10 Beginner Level Sewing Seams! How to use a sewing machine tutorial - Brother ST150HDH

welcome everyone I am tock custom and on this video we're gonna show you how to do some absolute beginner level basic stitch techniques to help you guys get started with your projects now I've already done a few videos on how to set up and thread a sewing machine so this is gonna be all about different types of stitches and seams to help you guys accomplish your goals alright so I'm all set up on my machine here and I made a list of eight different types of stitches and seams for absolute beginners to help you guys get started so I'm gonna be using my brother s t-150 HD age most of my videos are set up for absolute beginner so I wanted to point out a couple of basics real quick before we get started the first thing I want to point out is our seam allowance plate so depending on your pattern it should tell you what kind of seam allowance you have and in this demo we're gonna be doing a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance for all of our seams this is half an inch right here so basically you just line up your fabric with those dashes and that's how you get your seam allowance I get a lot of comments from people saying that their top thread comes out of their needle quite often or you get a bird's nest of thread as you do your first few stitches so I wanted to show you guys how to fix that so that doesn't happen the most important thing to keep those two things from happening are to make sure you've got a nice long thread tail so I usually make sure I've got about five inches of thread coming out the back then I put it to the back the other thing that's really important when you're starting any seam is that you start your first stitch on the fabric so if I lower my presser foot and I lower the needle I can see that I'm about half an inch in to the fabric right there if you start off the fabric there's a good chance you're gonna get that birdnest of thread anyway so we're all set up to do our first type of seam which is just called a straight stitch so I've got this on my 5/8 of an inch seam allowance I'm gonna do two stitches forward and then I'm gonna do my back stitch which we talked about in some of my other videos I'm gonna back stitch right up to the edge of the fabric without going off then I'm gonna go forward now I'm just gonna take out my pin and I'm gonna stitch all the way to the other end of this fabric pull out my pins and as I get to the other end I'm gonna do a back stitch and then run all the way off I'm gonna raise my needle lift my foot then I'm gonna pull out five inches or so of thread and cut my thread tail nice and long so that my next stitch will not get all jammed up now we've done our first type of stitch so this is just called a straight stitch if I open this up I should have a nice clean seam I haven't even pressed this yet but this looks just fine now every type of stitch that we're gonna show you in this video is gonna start with that basic straight stitch at a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance and there's some variations that we're gonna show you along the way now I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna do my straight stitch on all of my sample pieces real quick and then I will show you the difference between each variation as we get to them now it's a really good habit every time you do a stitch to press your steams and you're gonna heat set those stitches into place and that's gonna help it lay nice and flat now what I want to do for my first five different types of seams is I'm gonna open this up and I'm gonna press the seam to one side it doesn't matter which side right now but I'm just gonna press five of these different test samples to the right so that my seam is length flat to the right side like that so now that we've pressed all of the ones that we need to for right now we've got our straight stitch done so that is the most basic type of stitch we can do and now we're gonna talk about top stitching by default most machines are at 2.5 millimeters of stitch length when I'm top stitching I like to do about three or maybe three and a half sometimes four depending on the project but I'll do three and a half of this demo makes the stitches a little bit longer so they're a little bit more noticeable people also ask me a lot when I switch different colors for top thread do I switch my bobbin thread and I do not now when I do top stitching on my projects I like to do it in a different color so I'm gonna use a nice deep red color here as our top stitch alright so now I'm going to line up this edge of our seam with the right side of my presser foot here it might be kind of hard to see it because it's so bright but my edge is perfectly and flush with this right edge of my presser foot and I do that for a lot of my different top stitches now I'm gonna start the same way where I'm gonna do a couple of stitches and the back stitch up to the edge of the fabric and then I'm just gonna follow this edge all the way down and again make sure you pull plenty of extra thread out so that you've got a nice smooth stitch I'm your next one alright so as you can see we've got a nice smooth top stitch on the outside and this also helps to strengthen the entire seam on the backside so here was our original stitch and then here's the bobbin thread on our top stitch right here so it will actually add a lot of strength all right the next type of stitch we're gonna do is called an edge stitch so there our seam and I'm gonna line this up instead of lining it up with the right side of my presser foot I'm gonna put the seam right in the absolute center so that my needle is gonna go about an eighth of an inch to the left of where my seam is there now it might be kind of hard to see it because it's so bright but as I cast a shadow I can see there's my seam and then my needle is about an eighth of an inch to the left of that so I'm gonna do the same thing that we just did it's almost exactly the same as a top stitch now this is how our edge stitch looks and the difference between that in our original top stitch is about that much of a gap now there's one more thing we can do which is called a welt stitch or as I call it a double top stitch where I'm going to line up this edge stitch we just did with the right side of our presser foot like we did on the first one and I'm gonna do the same thing next to it and this is called a welt stitch now you should have something that looks like this and I do this a lot on like men's jeans and stuff like that on the back pockets and sometimes on the inseam the other good thing about this if I look at the inside of the seam is you can tell there are three seams there so there's our original seam and then both of our top stitch so this adds a ton of strength to your seams all right so so far we have our straight stitch our top stitch our edge stitch and our welt stitch so we've got four different types of stitches right there the next type of stitch I'm gonna show you is the triple top stitch so we've been doing number one here which is just a regular straight stitch but I love doing this triple wide top stitch for all of my top stitching on jeans it also adds stretch so you can use it on knits and woven fabrics too so I'm gonna change my machine to setting number three because that is our triple stitch now the way this works is it's gonna go two stitches forward and then one stitch back and then it's gonna go to forward one so it's essentially stitching over the same area three times every stitch so it's a little bit slower but it looks really good okay so here's our triple top stitch which looks really good and just to show the difference between that in our original top stitch you can see how much more bold this stitch is here than this one here I also forgot to modify this stitch length so it was a little bit longer so I'm gonna do another edge stitch here with a little bit longer of a triple stitch so you can see the difference there now I just set my stitch length to four millimeters instead of the original 2.5 all right so we've got our shorter stitch that we first did and then this is our longer stitch I prefer the longer stitch but you guys can do whatever you like more okay now I'm gonna show you how to do what I guess I'd call a folded edge stitch so I've got my seam pressed to the left so I'm gonna fold this over like that and what I'm gonna try to do is match up my seam so it's completely on our folded edge like that so as I folded that in half I just want you to see that the seam is right there on the edge and we're gonna press that down so it's perfectly flat now that that's pressed I can see that our seam is perfectly creased right on that fold line right there and this is gonna be a nice clean surface for us to do an edge stitch or a top stitch right there to get set up for our folded edge stitch I'm gonna take my needle and I'm gonna move it all the way to the right side most machines can do that and now my needle is all the way on the right and I'm gonna line up the edge of my fabric with the right edge of my presser foot I'm gonna keep doing the triple top stitch at a four millimeter length and then I'm just going to stitch all the way along that edge all right so now you should have something that looks like this and I do this a lot with dress shirts collars men's jeans costumes messenger bags all kinds of stuff like that so having that edge stitch is really nice you can see my Center seam is right on that edge there which is great and then our bobbin thread is black on the backside all right now I'm gonna show you how to do an open top stitch I don't know if that's what this is actually called I just kind of make up my own names but in this case what I want to do is I want to open my seam down the middle and I'm gonna press my seam open okay so I've got my seam split right down the middle now we're seeing this pressed open so you should see the center seam in the middle and then you should have your raw edges on either side now my needle is positioned on the left side here so what I want to do is line up my seam with the left side of my presser foot like that I'm going to lower the presser foot do a couple of stitches and a back stitch I'm gonna set my machine so that it is a four millimeter stitch length and then I'm just going to stitch all the way down keeping this left edge of my presser foot parallel with that Center seam okay so we have the right side of our seam top stitch that way so now all I'm gonna do is just flip our fabric over and I'm gonna line up the left edge of our presser foot like we just did with the center of the seam not the stitches but with the center of the seam that we have in the middle there so as I do this it's gonna be perfectly even with the other side we're gonna stitch all the way down alright so that's how our open top stitch would look I love the way that this looks the only issue with this is that it's the weakest of all the top stitches because there's nothing really holding that seam together other than the center stitch one thing you can do is you can add a strip of fabric to the back before you do this that it actually grabs on to something to make it a little bit stronger but it does look really good on the outside like that so something I need to point out is that everything we've done so far has raw fabric on the inside of your seam so this can all fray if it's woven fabric so that can fray this was our open double top stitch so these edges here can fray which is not good the only exceptions so far is our rolled edge stitch because the seam is on the inside so that cannot fray now if you absolutely hate frayed threads on the inside of your seams or you're planning on starting to sell stuff you're probably going to need to get an overlock machine or a serger like this one but basically I'm not gonna go into a whole lot of detail the way this works is it's gonna trim the edge of my seam here and while it's trimming that it's going to loop fabric over that raw edge of seam now when it's done it's gonna look something like that so I've got my original straight stitch that we did and then this whole seam here on the inside is overlock so that's never gonna fray and it's gonna look nice and clean on the inside now the cool thing about a serger is that I've got a nice clean seam on the inside then I press this over to the right so what I can do is the same technique we did before where I can do another top stitch or an edge stitch to hold that in place so as you can see we have our nice triple top stitch on the outside then as I flip this we've got a nice Serge seam on the inside and because the bobbin thread from our top stitch is there it's gonna hold that Serge seam in place so I can't even flip this over anymore that is completely locked down on the inside and on the outside the last seam I'm going to show you is what's called a flat felled seam I've only done this a few times and I might not be very good at it but I do understand the principle so first I'm gonna press my seam over to one side now what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of pull these apart and I'm gonna open the sub I'm not gonna press it but I'm just gonna open that up now on the right side of that inside seam I'm gonna trim that about halfway towards the center of the seam no I'm just gonna remove that scrap okay so now you can see that the left side of the seam is a little bit longer than the right side so what I want to do is I'm going to fold over the longer part of the seam so that it's covering the shorter side so now the shorter side is tucked in to that other side so I'm gonna iron this in place and now I'm gonna flip all of this stuff over to the right side and try to keep this as flat as I can I'm gonna pull the fabric nice and tight just to make sure that it's not puckering on the outside and now I'm just gonna press the whole thing down to the right side just like this alright now we're just going to take this over to our machine and we're gonna edge stitch as close as we can to the inside here and this is the inside of our fabric the outside is going to end up looking like that but what we're trying to do is hide any raw edges on the inside of that flat felled seam alright now don't forget we're gonna be stitching on the inside of our seam so using a top stitch thread is not really important or helpful at all so I'm gonna switch back to just some standard black thread for those alright so now that we're all set up I've got my needle in the middle here and we're just going to be stitching as close as we can to the edge of that pressed edge of fabric right there alright that actually went really well I'm pretty happy with that so the bottom is our original seam and then we've got the bobbin thread from our flat felled stitch there now if we look at the inside of our seam we've got our nice two straight rows of stitching there and there is no raw fabric there so you're not gonna get any frayed thread or anything like that the other benefit to this is it's a very strong seam so this will hold up for a long time as a bonus technique I'm gonna attempt to do my first ever French seam so so far we've been doing right sides together for every single seam we've done now the way a French seam works is you want to put wrong sides together which is very unusual for me so I've got wrong sides together now now I'm gonna stitch this at a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance now that we have our first seam done what we want to do is press our seam open kind of like we did our open top stitch earlier except in this case our fabric is backwards okay so for this part you're gonna need some really sharp precision snips and we're gonna trim each side of this seam down to about 1/8 of an inch extremely close to that first seam that we did alright so now we're gonna do the other side the same way and from what I understand this is technique people do a lot with silks and like Bridal fabrics and stuff like that so there's a very good chance I'll never use this technique with menswear which is normally what I do but this is still a good technique to learn so now the inside of your seam should look something like that just trimmed extremely close to the inside seam there now the rest of this should be pretty easy just like we did with our folded edge stitch so we're gonna do the same thing where we fold this so that that center seam is just right on the edge like we did before and I'm gonna kind of roll this between my fingers so that it is perfectly in the center and then we're gonna press that into shape okay so I just want to take a closer look before we proceed but it looks like that edge of that seam is right on the edge there which is perfect now we trim the inside of the seam to about an eighth of an inch so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do just a straight stitch seam here at about 1/4 inch seam allowance and then that's it and then we're done all right now I'm gonna line up this is our folded and pressed edge that we just did and I'm gonna line this up with my quarter inch seam allowance right here start with a back stitch and just go all the way down alright so there's the inside of our seam which looks fine and if I open this up this is how the outside of our French seam looks and I'd almost pattern match that pretty well but there is our seam right there but this actually looks really good and we don't have to top stitch this at all because the inside is pressed over to the right and there's no frayed threads or any raw edges or anything like that so my first attempt at a French seam went pretty well okay so I think that's gonna do it for all of our different types of stitches I didn't actually know I knew how to do that many types but we had our straight stitch top stitch edge stitch welt stitch triple stitch folded triple stitch open top stitch over lock surged top stitch flat felled seam and French seam so that was I think 10 different types of seams that we can do and I use a lot of those in a lot of my different projects if you have any questions about anything that we did in this video please let me know in the comments and I hope some of the early stuff helped you guys that are new get some smooth stitches to start off with again if you have any other questions or any other videos you'd like to see please let me know in the comments otherwise I really hope this was helpful thank you so much for watching and we will see you in the next video

Channel: Tock Custom

Views: 199,469

Rating: 4.9553351 out of 5

Keywords: sewing, how to sew, sewing for beginners, how to use a sewing machine, how to do a basic stitch, topstitch, topstitching, edge stitching, french seam, flat felled seam, different types of seams, seams for beginners, how to sew seams, welt stitch, triple stitch, top thread, brother sewing machine, brother st150hdh, man sewing, men sewing, sewing tutorial, stright stitch, thread falls out of needle, basic sewing, intro to sewing, using a sewing machine, topthread

Id: KQ6LkNiBiLw

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020