The Only Hand Stitching Tip You Need for Accurate Spacing

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 ball point 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 either make 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.