How To Sew 8 Common Seams

hey party people I'm behind the camera today and this installment oh look the construction series with Mariah we are going to well she is gonna show you I'm officially anything she is gonna show you how to so some of the most common scenes that we use to construct clothes okay she is working on a Jew key industrial single needle lock stitch machine but the things that she's gonna show you you can do on a home machine it's fine right hey everybody um so like Zoe said we're on the Suzuki on the industrial machine but any machine is great no one in the world sits down the machine and sews beautifully the first time that's just I've never seen it happen I've been teaching for seven or eight years I have over 100 students the semester I've never seen somebody just sit down and just be a natural that doesn't exist practice practice practice I like to keep my stitch width at two and a half bigger than that you would want to use for like basting which is kind of a temporary stitch if you were if you were gonna create ruffles or kind of gather your fabric you would do a basting stitch we're not going to do that today we're just gonna do basic stitches so two and a half is a good place if you have it really small say like one and a half it's gonna be really tight and it's gonna kind of pull your fabric in a little bit too tight so two-and-a-half is a good base place to be that's kind of the base line so you can change your stitches per inch or your stitch width based on different projects unless it's been said to you specifically like by a teacher or if you understand the fabric oh I need to turn this down or turn it up just kind of stick around that that range two-and-a-half um so I'm gonna start with the most basic stitch the easiest and work our way up and get progressively a little bit more challenging as we go so you're a basic straight stitch what you want to do is take two pieces of muslin I'm going to line them up exactly exactly this is the one place where I am like very specific that if you if you have it off if you're pinning it and one size a little bit bigger than the other your seam allowance is gonna be off so on something like this it's not gonna be you know a huge deal because I'm just sewing a square if I were to do that if I were making a garment say that I was making a dress and it's got like six or seven seams if I'm off by an eighth of an inch on six seams that's you're gonna end up with a garment that's either three quarters of an inch too big or three quarters of an inch too small that can make a big difference in the fit of the garment so with each team it adds up so you want to make sure as you go that you're really lining these up perfectly there are a couple pins to hold it together you'll notice that I put my pins horizontally I don't put them vertically so that as I'm sewing I'm just pulling it out as I go so I'm going to turn on my machine get a little hum of the motor warming up I usually give it a couple seconds to just get it warmed up and then I'm gonna line this up I'm gonna sew a half an inch seam allowance so I'm just lining this up putting my foot on I always use my hand to put the needle start it down this is a great trick because if you don't sometimes when you first start sewing the needle goes up first before going down and if your thread is too short it'll unthread your needle it's the most annoying thing in the world you're constantly read threading your needle the way to get around that is just always start with your needle down so I'm gonna sew a couple stitches forward oh yeah this is Maurice first time at my chuki so give her a second to warm up to mine actually yeah it's good to feel it so with hers it's kind of like a car where you put you put your foot on the gas and there's almost like a little time delay a little delay to it so it's good to sew a couple a couple lines before you start working with your actual fabric to get to know your machine because some are super jumpy where you barely touch it and you're like zooming and so you want to be prepared so I so like two or three stitches forward I'm gonna hold down my back stitch so two or three stitches backwards and what that does is it locks the stitch so if you are hand sewing that's where you tie the knot to get it started okay so now I'm gonna sew forward pulling out my threads as I heard my needles as I go you don't want to sew over your pens these are pretty thin so it's not the end of the world but if I were using thicker pins they could break the needle so you want to make sure that you're that you're not sewing over your pins that you take me values time so what I'm doing I'm not actually looking at the stitch line as it's going I'm looking at the seam allowance I'm making sure that it stays lined up with my little ruler on the side that says half an inch so once I get to the end I'm going to back stitch couple stitches I pull my needle all the way up before I pull it out and if you have a home sewing machine you're gonna use usually your hand lifting if you have an industrial machine you can use your knee and that lifts pull it out edge cut I just want to interject with one thing just that Maria won't know because she's not used to my machine at all but my machine because it's a very basic machine that I got a million years ago the feed dogs on the bottom are gonna move the fabric along at a little faster pace than the top fabric and that's why it's good to have here not just matching it's good to pin at certain intervals so that you're keeping everything lined up if you're using a machine that's a little bit older like mine some of the newer lines you're not gonna have that problem so it really depends on the Machine you have so that's why we pin and make sure everything is lined up as we do these longer scenes yes so you can see that I have a really nice clean straight stitch it's a half inch seam allowance all the way along so when I open up to the front of the garment it's nice and clean if you get to this point and you open it up and there's ripples along here it's being pulled or stretched that means typically that your tension is off so you want to adjust it you want to learn how to troubleshoot your machine okay so now that we've sewn a basic straight stitch seam let's you in edge such so we are going to take what we just learned and just add to it so we're going to begin with a basic straight stitch team okay so we sewed our basic straight stitch seam again I just pressed the seam allowance to one side and I'm gonna do an edge stitch so an edge stitch is going to be it's either a sixteenth of an inch or an eighth of an inch away from the seam so for this one I'm gonna look at the foot on here I'm gonna line this up with the side of the foot so the needle is going through the very center the very center hole of the foot if I line up my seam with the side of the foot the inside side of the foot it's gonna sew at about a sixteenth of an inch all the way along so I'll show you what I'm talking about so I'm gonna do stitch and backstitch to lock it into place and that's it and make sure your stitching on top of your seam allowance because the point is to keep that seam allowance tucked in yes so the point of top stitching or doing an edge stitch it has two purposes it's either decorative so you want to have that kind of cooler tougher look where like more utilitarian having cool detailing and seaming or it's like say they say that you're making a uniform jacket you're gonna wear that every day to work you're gonna want something really strong and tough so what you want is stronger seams so it reinforces the seam while creating that kind of decorative stitch it's also making the seam twice as strong so on the front side you'll see that there's the seam and about a sixteenth of an inch over there's a nice straight edge stitch on the underside you'll be able to see and at this point when you turn it over you'll be able to see how wavy your line is because you'll see two lines next to each other so it should be consistent all the way through and next I'm going to do the top stitch and then you can kind of see the comparison okay so for the top stitch you're going to just start with the same exact straight seam we've already we've already demoed press the seam allowance to one side and just like the edge stitch where we did right along that edge for a top stitch you're going a quarter of an inch over from your edge so for that one instead of looking at the inside side of the foot we're going to line it up with the outside side of the foot so I'm lining up my seam with that outside edge back stitch and just keeping it lined up with that side same processes the edge pitch it's just further over so top stitch is a quarter of an inch the next one that we're gonna do is going to be a welt seam which is essentially a combination of all three that we just did a straight stitch and edge stitch and a top stitch and that's going to give a really nice strong seam so I'm just gonna start with my straight stitch at a half an inch I earn it to one side I'm gonna do my edge stitch and then for this top stitch I'm gonna look not at the seam but at the at the stitch line and that's what I'm gonna line up against my foot so it'll be a little bit easier for you guys to see too with that really dark thread we're gonna sew a quarter of an inch from that edge cinch so for this one you can see on this side we've got to stitch lines a quarter of an inch apart we turn it to the underside we've got three stitch lines sixteenth of an inch and then a quarter of an inch so this is three lines of defense here this garment is not coming apart okay sometimes people will even over lock it first and then do this to kind of clean finish that can probably be for a later video though over line all right so to do a flat felled seam similar to the welt seam this is going to be a really nice extra strong seam where you're doing you're doing multiple lines of stitching but this is one that it kind of clean finishes the underside whereas the welt has this raw edge so for this seam what you want to do is start with your seam allowance a quarter of an inch in so if you need to if you need to use ruler and draw a quarter of an inch line you can you're gonna start with this a quarter of an inch in and for me the way that I can tell without having to draw that line is on my sewing machine I can line up the bottom one at the half inch mark and the top one at the side of the foot cuz that's a quarter of an inch end are you still doing right side to right side oh good question yes so with every seam except the French seam you're doing face to face let's say this is our face of our garment it's got some cute stars on it little stars okay so face to face sorry I should say you guys can pet I'm I've been sewing daily for about 13 years I don't use as many pins as I should but you guys definitely pin during the whole process while you're learning so now what we want to do is go over to the iron and fold that extra quarter of an inch over to the seam and I'm going to press that flat quarter of an inch and fold it over and press then I'm gonna open up the seam and I'm gonna fold it over and give it another press so you can see how it takes that raw edge in there and it just wraps that fabric around and envelops it so you can see from the front it's gonna be really nice and clean it's it's um okay so now we're gonna go back over to the machine all right so now what we want to do is an edge stitch along this open edge which should be a quarter of an inch off of our stitch line a stitch in the back stitch you can tell my machine is old-school because it's so loud it does the job though so don't feel like y'all need to buy the latest and greatest machine out there I this machine has always done me well forever my surgery is even older than my single needle still awesome alright so you can see that you end up with very similar look to the welt seam on one side but on the backside the wealth has the raw edge on the backside we have this this flat nice clean seam and you mentioned that there are a couple of different ways to do this but this one is your favorite so this is one way you can also sew a 1/2 inch seam allowance just like normal and then you just cut down one side to a quarter of an inch so that's another way that you can do it and then you're just doing the same thing you're you're pressing it around and then doing your edge stitch so just depending on if if you keep a quarter or a half an inch seam allowance on your patterns say that you're making a mint shirt if your seam allowance on the front and the back is a half an inch then that's a good way to do it so a 10 and a half an inch and trim one side down to a quarter of an inch if you anticipated doing a flat felled seam at your patterning stage and you have your the front of your pattern that's a half an inch to the back of your pattern that's a quarter of an inch seam allowance then it's already that way and you can just sew it together fold it over and press and this is really nice for unlined things because it really cleans all that yes and sometimes over la can look a little bit cheap yeah yeah yeah it's really nice I like that it's an extra step for sure I mean it's much easier and faster to just over lock something but not everybody has an overlock machine and this is gonna really clean clean finish your seams and you're gonna end up with a super strong super durable seam so this is really great for like working with denim working with like pants weight fabrics it's just a good strong seam I think all my husband's shirts are done like the sides yeah like that that's a pretty nice a pretty standard way to do mostly men shooting but in women's as well women's tends to do more of the French team alright so we are going to do the French team which is basically the opposite of all the other seams we so face to face for the French team we're gonna sew wrong side to wrong side and for this I'm gonna line them up and French seams are really great for things like sheer fabrics for silks for lace something where you don't want to have any raw edges on the inside on the inside of your garment like a silk you would never want to overlap a silk you wouldn't want to have raw edges for a lace you wouldn't want it falling apart open on the inside so a French seam is a really nice finish for that so like I said with the flat felled seam a lot of times for men's shirts that's kind of the seam that they do for women's shirts most of the time they do a French seam it's just a little bit more feminine detail so we're gonna start this by sewing at a quarter of an inch so our pattern is going to be patterned at a half an inch seam allowance we're basically going to do a quarter of an inch and then another quarter of an inch down line so it ends up in total being the half inch but we're going to start with just a quarter our fabrics that we're using especially sheer lightweight fabrics or a lace or something typically they're gonna have a lot of fray we don't want to have fray coming through our seam so you want to cut it down halfway so we're cutting it down to 1/8 of an inch but really just cutting anything off the top is it's fine so if you cut sixteenth of an inch or an eighth of an inch away either way it's fine you just want to clean up that edge so now we want to go over to the iron and press okay so you can see right now that the fabric is faced out so what we want to do first is we press the seam flat then we press it to one side doesn't matter which side it is press it nice and flat to one side and then we want to turn it to the inside of the fabric and press it right along that that stitch line and you want to make sure that you're pretty accurate with this because you don't want a wavy wavy seam yeah you could tell a cheap garment like that messy rolled French seam yes oh yeah worst and like why take all the time and effort to do a French seam which takes twice as long as any other seam and then do it poorly yeah you know if you're gonna do it do it really well so you'll see that that press is right down the very center of that seam yeah you shouldn't even be able to see it because it's just right on that edge so we pressed on that seam see you can see if I open it up to the front side we've got that all that seam allowance is going to the outside of the garment what we want to do is sew it so that it closes that off and it's a really beautiful clean seam so the way that we do that is line this up we're gonna sew it go in your pins we're gonna sew it now at a quarter of an inch and because we trimmed away some of that seam allowance we shouldn't see when we open it back up you shouldn't see a little thread sticking out so I'm going line it up at a quarter of an inch stitch back stitch you this is where I see students getting sloppy or amateur sores get sloppy like did you notice how Muraya pinned it even though that seam is already sewn she pins it so that to prevent it from rolling sideways as you stitch that second scene yes so now the inside is nice and clean it's a super strong seam and it cleans all that seam allowance the inside and you can see on the outside it's a beautiful straight line at this point you would just iron it flat you're good to go that's your French seam all right we're gonna do a corner seam and you wouldn't normally mark on your fabric but I put these lines on here so I can show you what I'm doing with this seam so you have two pieces if you're lining it up kind of like a puzzle piece visually it doesn't line up right you think it's not gonna fit but in reality we're sewing the seam allowance at a half an inch so it's gonna end up lining up right along that half an inch and it should if it's done properly line up really nicely and be a nice square so the way that we're gonna do this so if this is my face and this is my face I'm gonna take I want my square to end up like this so I need to go face-to-face I'm turning it over I want to sew this down all the way down until the quarter of an inch seam allowance sew a quarter of an inch on either side arts sorry excuse me a half an inch seen allowed so half an inch on either side that's gonna be the point that I'm gonna stop and turn so I'm gonna line this up and I'm gonna sew to that half an inch point and I'm using a half inch seam allowance if your seam allowance is wrong when you're sewing if you're doing wobbly lines or if you're doing a quarter of an inch or 5/8 of an inch if you're off at all the end product it's not going to at the side so the same when we do a curved seam if your seam allowance isn't perfect this is the one time that it really does it does become obvious so make sure that you're paying attention that it's a half an inch so backstitch so to that point and I want to make sure that my needle is down at that point okay this is really important if your needles up it's gonna skip that stitch and it's not gonna do a clean corner you're gonna end up with a little bit of a curve in your corners so my needles down on an industrial machine I'm gonna lift with my knee and lift up the foot on a home sewing machine you're gonna lift up your foot we want to take it and actually even on an industrial machine because I'm gonna be working in here and I don't want to accidentally stitch through my finger I'm gonna lift this so I'm not having to deal with my knee very much so you can take your nippers or your scissors and what you want to do is cut a straight line across that corner so I'll move this one you guys can see a little bit better so I just cut to that corner okay and that's gonna allow me to open up my fabric and it's gonna make this corner move a lot easier now I'm gonna turn now I need to take my corner and turn that so it's gonna fight you a little bit you just need to kind of make sure all this extra fabric is out of the way I think that's the number one problem I had as I kept sewing over like an extra layer yeah set it move all the stuff out yeah if you don't move every little bit out you're gonna end up with a little pucker in there and that's where the fabric kind of folds over like a little tiny fold so you don't want to pucker so you really want to just take an extra minute make sure that all your fabrics out of the way I feel ahead of it and then make sure it's nice and clean down start sewing again this point you can in it so you should have a nice clean corner now you can see you can see my lines on there that I drew ahead of time so you can see that it's that it's a clean corner and what you want to do is press and you can even take this corner and clip your corner so it's not the fabrics not fighting so much and then you can press it flat so you have the corner here put it there and it's left we're gonna do the curved seam which is similar this one feels like it's not gonna fit right but if we sew it with the correct seam allowance it's gonna line up and fit perfectly so for this one I went ahead and I notch my fabric so I know as I'm sewing that my notches are gonna line up if my notches don't line up there's no way to correct that during sewing if if I start sewing and these two notches don't match they're off everything else is gonna be off so at that point you want to pull out your seam ripper and go back and start again so what I want to do is start in the beginning and this one it's kind of hard you can't really because you're working around this curve you can't really pin ahead of time but I'll use a couple pins as I go so I'll kind of hold together the beginning part and this I'm gonna sew a curve like this you would want to sew at a quarter of an inch seam allowance once so I'm just gonna start with stitching and back stitching and I'm moving it in as I go and as soon as I can as soon as they'll line up I'll go ahead and pin where those two notches are because I want to make sure that they stay lined up that one of them is not stretching away from the other not just my first notches match so we're like quarter of the way there go and smooth it's just really important that you keep the correct seam allowance as you go and you want to make sure that you're not pulling fabric because this is around a curve you're actually working with the bias which means that it's as stretchy as part of the fabric so the fabrics gonna fight you a little bit it's gonna want to be cool it's gonna want to stretch out of place so you want to just make sure that you're staying on top of that and not letting it hey so I'm lining it up it's like my second notches match that's a good sign so now you can see that you end up with a nice curved seam right now you can see one side is nice and straight the other side has all those crazy little ripples you can do one of two things you can either press it flat down if your if your fabric and if your pattern indicates that that's fine if it's a pattern that needs to have the seam allowance pressed up what you can do is take your scissors you can just cut little triangles of fabric out from this inside and that's going to allow it to lay down flat making sure that you're not cutting through your stitches but if you do that all the way along then it'll lay down flat so really for this one I if you can you just want to press it out flat so you can see that it's a nice smooth curve and it keeps a consistent quarter of an inch seam allowance all the way through and you often use a porter of seam allowance for more though really mercury yeah cuz it's really hard to get that with a wider see loads yes and it gets it gets kind of bulky with that extra seam allowance so right now we push down but say that you have a pattern where you can't push it down where so that's like the end of a garment or something like that say that you're making a scallop on the end of a skirt you wouldn't be able to push it down so you'd have to push all that seam allowance up you're gonna have to trim away so if you had a half inch seam allowance there you would have so much fabric that you're just cutting away and it's bulky and the top of your scene would be thick Mound so it's just nice if you can on a curve to use a smaller seam allowance just makes a cleaner product that's a curved seam is that it that's it oh my god that's so much I'm like is that it alright now don't we we sold like a million themes alright last week let's tailor a whole outfit oh I'm down okay and that should only be like a 17,000 our video all right I'm still back behind the camera but do give Mariah a round of applause tell me if you want her back for more videos if you love her teaching style if you don't go away no I'm kidding I mean anyway so please do hit the thumbs up button if you learn something new today Mariah also preaches practice makes better cuz perfect or not exists doesn't exist perfect as it exists practice makes better practice not magic alright so subscribe share drop your questions in the comments section check the description box for the links to related videos and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Zoe Hong

Views: 639,689

Keywords: Zoe Hong, Zoe Hong Teaches, Myriah Zaytoun, sewing, sewing tutorial, how to sew, french seam, welt seam, flat felled seam, corner seam, curved seam, basic stitch, edgestitch, topstitch, sewing machine, stitch length, what stitch length to use, stitch width, how to backtack, how to backstitch, sewing machine troubleshooting, zoe hong teaches, fashion design, fashion

Id: s9CB-uq8N-Q

Length: 30min 19sec (1819 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 24 2018