How to Sew a Seam with Liesl Gibson I Creativebug

[Music] we'll start out with a straight seam and any time you're sewing you're always positioning your fabrics with right sides together like I'm doing now and then the easiest way to hold those fabrics together is to pin them and it's a good idea to pin perpendicular to the edge and this also makes it easy to take the pins out as you're sewing and I pin every foe I don't know six inches or so not that often you can you can pin more frequently than that if you're feeling uncomfortable or if you just want a little extra help with your seam but really that's all that's required we've got our right sides together and we've got our pins in the fabric to hold it when you start sewing curves there are two different kinds of curves there are matching curves like these which when we place the fabric with right sides together the curves really do match each other these are relatively easy to pin because just like with the straight seam we just have to hold those two pieces of fabric together every so often and again with pins perpendicular that's very straightforward the other kind of curve is contrasting curves or opposing curves for example the top of this skirt with the bottom edge of the yoke you can see when I start pinning these together they don't match it all they really are opposing and the easiest way to handle a situation like this is first of all it's really helpful to have some notches or something that will sort of guide you what matches which part along the curve I'm going to start out with the outside edges and then I'll work my way I think I'll pin something towards the middle and then I'll sort of work my way in so I've pinned the outside edges now I'm going to pin the center so that they match and then I have a notch that matches the seam this will be helpful for just making sure everything aligns and another one on the opposite side and now things are starting to come together one thing that will help is anytime you have a shorter curve that the inside curve I like to take a few just little clips in there and that will release the seam allowance which will explain more about later and allow the cut edge of the fabric to match up with the cut edge of the opposite fabric and this can take a little fiddling we'll put a couple of pins in and then I'll go back and adjust this pin put another one in over here just to hold everything in place and this can look a little funny when it's all pinned in position it doesn't look like it should make any sense when you stitch it but you'll see once we've actually sewn it that it goes together really nicely and makes a really pretty curved seam when it's finished coming around to the back here just put a few more clips in here and then again we can kind of stretch the shorter curve to match the longer one and we're just really looking to get those two edges lined up as well as we can while keeping the portion that will be stitched which is about a half inch in we'll still keep that straight so you can see it looks a little funny right now because the yoke is matching the curve of the skirt so it's sort of puckering here but when we flip it up this is what it's going to look like when we sew it it's going to make a nice curve there when you sit down at the machine to start sewing there are a few things to keep in mind one is it's always a good idea to remove your pins before you sew over them if you forget and sew over a pin it's probably not the end of the world but it's a lot safer if you remove them before you sew over them I then I'm lifting the presser foot there's a little lever on the back of the machine that lifts up that presser foot and you just put the fabric right underneath the presser foot and then it's always a good idea to start out sewing with a couple of back stitches which is literally sewing backwards before you start sewing forwards and that knots your failure of thread essentially and prevent it from pulling out later on so I'm going to start just a couple of stitches in from the back edge of my fabric and I have a little button on my machine here that I push and that allows me to stitch backwards just a couple of stitches you don't have to go far just enough to hold everything in place and then I can start stitching forward and you'll see as I'm sewing I'm going to hold my fabric usually in two places I like to hold off to the side and I hold it in front and the reason for that is it allows me to sort of guide my fabric and Stitch exactly where I want to stitch and when I teach people to sew I often use the analogy of driving a car or when you're driving you're not looking at the front of the car to see where you're going you're looking somewhere down the road it's the same thing with sewing rather than looking at your needle and trying to line up your fabric at your needle you actually look ahead of the presser foot itself and you can see on the sewing machine itself there are some lines here that show you how big the seam allowance in other words the space between your stitching and the edge of the fabric how wide that seam allow is as you're stitching I'm using today a half inch seam allowance which is right in between the 3/8 inch marking and the 5/8 inch marking year so you'll see there's another line in there that's not indicated doesn't have a measurement on it in other words but it's the four eighths or half inch marking so I'm going to line up the cut edge of the fabric with that line as I'm sewing and the reason that line is up ahead of the needle is because like with driving if you get you the edge of your fabric lined up with that mark it gives you plenty of chance to keep an even seam allowance before you get to this actual stitching at your needle and so I'll continue to guide the fabric right along that marking just holding it in position gently guiding it you don't have to do much there our feed dogs underneath the foot there those little grooved things they move backwards every time you take a step and they're actually guiding your fabric through the machine so all you do is show it where you want it to stitch and it does the rest of the work now as I get down to the corner another thing you can do if you're stitching a corner itself if you want to do a corner with your hand you can turn the crank wheel to bring the needle right down into your fabric and this machine actually has a needle up needle down function that I can use as well but a lot of machines don't have that in which case you just use this crank wheel always turn it towards you and with the needle down in the fabric I can raise the lever to lift the presser foot and then reposition the fabric itself before I lower the presser foot and continue sewing so this allows you to do a corner or if you start getting off a bit you can just adjust your way it's also really useful when you get to sewing curves and again I'm just holding that fabric just guiding it along until I get to the end and then once again I'll just take a couple of back stitches just to knock my thread and then I have a special little thread cutting mechanism on here that makes everything nice and easy otherwise you just pull your threads and snip them and we've got a seam sewn if we open it up we can see that we've sewn the two pieces of fabric together here's the wrong side of our seam with the seam allowances showing now one thing I want to point out to you is I use two different colors of thread I use the turquoise in my in my spool at the top and I use more of a burgundy color in the bobbin and one of the reasons I did that is so that you can also see what's called tension and a sewing machine when those two threads are traveling parallel to each other and they're twisting around each other ideally you want that twist to happen right in between the two layers of fabric and if you look really closely sometimes you can see especially if I use two different colors of thread you can see if I pull those fabrics apart you can actually see where the two threads are twisting and if they're twisting right in between the two layers of fabric then you know your tension is balanced really nicely now if the tension is off a bit you should only ever adjust the tension on your top spool of thread there is a tension adjustment in the bobbin it's really really touchy it's really difficult to adjust I recommend that you send that one to your sewing machine repair person if you need to do any adjustment there any adjustment that you do at home should only be done with a tension adjustment dial that's found on your machine it will be found here sometimes it's a it's an adjustment down here but you can make it tighter by dialing it higher and looser by dialing it lower and you'll see pretty quickly and pretty easily how to adjust that but it's really easy to see that that adjustment needs to be made if you do two different colors of thread sewing the curved seam will be the same as sewing the straight seam will just line it up back stitch a couple of stitches and then continue on our way and again I'm just lining it up with that edge keeping it equidistant from the scene while it's died long before it gets to my needle so I don't even have to worry about it and I'm just taking out the pins before I get to them some machines also have what's called a lock stitch which is this little target shaped button up here that will it's kind of like a back stitch but it just stitches in one place for a few stitches and that's kind of a nice one to use as well and then we cut our thread and there you've got a curved seam now I also want to show you the opposing curved seam that we had pinned because this can be a little bit trickier too so you're going to want to do this one in short sections just to be sure that everything is matching up okay I like to sew it with the trickier part usually on the top because we're sort of contouring to the shape of this skirt which is the underneath fabric I'm going to keep the yoke fabric on the top because I can really see what's going on then and I can make sure that nothing is puckering or getting in a way or doing anything wrong so I'm going to start out near a side seam here take a couple of back stitches I should also mention that when you're doing a straight stitch generally for most purposes you want your stitch length to be between two and a half and three and a half millimeters I'm stitching nice and slowly here taking the pins out as I go along and just making sure that all the fabric lies smoothly so by keeping your stitch length to between two and a half and three and a half that will be a good length for most projects different sewing machine feet require different stitch lengths I don't know if you just noticed I just put my needle down in the machine so that I could lift up the foot and just adjust things a little bit I'm just going to continue going along nicely slowly making sure everything's nice and flat laying smoothly I can feel underneath here that the bottom layer is now completely smoothly which is why I'm stopping and occasionally adjusting and then I get to an easier stretch and there we go and I'll back stitch a couple on the other end of it cut the threads and now you can see when I lay it out that we have a nice curved seam here so let's say that you finished your seam and you look at it and you have some puckers or you realize that you made a mistake and you stitch the wrong thing to the wrong thing what do you do there's this fabulous tool called the seam ripper and it's got a little blade that's right in the hook of it right there and in order to use it you simply slip the longest part of it underneath your stitch and you push and that little blade will cut the stitch and you don't have any danger of actually cutting your fabric this way you're simply cutting the thread itself so I usually when I have to rip out a section I cut every I don't know four or five stitches something like that but I just work my way along the segment that I want to fix and I cut each of those threads and then if you just give a little tug it will come apart there and you can research that part so now I can just go in and fix that little mistake or you can do the whole thing that way if you've sewn the wrong sides of the fabric together or something like that but a seam ripper is probably your most crucial tool when you're a beginning so it's especially you

Channel: Creativebug Studios

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Keywords: how to sew a seam, sewing, seams, liesl gibson, Do It Yourself (Website Category), creativebug, Pattern, How To, Do It Yourself (Hobby), DIY, How to Sew, Sewing (Industry), Sew, Learn to Sew, tutorials, Tutorial (Media Genre), creativebug tutorial, creativebug.com tutorials, creativebug.com tutorial, Creativebug.com, learn to sew a seam, Creative Bug

Id: rjRzeay8u-Q

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2014