Ashley Hough

Sewing Essentials Session 8: Bring it All Together

Ashley Hough
Duration:   32  mins

Description

Once you’ve learned how to sew it’s time to bring it all together and make something you can actually use. Ashley will teach you how to make a sewing tool pouch that can be easily customized. Cut out pattern pieces, fuse interfacing and use all of the skills you learned in the class!

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So now that you have all of this sewing knowledge, and all these sewing skills you've practiced, let's put it all together and make a fun project. So maybe if you were new to sewing, you had to go out and buy a few new items, whether those were scissors, or maybe some marking pens, pencils, rotary cutters. Well, let's make something to where we can keep them all together, so you'll know where everything's at for the next sewing project you want to start. So we just have this really easy little pouch. It has a button and elastic closure like this, which makes it really good because maybe you have a taller pair of scissors, and something is stretched a little higher, you're still going to be able to close it.

And as you can see, it's got plenty of pockets, and little divisions for everything from our marking pens. We have our little hem guide, to our rotary cutters and our scissors. So I'm gonna show you how to make this exact layout of this one, but this is something that is definitely 100% customizable to whatever size you want to make it. And whatever tools you have to put inside of it. So I'm gonna set this aside real quick, and we'll talk about the pieces that we need.

Now all of the information, pattern pieces, and all the measurements will be provided as a download with this class, but what we need are two pieces of what's going to be our outer print fabric. And these are 10-1/2 inches by 18 inches. And we need two of those. So then it makes sense if we're going to layer everything up that it all needs to be 10-1/2 inches wide. This one is our lower pocket piece.

We are 10-1/2 inches by six. We have a piece of mediumweight to heavyweight fusible interfacing that's 10-1/2 by 6-1/2. Then we have two pieces for our back pocket here that are 10-1/2 by seven. We are going to interface this back pocket right here, and the reason I've done that, and the reason why I've chosen the medium to heavyweight interfacing is because I may repetitively be putting scissors in that pocket. And I want this area to be a little bit more protected, so I'm not worried about this pair of scissors poking through my project at all.

I've got a little bit of extra protection there with that interfacing. So that's why we've chose that. So what we're gonna do is we have all of our pieces already cut out. And so I like to work in steps. So the first thing I'm gonna do is do all of the pressing I need to do to prep my fabric first.

So with that, the first thing I'm going to need to do is fuse my interfacing in place to one of my back pocket rectangles. Now this fabric you can't tell which one is the right, or the wrong side. So you can just pick one to be your wrong side. You're fusing your interfacing to the wrong side. Again, I felt my interfacing, so I know which side has the glue, and which side does not.

So I have it glue side down. Now I want to make sure that it is lined up along three edges. You can see I have an extra 1/2 inch here along one side that I don't want the interfacing. Again, just like before I'm gonna take my iron. And I set my iron, my iron with no steam down on the interfacing.

I just leave it in place. Then I'm gonna pick it up and move it to the next section. Again, I'm not moving my iron back and forth, and that's just sort of a good habit to get into. I know I said before that when you're moving your iron that can really skew your interfacing if you're using a really lightweight, or featherweight interfacing, but it's still just a good practice to do that when you're using the heavier weight. That way you don't maybe accidentally do it just out of habit, if you are using a lighter weight.

So, again, I'm just gonna go all the way around. Use my fingernail here to check along the edge, make sure everything is fusing in place. I can see that corner it's gonna need a little extra heat there. I missed that guy coming around. Again, I'm just picking up my iron, moving it around, making sure all areas are nice and pressed in place.

Now the heavier the interfacing the longer I'm gonna have to leave the iron on, which means the hotter it's gonna be when I'm done. So again, I mentioned, I want it to cool down completely before I want to move it, but I still want to do some pressing. So I'm just gonna simply rotate my mat around so this piece can cool down. And while I'm waiting for that I'm gonna take my lower pocket piece. We need to do our double-fold hem along what's going to be the upper edge.

So, again, I can take my handy hem guide. I'm gonna move this just a little bit like so. And, again it's already set at, I'll adjust it just a little bit, 1/2 inch because that's what we had it at last time. I can fold under my edge, and I can get it nice and lined up, and then I'll go ahead and press it. And when you're using a thinner, lighter weight cotton like this, I can actually go and do some finger pressing all along the edge first and then bring in my iron.

And it just kind of saves me a little step. I don't have to worry about keeping my fingers as close to the iron then if it's already sort of held in place with some finger pressing. That will lessen the chance of me accidentally burning myself. So now that it's sort of held in place already I can just come back in with my iron right along, get that pressed in place. Again, it's a double-fold hem.

So we're going to fold it over one more time. Make sure it's all held in place and press. Okay. Now I've got my first two pressing steps out of the way that I can actually get ready to do some sewing. So I'm gonna go back to my interfaced piece from before, and now that I have the interfacing on the wrong side it's really easy to see that this is the wrong side.

This is the right side. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna layer my two pocket pieces right sides together. And they're the exact same size. So everything should be lined up all along all the edges. And I'm gonna put some pins in place.

Now we talked a little bit about seam allowance before how a 5/8th inch seam allowance was very common for garments, but that when I'm making up patterns that I really like to use 1/2 inch seam allowance because I find that it makes the math so much easier. So, again, you would set up your machine ready to do your 1/2 inch seam allowance. So I'm gonna make sure that mine is set up for that. And what's gonna be really easy about this first stitch, and what's going to allow you the option of checking to make sure that you're at a 1/2 inch seam allowance is that our interfacing is exactly 1/2 inch smaller than our piece of fabric. So I know my edge of stitching should be right along the edge of the interfacing there.

Go ahead and get everything lined up. Again, I'm going to do some back stitching at the beginning as well as at the end, I like to do two or three stitches. I have pinned out of the way so I don't even have to worry about removing those as I get to them. I'm on my construction stitch, so it's a 2-1/2 millimeter stitch length. I'm gonna stitch all the way along, and do a little backstitch at the end, and I'm done, I can take it off, cut my threads.

You can see my stitching, my 1/2 inch seam allowance goes right along the edge of that interfacing there. And that's why we wanted that piece to be a little bit smaller because we are going to now turn this and press it. And it makes it a lot easier when I don't have all that extra bulk from the interfacing actually being in the seam allowance, but before I moved back to pressing I'm still at my sewing station. So I kind of like to streamline my process. So since I'm over here, now I'm going to grab my lower pocket that I've already prepped for my double-fold hem.

And now I'm going to sew it. I like to stitch fairly close to the folded edge of my fabric, my lower folded edge because I know that it will hold everything in place nicely. Again, I'm gonna do a backstitch at the beginning and end. And I am sewing with the wrong side of my fabric up because I want to be able to see where my folded edge of the hem is. So now I have black thread in my needle, but I have white thread in my bobbin.

So when I take this piece away here, this is my wrong side. This is my right side. So I would want to keep that in mind if I was trying to match stitching that maybe I put red thread in my needle because I was using red fabric, but I forgot to check what color my bobbin thread was. And I did the stitching and I turned it over. Well, it was white and I really wanted it to be red.

So just keep that in mind as to which color thread you'll see where on your project. I kind of like that it stands out a little bit. I think it adds just a little bit of extra design to it. So we have our little snips, we can go ahead and snip off all those little extra threads. And now we're gonna go back and do some pressing.

So what we had was our piece here that we stitched, and I want to now fold this right sides together, and line up all the edges again. You can see how that was super easy to just fold that back right along where the interfacing was. I almost don't even have to use an iron on it just because it's such a heavier weight interfacing with this thinner weight fabric that it really just pressed nicely, but I want everything to stay before I stitch it. So I'm gonna go ahead and just give it a nice little press like that. And then I'm going to do topstitching.

We learned what topstitching was during some of our terminology. So we know that for topstitching, I want to lengthen my stitch length. And then I'm going to stitch close to the edge of the top of the fabric. Now you can decide how close to the edge that you want to be when you're doing your topstitching. I'm going to go fairly close to the edge, but enough to where it's a little bit easier for me to keep a nice straight edge if I have something to line that folded edge up with.

So I've lined the folded edge up with the edge of my presser foot to give me something to follow. Again, I'll go ahead and do a little backstitch there. You can see I have a nice straight, because I lengthened my stitch length, straight line of stitching all the way along that upper edge. Now it's time to put our pockets in place. So we're gonna bring in one of our long back pieces.

Again, we have two of them. We want to make sure that we only are stitching with one right now. So we don't accidentally stitch all of our layers together. What I'm gonna do is layer my pockets in place. I have my larger pocket that I've already stitched and stay still.

Everything matches up along the sides and the lower edge. Then I have my even shorter pocket, and that's gonna layer it nicely right there. Now is where we can do some customization if we want to. We're gonna decide what it is we're going to be putting in our little pouch, and how big we want our little sections to be. So if we look back at our finished one real quick.

I have a larger pocket that I thought would work great for my scissors, maybe my rotary cutters, but then I wanted specific pockets for my marking pens and pencils, or maybe my little, my hem guide. I wanted them to fit nicely in there. So I made these little inch sections. So what I can do is I can grab my ruler, and my marking pens and pencils, and I can decide where I want my marks to be. So maybe I want my first mark to be 2-1/2 inches in from the outer edge.

This will give us the mark that we had on our other finished product. That's not gonna show up very well. Let me grab my other marking pencil. It's always good to have a bunch of them handy just in case one's not working. And I'm just going to draw a line.

Again, these are my removable fabric pencils so I can draw straight on my fabric. And I know I can get that out. Then I want another little pencil mark so I can have my line. I can move over an inch and I can draw another line. I know if I stitch along that one I'll have a nice little pencil mark.

Maybe I'll want two pencil holders. Move over another inch everything lined up, and draw another mark. Now these lines are going to be lines that I'm going to stitch directly over. So now everything looks nice and is lined up perfect here, but I don't want it to move when I actually go to stitch it. So what I want to do is put just a couple pins to hold all of my layers together while I do those couple lines of stitching.

Then once those stitching lines are done I know everything will be held in place nicely. So what we always need to remember when we go back to our machine to stitch is what we did last. So in this case, we did topstitching last, which means our stitch length is longer. Now I'm gonna go ahead, and stitch these on a construction stitch length because there may be a little extra wear and tear as I'm putting my pens and pencils into these slots. And I don't want them to come undone.

So I'm gonna go ahead. and put my stitch length back to the 2-1/2 millimeter stitch length. And go ahead and stitch right along those lines that I've drawn. I'm gonna go ahead and do a backstitch, make sure everything is nice and secure, and stitch right along this line. Going all the way up to my upper pocket.

And I'm going to do several backstitches right here at the end of that pocket. Again, making sure that no matter what I put in and out of that pocket none of my stitching is going to come undone. So I would continue on stitching on all of my lines. And you can see that my stitching didn't 100% cover the line that I drew, but, again, these are removable fabric markers. The one that I just used is the one that's a wash away.

So once this whole project is done, I could simply throw it in the wash, and all those lines will come out. So I would stitch on all of the lines that I drew however many pockets I wanted to add. And then we actually need to put a back on our project. So we have our other long piece, and we're going to layer this right sides together. They're the exact same size.

So everything should line up nicely around all of our edges, like so. What we're gonna do is we're going to stitch the perimeter, but I need to leave an opening for turning. What I also need to do is leave a spot to attach the elastic. Now I find that I'm really into my project, I'm going along, and I've stitched right across the separation. I forget that I needed to leave an opening for the elastic.

So to make sure that I don't forget to do that, I'm just going to leave my opening for turning right along that edge. That way I can still do all of my stitching. And there's really no way to forget because I'm not stitching there anyway. So I'll place some pins all the way around the outer edge. Be sure everything is still lined up in place.

So I can tell by feel when I pick this up that this is where all of my pocket layers are. So this is the bottom. So this top is where I need to leave the opening for turning, and to leave the opening for where I'm gonna insert my elastic. So I'm gonna start stitching here, go all the way around, and then stop leaving that opening. So, again, I'm back on my construction stitch.

So my 2-1/2 millimeter stitch length, and I've been using 1/2 inch seam allowances for everything else in this project. So I'm gonna go ahead and use 1/2 inch for this as well. Even though we're leaving an opening for turning that we will eventually close up, I do still want to go ahead and backstitch at the beginning and end. And I'm doing this because when I put the stress on this project putting it through the opening to turn it right side out, I don't want any of those stitches to come undone. I'm just stitching right along the edge.

Again, I'm familiar with my machine to know which line on my throat plate gives me the 1/2 inch seam allowance that I want. If you are unsure, and you don't want to have to keep measuring each time you could put a little piece of tape, maybe put a little mark there, something that reminds you what line you want to make sure everything is lined up with. Again, I'm going right along the edge. And at the corners I leave my needle down. I lift my presser foot and I pivot all of my fabric.

And just keep stitching. If I have a pin and I don't want a stitch over my pin maybe I've put it into far that it's actually in my seam allowance, I'll go ahead and remove it. With bigger pieces like this where I find that they're kind of sticking together, or staying together on their own anyway, I do like to pin further back. So I don't have to take the time to stop every couple inches to actually take all those pins out. So, again, I'm gonna back up at the top.

Then I'm going to stop. I don't want to go all the way. I need my opening for turning and I do a backstitch, and I can take this off of my machine. So we are almost done. So what we're gonna do now, move my pins out of the way, on my pin cushion, remove all my pins.

I'm gonna do what's called clipping my corners. And then we're gonna turn this right side out. So here we have the corners we've stitched. You see our stitching here right along the edges. And what I want to do is clip the corners.

So all I'm doing is taking my scissors, and cutting off the edge. That's going to make it much nicer for when I turn everything right side out, and I try to press out my corners. I want them to be nice and crisp, and clipping off the excess fabric in those corners makes it much easier. These corners, obviously, there's a lot more layers because this is where our pockets were. So they may be a little bit harder to clip, but you want to make sure you go through all of your layers.

Now I'm gonna turn it right side out. Just press everything through that opening. With the opening that you leave depends on how big a project you're turning right side out, how thick the fabric is. I left a good three, maybe four inches. That was more than enough.

I mean, I do have sort of a thicker area down here with all the pockets, but that was more than enough room. I couldn't even fit my entire hand into that opening to really be able to press everything out nicely. You can see there's really only so much I can do with my hands in order to get my corners pressed out. So what I'm gonna do is take my scissors, and use those to carefully poke out the corners. What I don't want to do is poke too hard because I don't want to press through my actual row of stitching.

Now, if you have a chopstick, or something you want to use, you can do that as well, or my hem guide here actually comes with, it even says it right on there, a point turner. So if you can find a tool that sort of a multipurpose tool that just saves the amount that you need to buy, the amount of tools you have to have. So if you can find one that does multiple things that's great. So I have my little point turner. You can see I'm just using it to make sure my corners are nice and pressed out.

And even with this it still is a fairly thin piece of metal. I'm not pushing too hard because I really don't want to accidentally push through my stitching, or that would just mean that I have to go back, turn it back inside out, line everything up and repeat with the stitching. Okay, I'm gonna use, just go slow, push out those corners. Down here might be a little bit trickier. Got a lot of layers happening.

Get everything nice and pushed out. Go over to this one, and pull it out a little bit first this way. Okay. Now once we get all of our corners nice and turned out then we're going to put our little elastic closure on the top, and we'll have a way to actually close up our pouch. So once we put all of our utensils in they're not going to fall out.

So, here's my opening along the top. And what I want to do is I need to fold under my edge, my seam allowance to the wrong side. Otherwise it's just going to be flapping up like that, and it's not going to lay flat. So an easy way that I found to do that is it sort of naturally wants to curl under anyway. What I'm gonna do is take my fingers, and just pull the fabric slightly out towards the edge.

And you can see it naturally just curls under along where that stitching line was on the top, and sort of just folds itself in place, which is really handy because it doesn't have to do a lot of extra work. So it's folded itself under. You can put a couple pins to hold it in place. And now I need to cut a length of elastic. Now back to our finished sample here, you can see I have a fairly long loop of elastic.

And the reason for that is maybe I want to put something in my pouch that's really tall, and then this only folds to here, and I need my elastic to be able to stretch all the way down to this button. So that's up to you as to how long of elastic you want. If you want this to fold all the way down you may want a very small loop of elastic, but we do need to make sure is that our loop is at least big enough to get around our button. We have a fairly large button, so we're going to need a loop that if I just hold it, and I stretch it just a little bit, I know that I'm gonna have enough room to get around my button. So this I'd say is about three inches of elastic.

Cut off our little piece and we can put this in our opening. So I'm gonna take and just fold my elastic in half. Stick it in between the two layers of fabric, like so. And I'm just going to temporarily place it in there, and you can see, it would bother me if it wasn't exactly in the center. So I want to make sure that my elastic is right in the middle, because I know that I'm gonna want my button right in the middle, so I'm gonna make sure everything is nice and lined up.

I need to scoot a little bit this way, there. Now I know it's in the center. I can put a pin in place to hold it. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do some topstitching. Now, again, with topstitching we were lengthening our stitch length because we wanted it to look nice and straight.

So I'm still going to do that. Now I want to make sure that the elastic is not going to pull out at all when I am actually closing up my bag. I'm going to show you what I'm gonna do once I actually get to where the elastic is. Again, I'm just going to stitch close to the edge, right? Using my 3-1/2 inch stitch length.

I did a backstitch to go ahead, and make sure everything stays in place. I'm stitching right along the edge. I'll go ahead and remove my pin when I get to it. So I'm coming up on my elastic. Now I'm gonna get really, really close to where the pin's at before I take it out.

I'm still holding my elastic in place with my other hand. And I'm gonna stitch over the elastic. Now because I have such a long stitch length I'm not confident in that staying in place like that. So I'm gonna go ahead and backstitch over the elastic. Go forward again, and then go backward again.

And now, even though I had that really long stitch length because I was doing my topstitching I still know that my elastic is going to stay in place even if I really have to pull on it to get it around my button. Do one last little backstitch. And we're done across the top. So you can see I have my nice row of stitching. You can see I have my extra stitching right here around my elastic.

So I know if I pull on it, that's not gonna go anywhere. So I can trim off my extra threads up here. And we have our nice pouch it's done. Again, we would have done this stitching wherever I want in my pockets. I would give it a nice press.

And the only thing that's left to do is to put our button on the front. So now our button, while maybe your machine can do buttons, they can sew buttons onto the fabric on your machine. That can be kind of tricky. And it's something that you have to make sure you have everything lined up perfectly when you're doing it because you don't want to stitch onto your button and break needles. So I find this just easier to stitch the button on by hand.

So I just have a hand sewing needle that I have threaded with thread. I would probably pick a thread that matched my button, but I'm just going to use the black thread I have here today. And there's a couple different ways to secure the end of your thread when you're doing hand sewing. So I'm gonna show you the way that my mom taught me. And the way that I think is really easy to tie a knot.

What I'm gonna do is I want to have moisture on my fingers. So whether you want to, if you want to lick your finger, and get your finger wet, you want to have just a little bit of moisture on your fingers. You're gonna take, and you're going to wrap the thread around your finger like this. I'm now gonna take my thumb and my pointer finger, and I'm rolling the thread together until it's off the tip of my finger. Use my middle finger and pull all those gathers down.

And it just creates a little knot right there at the end. So, again, that's just an easy way a quick way to tie a knot rather than taking the two ends, and trying to tie some other sort of overhand knot together, something like that. So an easy way to put a knot into the thread. Decide where you want your button to be. Again, I can fold over my top, so I know where my elastic is in the center.

I know my button needs to be in the center, but then you can decide how far up or down you want your button to go. I'm gonna go a little on the higher side on this one. Since my finished project I have my button on the lower side. What I'm gonna do is decide where I want my button, and I'm going to put a stitch in the fabric first. Now I'm going through just the red fabric.

I'm not going through everything. I don't want to go all the way through the back. I just want to simply take a stitch through that red fabric. This is a way I can hide my knot behind my button. And now my needle is through my fabric, and ready to go through my button.

I come up through the bottom. Go back through the other opening in the button, like so. And then I can sort of hold my button out of the way for a minute because I'm eventually going to tighten it down on it, but I need to know where to place my next stitch. You can see how wide the opening between the two holes in the button is. And that's about how far apart I need to take this stitch.

So I'm making a little stitch that's about the same width as the distance between the two holes in the button and pull through. Now I can go and I can tighten and pull down on my button. Now this is a really big button, kind of a heavy button. You're going to need to do that several times. So, again, I'm gonna come back up.

After you've done your first one you're kind of going by feel. I can kind of tell where the opening in the button is, but I'm sliding my needle along the back of the button until it finds the opening can bring it up. Go back down through the other one, like so. And then I'm again going by feel taking just a small stitch through the fabric in the back, and then I immediately come right back up through that other opening. And I would do this probably five or six times until I pulled on the button, and I felt pretty sure that it was nice and secured in place.

So I've gone through a few more times. I have my button nice and secure. Now it's time to tie off my thread. The way I like to do that is I'm going to hold my thread on the fabric, wrap my thread around behind the button, and then tie a little slipknot. So I've gone through my thread, and now I can just pull it tight, and I'm gonna do that three or four times.

That way I can tie the knot here rather than having to pull the thread through the back of the project, and tying and knot somewhere that I could see. I want all my knots to be hidden behind this nice big button. So I've done that three or four times. I know my knot is going to stay, and I can just clip my thread off. And now my button is nice and secured onto the front of my little pouch.

So, again, I would give this a nice press. Make sure everything, all the edges are nice and crisply pressed out. And it would look just like our finished project here. So, again, now you have this fun little pouch. You can put all of your little sewing notions, everything that you have maybe gone out and got brand new for this class, or maybe things that you had that when you're sitting down to do your sewing project you have to go around and find everything.

Now you can easily keep them all in one place. This is also a great thing that you can make for somebody else. Maybe you have a friend who's also getting into sewing. You can make them one of this. Maybe even give them one that's already pre-filled with all the things they're gonna need to do a sewing project, or if you have someone who isn't into sewing at all, but you want to make something like this for them you could have them maybe fill it with their makeup brushes, or any sort of travel makeup kit.

I mean, with this being so easy to make with the customizable widths of pockets, and the widths of pockets this way by doing all of our stitching it's something that you can easily customize, and it's really quick. So you could sit down in an afternoon, and whip up presents for all sorts of people. So I hope you really learned a lot in this class for everything from how to choose your fabric, how to cut it out, the types of needles and threads that you need to use, and how to put it all together to make something fun. So I hope this is just the beginning, and you keep doing many more sewing projects in the future.

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