How to Tailor a Button Down Shirt - Beginner Level Sewing Tutorial - Tock Custom

welcome everybody I am tock custom and on this video we're gonna show you how to tailor a button-down shirt just like we made in our last video if you missed that feel free to go back and watch that otherwise if you have some shirts that you want to be a little bit more fitted we're gonna show you how to do that right now and also at the end of the video I'll show you how to do a long-sleeve dress shirt that has cuffs the steps are pretty much the same but I will show you what is different with that now all you're gonna need to get started is whatever button-down shirt or dress shirt that you want to tailor to yourself you'll need a sewing machine some scissors and some threads alright so our first step to tailoring a shirt is we have to put it on and button it up now in this shirt I want to bring it in about an inch and a half on either side so that I've got a much more narrow fit so we're gonna start at the sleeve through the armpit and all the way down to the bottom but before we do that we have to open or rolled hem at the end of the sleeve and at the bottom of our side seam so I'm gonna show you how to do that right now now we're gonna take about an inch of fabric out of this shirt on either side so I'm going to take out about two inches of my rolled hem so I'm just going to pop these stitches and then lay this out flat so I've taken about an inch of either side of this Center seam of our rolled hem and that should open this up so that we can lay this flat I'm gonna end up ironing this and then we should be able to see our nice raw edge and this is exactly what we need to do on either sleeve and the bottoms of our shirt so I'm gonna do all four of those parts right now alright so I've got all of my rolled hems open about two inches on either sleeve and two inches at the bottom of each of my side seams here so now I'm gonna press these that they're open so that they're easier to work with now just so you can see how this is gonna work I'm just gonna press this open and then use my iron to make sure this all lays nice and flat and this is really gonna help us when we end up tailoring these seams of our shirt all right so now you should have something that looks like that and I'm gonna do this with the other three seams so that these are all nice and open and flat like that alright so my hems on my sleeves and the bottoms are all open and pressed so that lays flat so at this point we're gonna want to turn our shirt inside out and lay it flat on our table alright so now I've got my shirt inside out and this is the end of my left sleeve through the armpit and all the way down to the bottom and you should be able to see the raw edges since we opened up that hem now I want to take this in about an inch on either side so I'm just gonna kind of eyeball and mark this with white chalk I don't know if you can see this but this is just kind of a reference for me so that I know roughly where my stitches are gonna go and try to keep your fabric nice and flat so it should look like that I don't need to pin this at all I'm just gonna take this right over to my sewing machine and sew from the bottom all the way up to the end of the sleeve there alright so we're at our sewing machine and because this is a woven fabric we can just do a regular straight stitch which is a lot easier now before we start it's really important that you line up the two raw edges if these are uneven like that it's not going to come together well so you want to make sure that the raw edges of your fabric are perfectly flush with each other like this now as I feed this into my machine I wanted to take out an inch of fabric from where we did our original seam here so I'm gonna line up this stitch with the one inch mark on our plate right here so that's what we're looking to do now I've got this all nice and flush everything looks good so I'm going to do a front and back stitch and now all I have to do is just follow this entire stitch all the way down to the bottom of the shirt following this one inch seam allowance from this black stitch right here all right now as I get close to the bottom I also want to make sure that the two raw edges of fabric at the very bottom are also perfectly flush so that we've got a nice even seam finished with a back stitch and cut my thread and we are done with one side so now I'm going to do the other side real quick and show you what happens next all right so now you should have something that looks like this here so here was our original seam and here is our new seam so normally I would just take this over to my serger like we did on the original end and just Serge the whole thing and it would trim it and clean it up but I'm going to show you how to cut it and do a zig zag stitch for those of you who don't have a serger so what I'm going to do is I'm going to trim this so that the raw seam is about maybe half an inch or so from our new seam that we just sewed all right so we've got our seams trimmed and this is a good length for us to work with for a zig-zag stitch and again when you use a serger or an overlock machine it's gonna lock all these up because with any woven fabric you're gonna get loose threads like this if you just lightly tug on it we don't want that so I'm gonna show you how to clean this up without a serger so that you've got nice clean seams on the inside now the first part of overlocking with a zig-zag stitch is you have to figure out where your zig-zag stitch is on your machine this has a digital touchscreen so I know this is my zig-zag stitch here and what I want to do is I'm gonna modify the zig-zag stitch so this tells me how wide the stitch is gonna be and this tells me how long this stitch is gonna be so I want this to be as wide as possible which i think is seven millimeters wide and I'm gonna keep this at about one point six millimeters in length and you'll kind of see how that looks as we do this now that we have our zigzag set the way that we want it to the way this is gonna work is we're gonna do one stitch off the fabric and then one stitch on the fabric but I want to start on currently my needle is on the right side of my machine so I'm gonna use my hand wheel to go all the way down and when this comes up it's gonna snap to the left like that so now what I want to do is our first stitch is gonna start on the fabric and I'm gonna use my hand wheel to make sure that the second stitch is going off the edge of that fabric when I go all the way down it should just barely be off like that so as I do a front stitch and a back stitch I'm gonna go all the way off the edge almost off the edge alright so as I followed the seam what's gonna happen is every other stitch is gonna go off the edge of the fabric and it's gonna lock any frayed or loose threads to the inside of that seam so that it stays nice and clean kind of like an overlock machine but much more simplified and I'm gonna just go all the way down from the edge of the sleeve all the way down to the bottom of the shirt all right so as I get to the bottom I'm gonna cut my thread and you should have something that looks like this and the zig zag is going to keep all of this raw fabric from fraying and it doesn't look quite as pretty as a Serge seam but it will keep your fabric from fraying and you're not gonna get loose threads or not nearly as many if you didn't do this at all so I'm gonna clean this up a little bit and then I'll show you what's next all right so when you're done you should have something that looks like this and I know it looks kind of messy but all I need to do is just trim off any bulk right there and any loose threads and if I pull this real tight the hem should actually kind of start to reform by itself and I'm just gonna kind of tuck that in and then I'm gonna press this with my iron and it should just kind of line up with the previous hem that was in there before we took it apart like that okay so I'm just pressing our rolled hem back into shape just like it was before we open this up and tailored it and I'm just gonna do a start and backstitch here stitch across the rolled hem and end here by doing another back stitch and that's gonna close that up we're gonna do this on both the side seams and both the sleeves and then we are actually done with tailoring our shirt okay so here is how our new hem looks as we just kind of researched that together and I'm just going to trim any loose threads that we have from the outside first and then I'm gonna flip this and look at the inside and I'm going to trim any loose threads from the inside and when you're kind of recovering or repairing stitches it's usually a good idea to use some kind of a fabric glue so I'm gonna use some fray check here and I'm gonna put a couple of drops there where we started and ended those stitches all right so now that we got some free check on there that's gonna look nice and clean on the inside and the outside just like that and it's not gonna fall apart in the wash or anything like that all right now before we try on our new tailored shirt I did mention that I was gonna just quickly go over how you would do this with a long sleeve dress shirt and I'm not even going to do a full demo because I don't need to but if you were tailoring a long-sleeve dress shirt like this with a cuff you would do everything exactly the same where you on him the bottom and then you're gonna stitch up through the armpit here and then when you got close to your cuff what you would do is you would follow this one inch or so or whatever you end up tailoring and then as you get close to the cuff you get closer and closer to your original seam and you're just gonna blend in with the original seam about right here so that it's completely seamless you'd end up trimming out any extra fabric I've been surging or zigzagging over that raw edge like that now after you've tailored your dress shirt if you find that the cuff is still too big around your wrist all you'd have to do is take your button pop out the stitches move it in about half an inch or an inch or however much you need to resew your button a little bit into the cuff right there and everything is gonna work out perfectly just like it did with the other shirt that we just finished okay so as I try this on I can tell that this is fitting a lot better it's not quite as dramatic as the t-shirt that we did but as I look at my sleeve my armpit down the flank and around the hips it feels a little bit tighter and more narrow so if it looks like I'm wearing a custom handmade tailored shirt that's exactly what I'm wearing hopefully this helped you guys tailor your own shirts or dress shirts if you have any questions please let me know in the comments otherwise thank you so much for watching thank all of you for your support and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Tock Custom

Views: 33,203

Rating: 4.9704432 out of 5

Keywords: how to use a sewing machine, sewing for beginners, how to tailor a shirt, how to tailor, tailoring for beginners, tailor, men's fashion, how to make men's clothing, tock, tock custom, sewing, how to resize a shirt, button down shirt tutorial, tutorial, sewing tutorial, beginner level sewing techniques, how to sew, how to make men's clothes, how to sew clothing, how to modify a shirt, how to make a shirt, beard, man sewing, twitch creative, cosplay, how to use a serger

Id: hqQzUiMmGGQ

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 07 2020