But say you're making a really nice men's tailored dress shirt, you wouldn't necessarily want to have puffy sleeves on that shirt.

So you wanna make sure that you are easing your sleeve into place, making sure that everything stays nice and flat, and you can do that by doing ease stitching. So ease stitching is, again, we're changing our stitch length and our stitch placement. Ease stitching is also done inside the five eighth inch seam allowance. Now, our stay stitching, we were very close to the edge of our fabric. With ease stitching, we want to be fairly close to our actual seam allowance.

So if we're going to stitch on a normal five eighths inch seam allowance, I would do my ease stitching on a scant three eighths inch, so even closer to that five eighths inch side, and the reason for that is what I'm gonna do is actually pull on these threads and slightly gather the fabric a little bit. So I want that gather that's helping hold everything in place as close to my stitching line as possible, otherwise if I'm gathering way out here at the edge, it's not really gonna help me when I'm stitching five eighths of an inch away from it. So I have lengthened my stitch length to 3.5, and I went ahead and stitched a scant three eighths inch from the edge. What I would do then is take one of my threads, either my needle or the bobbin thread. You'll find that one is a little bit easier than the other sometimes.

For me, I find the bobbin thread is easier to pull, and I'm just going to pull it slightly. Now I'm not, I don't wanna gather. I don't want big puckers in my fabric, but I just want to give it a little bit of shape and I'm gonna pull from both sides and sort of meet in the middle, like so. Just going, I'm pulling pretty gently on the thread. I don't wanna break it because then I just have to go back and re-stitch it, and now I'm ready to actually put it into my shirt.

Now it looks a little uneven, some areas are more puckered than others, but everything will sort of smooth itself out once we get it into our shirt sleeve here. So I have my front and back of my shirt. I'm going to turn this inside out because I want my right sides together, and I have my sleeve right side out. So I'm gonna bring this in, and I'm matching everything up right sides together. So as you can see, I'm bringing my sleeve through my armhole opening, and when you're putting in a sleeve, I always start at the bottom.

I always match up my underarm seams, and I'll just go ahead and do that real quick so I can put a pin in place and hold it so that we can start working on the top, which is the more complicated part of our sleeve. So I put a pin in place on either side. Then of course, if you're following a commercial pattern, you will have notches that you're matching up as well, and you can see I have my notches here that easily match up. And then you will have some sort of mark on your pattern that tells you what the very top of your shoulder is on your sleeve, and we have a seam to match that up with right here. I can go ahead and put that, a pin there, and now you can see there's a lot of extra fabric from the sleeve cap that needs to be fit into our sleeve opening, and this is where that ease stitching really helps.

So what I can do is utilize my small little gathers that I've made with that ease stitching and start evening it out, and then putting some pins in place. So I like to go every inch or so, so I have one pin here, move over about an inch, make sure the raw edges of my fabric are lined up and I can go ahead and put in a pin. Now what I wanna do is I wanna make sure that between those two pins, with my ease stitching, I still have a little bit of a pucker, a gather, but once I stitch over that, it will lay flat so I won't actually have a gathered look to my sleeve. Again, I keep moving on with my, putting my sleeve in. I can move my gathers down just a little bit so I don't have, that was a pretty distinct pucker.

I didn't want that big of a ruffle there, so I can move down about an inch and go ahead and put another pin in place. Now if I didn't have this ease stitching, I would have to be stretching my fabric, working my fabric and putting in a lot more pins than if I didn't have my ease stitching. So again, I can just spread it out a little bit, make sure there's no definite puckers. Move an inch or so, and put in another pin. And I will continue doing that on the other side, as well as when I get down towards where my notches are, because I have my notches and they're really isn't any extra fabric in the underarm, as opposed to the sleeve cap, I don't need any ease stitching down there.

So you can see how easy it would be to put the rest of my sleeve in place with that ease stitching. Then I can just take it, stitch it on my five eighths seam allowance, and it would fit in there very nicely, so that's where that ease stitching really does help. Now the last type of stitching that I'm gonna talk about right now is going to come in handy, not only for different types of seam finishes, but when you get into hems as well, you're going to use top stitching a lot. So I'm gonna bring just my little sample that I had here that showed my construction stitch back out, and we're gonna say that this is a finished project and that I wanna do some top stitching on it. So first thing I would do would be I would press open my seam or press my seam to one side or the other.

Depending on what you're making will tell you how you're going to be pressing your seams. If you're using a fabric that is a medium weight to heavy weight fabric, that there's gonna be a lot of bulk when you press the seams to one side or the other, you'd actually press them open and then if you wanted to edge stitch or top stitch on both sides, you could. This is a pretty medium weight to light weight fabric, it's just a nice cotton fabric, so I'm gonna, again, press this to one side, and then I would top stitch right along this edge. Now again, I mentioned that you could use a top stitching foot, but that I like to do a lot of stitching with my regular presser foot, I like to do as much as I can with that. So I'm gonna leave my regular presser foot on, and what I'm gonna do is I want to, again, use the edge of my presser foot to help me line up my fabric here.

So you can see, I have my needle position moved all the way to the right, which would give me about an eighth of an inch, which is the seam allowance or stitch width that you would be getting if you had your top stitch foot on. But what I wanna do is make sure that I am stitching down where my seam allowance is. So if I were to put my fabric under my presser foot like this, I'm not stitching on the right side. I need to be able to stitch over where my little seams are, so I would have to flip my fabric around, line the edge of my presser foot up with the seam of my fabric, then I can stitch with that one eighth inch seam allowance. Now when you're doing top stitching, you wanna make sure that you have a nice long stitch length, because that is what is going to help you get a nice straight line, and this is going to be sort of a decorative or finishing element on the outer part of your garment or whatever it is you're top stitching, so you wanna make sure it looks nice and neat.

So I'm going to change my stitch length to a 3.5, and I am going to just stitch right along. Again, I'm making sure the edge of my presser foot is lined up with that seam on my fabric. Take it off, and again, you can see how nice and even that is right along, and again, that was because we had that long stitch length, that's what enabled us to get a nice straight line going across there. So when you're just starting out with sewing, you probably do a lot of just 2.5 millimeter stitch lengths because maybe you don't know what the different stitch lengths go with what and when to use them, but I definitely encourage you to try out the different stitch lengths. Know when to use them and know when to use different seam allowances, and next time you're making a garment, definitely try out things like the stay stitching and ease stitching.

I think you'll find that they really help you make it a lot easier when you're putting in sleeves or doing anything like that, and definitely doing the stay stitching, even though it's an easy step to just look over, definitely give it a try next time you're stitching.