How to Finish Seams When Sewing Silk

When working with silk and silk-like fabrics, some varieties tend to fray badly. So you'll wanna finish your seam allowances so that you don't have a mess everywhere and so that the wrong side of your garment or project will be nice and neat and finished. So I'm going to talk about a couple of different silk seam finishes. And the seam finish that you use will depend on the silk variety you're using and the intended finished use. So first, the seam finish I'm gonna talk about is called the turn and stitch, which is exactly what it sounds like.

You're going to sew your seam using your regular 5/8-inch seam allowance, press it open, and then you're going to turn the seam allowances independently toward the wrong side 1/4 inch. I've already done that here. And you give it a good press and then we're just going to edge stitch that fold. And this is a good technique to use for opaque silks, so not sheers. So silk crepes, broadcloth.

And then your seam allowance is nice and finished and you would just do the same thing to the other side, turn this under, press, and edge stitch. And you can use that on straight, biased, or curved seams. The next seam finish is the French seam, which is good to use on sheer silks such as chiffon. And you start that with your fabric pieces wrong sides together. So it's kind of counterintuitive.

You have to get over that right sides together part of your brain. So with wrong sides together, we're going to stitch our seam. And if you have a 5/8-inch seam allowance, you're going to stitch this seam using a 3/8-inch seam allowance. So whatever your seam allowance is, you just want to stitch this first seam a little bit narrower because we're going to turn it and stitch it again. So we're going to trim our seam allowance to 1/4 inch.

And then we're going to turn this with right sides together. And you're going to stitch the seam again using 1/4-inch seam allowance. So that encloses all the raw edges. And your seam is finished and looks nice on the right and the wrong side. The next seam finish is called the Hong Kong seam.

And this is good to use on stable silks such as dupioni. And you're basically just binding the raw edges of your pieces before you even stitch the seam. So you want to cut yourself one-inch wide bias strips and you wanna use a lightweight fabric so you're not adding any weight or bulk to your garment. So just a lightweight cotton is nice to use, doesn't, it won't fray, it's cut on the bias. So with right sides together, we're going to align our bias strip and our silk piece.

We're going to stitch using 1/4- to a 3/8-inch seam allowance. Then we're going to press everything away from the silk. Press everything up toward the binding strip. And then we're going to fold the strip over and encase all of our raw edges. And we wanna make sure the strip goes past our previous stitching line.

Then to secure this, we're going to stitch from the right side and we're just gonna stitch in the ditch of that seam, and that'll catch our binding on the wrong side. And as you're stitching this, if you're going to favor one side or the other, you definitely wanna favor the binding side so that you make sure you catch that raw edge on the wrong side and enclose everything. So you can see I've caught the edges on that side. It's nice and finished. And I've already done my other piece.

So then, you would just put your silk pieces right sides together, stitch the seam as usual, and then your seam allowances are nice and professionally finished, gives a nice couture detail to the inside of your garment. It's great to use on jackets that are not lined, since you will be able to probably see the inside of the jacket at some point. And the last seam finish is called the flat fell seam. And this is another one where you're gonna start with wrong sides together. So I've got my pieces with wrong sides together.

And I'm going to stitch my seam using a regular 5/8-inch seam allowance. And then we're going to press the seam allowances toward one side. And if you're making a garment, you wanna give a little thought to what side you're pressing toward because that side is going to have an extra line of topstitching showing on the right side. So we've pressed toward one side, and then we're going to trim this lower seam allowance to 1/8 of an inch. So you wanna trim it really short.

And then this upper seam allowance, we're going to fold 1/4 inch over and that is going to encase that lower seam allowance. So you'd want to make sure you fold that over nice and evenly. And this creates a nice strong seam too because it's stitched twice. You can use pins to hold it in place or you can just press it. And you would want to do it nice and even.

And then we're just going to edge stitch this fold. So you'll be able to see on the right side the original seam line and this extra line of topstitching. You would, of course, wanna take a little extra time to make sure everything is nice and neat and even. But in general, you would have your two lines of topstitching or your seam line and your extra line of topstitching. So those are some seam finishing techniques that you can use when working with silk.