Transcripts
1. Introduction: At the beginning of
my sewing journey, just six years ago, I didn't even know
how to make a napkin, but now I make almost
all my clothes from scratch and it all started
with learning the basics. [MUSIC] Hi, my name is
Robyn Andrea Burgess. I'm a sewist and founder
of Styles In Seams, a fit of set sewing blog
and indie pattern business. I started sewing six years
ago after decades of struggling to find clothes
that fit my 6"2 body, my budget, and my
bowl cheerful style. Now, I am proud to
say that I have not bought clothes since 2018. Everything I wear, I create from my imagination
and my sewing machine. If I can learn this
crap, so can you. In this class, we're
starting super-simple by creating a clutch
with a zip fastener. Through this project, I
introduce you to a set of basic sewing skills that you can use when creating a
range of gardeners. First, I'll start by showing you how to
set up your machine. Then we'll talk about
preparing fabric before I walk you through
common stitches and closures. We're going to get you past
all of the speed bumps that slow down or interrupt
your sewing journey. You can become a
competent creator faster. You should take this
class if you're at the very beginning of
your sewing journey, or if you started to sew but
something's not going right. Listen, I have been there. I'm here to walk you through the fundamentals of the craft. By the end of this class, you'll feel empowered to
start exploring the world of DIY fashion and make
your first garment. I'm so excited you're here and can't wait to start
this journey with you. Let's dive in. [MUSIC]
2. Getting Started: [MUSIC] Welcome. I am so happy you're here and
excited to teach you some of the key
skills that I use in almost all of the sewing
projects I create. I started my blog styles
in scenes three years ago, and it serves as a vibrant
public record of how my skills have improved and how my style has developed
over the years. But when I bought this
sewing machine in 2015, I couldn't even sew napkins, I literally quit for
an entire year because my stitches weren't straight and my makes were embarrassing. Frustrated with fast fashion, I later set a goal to
not buy any clothes for a whole season and
pushed myself through the intimidation to
start creating garments. My competence builds as I take on increasingly
challenging designs, add flare, detail and personal
touches wherever I want. I have a mass and entire
wardrobe of my own creations, from dresses and jump suits
to skirts, shirts and pants. Now, I only buy clothes to support friends and
emerging designers. I'm completely self-taught
and living proof that if you set your mind
to something with time, patience, and practice, you can amaze yourself
with what you achieve. In this class, I'm going
to teach you a set of fundamental sewing skills
on a simple bag design. Once you make one bag, maybe you can continue
to practice by making a few as gifts
for your friends. My hope is that once
you master this class, you go on to explore my other Skillshare classes
that will take you on a learning path from a total beginner to
a competent sewist. What are we going to
need for this class? First, and most importantly, a sewing machine. Here's my baby. It's a brother,
CS6000i I got it for under $200 and I've had it
since the beginning of time. But you don't need to break the bank and get
anything fancy just ask around borrow it from someone who got a machine
to sew masks during the pandemic or has had it in their closet for the
last two generations, it'll still work as long as it goes straight and
keeps the stitches up. Now that you have
your sewing machine, let's talk through the other
materials for this class. First, get yourself some paper, a ruler, and a pen or pencil
so you can create a pattern. Next, two scissors, paper scissors and fabric
scissors do not mix up the two. The paper scissors
are just for paper, the fabric scissors
or just for fabric. If you use your fabric
scissors on paper, it will dull the blade, and that's like the
Number 1 no, of sewing. Next, you're going to
need some needles. We'll talk about how to
choose the perfect needle, but keep in mind, the needle
will depend on your fabric. Next, the materials for making your bag and actually putting something through
the sewing machine. You want some scrap fabric. We are using scrap fabric
to keep it low stakes so that you can make mistakes
and not worry about it. Find an old bed sheet, find an old shirt that
has stains on it, a kitchen towel, whatever
you have that you don't mind ruining because we're just going to practice
to get started. You want some thread. You want a zipper
for our last lesson, and you want some fabric for the finished clutch
that we're making. I've chosen some denim that I've actually gotten
from a thrift store, and it's been perfectly
upcycled but this is a great fabric for this
class because it's a little heavier than say, a quilting cotton or something that you would
make a top out of, which is going to
be really great for holding up our clutch. It's also really
important that you have an iron and a little
bit of water with it. Pressing is one of the
most important parts of sewing and we'll talk about pressing and a few
of our lessons. Now that you have all
of your materials, meet me in the next lesson where I'll teach you how to
set up your machine [MUSIC]
3. Setting up Your Sewing Machine: [MUSIC] Welcome back. So excited you're
here to get started. We're going to start
super basic as if you've never touched
a sewing machine before. We're going to wind up some
bobbis, choose some threads, choose some needles,
and start with your first test stitches
on some scrap fabric. First thing you need
is some thread. I have this gutermann thread. It's good to get a good high quality polyester
all-purpose thread. Don't get a little cheap
dinky thread because it'll break and then
expletives will come out. [LAUGHTER] The first thing
that we're going to do is wind up a bobbin. With a sewing machine
there are two parts. There's the upper thread and
then there's the bobbin. You have a thread on top of your fabric and you have a
thread below your fabric. We always start by winding our bobbins because
we're taking from this spool and putting it onto this little bobbin so that we can put it down
into the machine. Let me show you how to
wind that on my machine. Your machine might be a
little bit different, but same basic principle. Go to your owner's
manual if you need the instruction of how to do
it exactly for your machine. First things first, we need to put the thread on the machine, and then we need to put
the bobbin on the machine. My machine has this
thread pen that I can pull up into
place and drop it on. Then it has this
pin for the bobbin. I'm going to stick that on. Now my machine has a
diagram to show me exactly how to
thread the bobbin. But if yours doesn't
have a diagram, check the instruction manual. I'm going to take the thread, put it through
this a little bit, whip it around here. We're creating some
tension for it. Then we're going
to do a few winds on the bobbin just to get it started and then
click it into place. Now my machine is on, and what I want to do is start
looking at the panel here. It doesn't matter what threads setting you have it set to, because as soon as
this locks into place, your machine probably knows that it's ready to
wind the bobbin. If your machine has
different speeds settings, turn it all the way up. Next thing is to push the bobbin into place
and get ready to spin. I'm going to put my foot on the gas and just go a little bit slow
to see what it does. I want it to start spinning and I want to see it starting to wind around this bobbin and add extra thread
to this bobbin. I'm just going to
pedal to the metal, go as fast as I can and
let's watch the bobbin wind. [NOISE] When the bobbin stops going, that means it's full
and it's ready to use. What I'm going to do is
take my fabric scissors or really any scissors for this
and just snip the thread. Now it's time to put the
bobbin into your machine. We're going to open up this
little case here by pulling the button back and
letting it pop open. Then we're going to take
the bobbin and following the diagram that it's
here on my machine, I'm going to pull it
around and loop it so that it goes down into the
machine the right way. The diagram is really important here because if you
flip your bobbin the wrong way or you don't set
it into these exact steps, then it's going to mess up the thread tension and it's
not going to sew right. Actually, the very
first thing that I do, if I find that my stitches
aren't going correctly, I take my bobbin out
and I put it back in the right way because that's
probably what's wrong. I'm going to hold the end of the thread and I'm going to hold the other one
with my right hand. I'm going to put it
down into the bit here. I'm going to pull this with some tension to make
sure that it's tight. There's an arrow here
that's telling me to take it to the left and up. I'm going to take it
with my left hand, bring it to the left and up, and then around this
bit where there's another knife that's
going to cut it off and give me
some loose thread. I've held it here with
my right hand the whole time because
otherwise I'd just be pulling it and I just be pulling thread off of the bobbin
and I don't want that. Now I'm just going to
snap the cover back on. Our next step is
choosing a needle. You can buy schmetz needles or you can buy these
organ needles, which I love getting in bulk
because they're way cheaper. You don't pay for the plastic. But what's most important
is making sure that you choose the right type of
needle for your fabric. You want to use a
universal style needle for most woven fabrics and you want to use a
ballpoint needle for most jersey fabrics
or knit fabrics. Here I'm going to be using
some woven scrap fabric and it's medium to light weight. I'm going to choose a
gauge that is a little bit lower than I would
use for say, denim. The gauge here on the
pack is pretty simple. You get this 70 over 10, which is like the European or British and
the American style. But only thing to remember is
the lower the numbers are, the finer point the needle is, and the thinner the
fabric is going to be. Big number which, and they
usually go up to about 100, 120 even over like 14 or 16. That would be for a
really thick fabric. For a finer fabric, you can use something
like 70 over 10. To put my needle on my machine, I like to use a tool that we
all have and it is a dime. Because where the needle goes, there's this little screw. Now a screwdriver to
come with my machine, but I don't like it,
so we use a dime. You just want to use
this dime to loosen this up to the
point where you can grab it and get it open. You need to take the needle
and with the flat side of the shank facing back and
the round side facing you, put it in here and push it
up as far as you can go. Then you want to
hold that in place and screw it on tight. Then I use my dime and I
just get it nice and tight. It's time to thread the needle. The first thing that you
need to do is make sure that your needle is in its
upper most position. If you have a button that moves your needle up and down,
you can start there. I put it down. [NOISE]
Let it come back up. If you don't have a
computerized machine, use the hand wheel and
turn it towards you, always only towards you
and just crank it until the line on the hand wheel matches up with the
line on your machine. We're going to take the thread
off of the machine first because it's set up the wrong way to go
down into our needle. Next, we're going
to follow our guide again to get the thread
down into the needle. We're going to come through here and then we're
going to bring it down. We're going to hook
it around down here. We're going to bring it up. We're going to hook it
around this metal hook. We're going to bring it down. We're going to go through this metal pin next
to the needle. Now we have it out in front of our needle. Hold it pretty firm. Give yourself like a quarter of an inch and push it
through the needle. Now with your left hand, take it from around back
and pull it through. Your needle is threaded. Last thing with a needle and
thread before we can start sewing is to pick up
the bobbin thread. Some machines don't require
you to do this, mine does. I'm going to hold it
with my left hand and I'm going to use
my hand wheel to take the needle all the way
down and all the way back up. What will happen is another thread from the
bobbin will come up. You can see it right here. I'm just going to pull
it out a little bit. Now we need to test and make
sure your needle is threaded correctly by doing a
couple of test stitches. In order to do the
test stitches, I'm going to take
some scrap fabric. I'm just going to cut
off a little section. I'm just going to take
a little square off of this fabric that I can use
for a few test stitches. When we do this first one, we're just going to use one
piece of fabric. That's okay. Once we do a seam, we'll graduate to two
pieces of fabric. The first thing
that you want to do is lift your presser foot. Now the presser
foot that I have on here is the universal
presser foot. It comes with practically
every machine. It's this real basic one. In order to lift it, there's a little lever here. I'm just going to take
that lever and lift it up, that allows me to put
the fabric underneath. What I want you to see
here is that there's the presser foot and then
there are feed dogs. It's these little rigid bits that are beneath
the presser foot. There's a button in
the back to release it and it can just hook on when I drop the presser foot
down into the right spot. Put your fabric down on
your throat plate here. Put the presser foot down. Always, always put your
presser foot down. Then I'm going to hit my
button to drop my needle down. I just have it set to
a straight stitch. I'm going to do a
test run just going a straight stitch through
this length the fabric. Get your presser foot, put your foot on the
gas, and let's go. [NOISE] When I get to the end, I'm just going to
bring up the needle, bring up the presser foot, and you probably have something on your machine where
you can cut the threads. There we go our first stitches. On my machine, I
change the stitches using this menu by hitting
these buttons here. If you don't have a
computerized machine, you might have a dial
and you can just click that dial so that it lines
up with the stitch you want. [NOISE] I'm just going to keep doing more
and make sure that the settings on my
machine are correct. I'm actually looking at the top stitches and I'm looking at the bobbin
stitches in the back. I want to make sure that they're laying nice and flat and I don't see any little loopers
coming up the wrong way. If I were having issues, it might be tension. So I would change
my tension dial here to a different
setting or it could be that I miss threaded my machine or my bobbin
is inserted incorrectly. If you're having any
problems getting stitches that look
correct and you'll know they look
correct because you can look at the hem of like anything that you're
wearing and see what stitches are
supposed to look like. If they don't look like that, my first recommendation is to take the thread
off your machine, take your bobbin out, turn your machine off, turn the machine back on, put the thread back in, put the bobbin back in, pull your thread back up
again and start over. It might sound
like that's silly, but it's the total
turn the printer off, turn the printer back on. It could just be that the bobbin went in upside down and
you didn't realize it. It could be that you missed one of these hooks in the threading. It could be any
number of things. But by not having to figure out what that
exact problem is, you troubleshoot by just
starting over again. It takes 30 seconds, and 30 seconds is worth the 20 minutes of frustration
of having bad stitches. In addition to
controlling your speed here on the speed dial
that I have on my machine, you control the speed that the machine moves with
your presser foot. If I press lightly, it goes slow like this. [NOISE] If I press it down fast, just like a car, it goes fast. [NOISE] In this lesson, we've set up our machine
by winding our bobbin, choosing a needle,
threading the machine, and doing our first
test stitches. I want you to
practice, practice, practice and every
time there's an error, just do a factory reset or check your instruction manual to make sure the
settings are correct. [MUSIC] Meet me in
the next lesson and we'll talk about
seams. [MUSIC]
4. Stitching Seams and Basting Stitches: Now that you know how
to set up your machine, let's start stitching seams. Seams are basically when you
take two pieces of fabric and make them into one so
that they're one solid. You have seams at your sides, you have seams at
your shoulders. You have seams
wherever you're trying to make a shape
with some fabric. They're super
essential to sewing. We're going to keep
it super low stakes here and stick with
the practice fabric. I want you to use something
that you do not care about, like something you've up-cycled, something that would be trashed. Basically we're going to recycle something into fabric
that you can practice stitches on so
that you don't get frustrated when you
maybe mess it up. The key here is to go
and go and practice and get good at it before we
move on to your good fabric. Grab a little bit of scrap
fabric and let's get started. First things first, when you're sewing two pieces
of fabric together, in almost every case you want to put right sides together. If your fabric has a print, it'll be easy to tell
which is the right side. If it doesn't have a print, it might be a little bit harder, but just choose the side that you want to be the
wrong side and go ahead and mark it so that
you stay consistent. Next thing that I
want to do before I start stitching is
getting a little bit of practice with using pins to hold the two pieces of
fabric together before I put them
under my machine. I have some pins here. If you're going to ever
be ironing with pins, it's good to invest in
some glass head pins because they won't melt
under the heat of the iron. We're going to take our
pins and we're going to add them to the seam
that we're going to stitch to hold the
pieces together so that they stay aligned when we put them under the presser foot. The most important thing
when pinning is to have the pin going perpendicular
to your seam. Because if you do it parallel, what will happen is your fabric will bunch up a little bit like this and you won't be able to
keep it straight and good. The other thing is when you're
keeping it perpendicular, it's good to have it
so that they face out in the direction that
is the outside of the seam. That way it's going
to be easy to pull those pins out as you sew. As you get more
confident with sewing, you might not have
to use as many pins, but it's perfectly okay to put a bazillion
pins in your garment. It'll take a little more time, but it'll get the
results you want. One of the most
important concepts in sewing is maintaining
seam allowance. Seam allowance is the amount
of distance between where the stitch line goes and
the edge of the fabric. In a lot of patterns, you'll see a seam allowance
of anywhere from 3/8 of an inch or 1 cm up
to 5/8 of an inch. I'm going to show you
how to figure out how much seam allowance
you have on your machine. What I want you to do is lift up your presser foot
and just take it off. Then grab a small ruler, in this case I'm
using a seam guide, and rotate your needle so
that it's almost down. Now, you just want to measure
the distance from where the needle position is to
where it says 5/8 of an inch. The reason why I'm
doing this is because different machines have
different needle positions, and sometimes the marketing and the placement of that 5/8 of
an inch seam is different. For me, stitch number
zero-zero is 5/8 of an inch. This is the stitch
where the needle is in the leftmost position. But if I put that needle
down and bring it back up and say I were to
choose number 1, where the needle goes in the middle part of the
throat plate and measure it, I would find that it's
actually been moved over by an eighth of an inch, and now it's only a half of
an inch from that 5/8 line. You don't have to
do that every time. It's just good to do it the first couple of
times that you remember the right needle
position for getting a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance. The seam allowance will be
so important when it comes around to using a pattern
to sew a garment. Garments are designed
and the pattern is made with a certain
amount of seam allowance. It's important that you remain consistent that whole time. Otherwise, your garment will end up too small or too big. Your points might not match up, and you effectively will be sewing something outside of
the design that's intended. Let's put our presser foot back on and get our
fabric under there. Now that I know that this line on my machine
here is aligned with 5/8 of an inch and I'm going for a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance, I'm going to go
back down to stitch zero and place the fabric
under the presser foot. Remember that you have pins in here and needles and pins
don't like each other. What we're going to do is
remove the pins as we sew, just before we get
to where the pin is, to make sure that we're not
going to break our needle. Broken needles are inevitability when it comes to sewing, but let's avoid
them where we can. I'm going to drop
the needle and pay very close attention to the first couple of
things that I do. First, I'm just going to
get rid of this first pin, get it out of the way. Whenever you start
to sew a seam, what you want to do is
start your stitches, backstitch a little bit, and then keep going. That backstitch is going to secure your stitches in
place because it goes this way and then back
that way and back this way over the stitches
that you've originally done, and it gets a nice and
secured and locked-in place. To start that, I'm
just going to press my presser foot and do, say, three stitches. Nice and slow, 1, 2, 3. Now on my machine I have a
button that does a backstitch, so I'm going to press that, 1, 2, 3. Now that we've backed
stitched at the beginning, let's sew the seam and then
backstitch at the end. [NOISE] If you just hold down the backstitch, it'll go for three
slow stitches. Just watch them and
then go forward again. Lift up your needle, lift up your presser
foot, cut it off. We have our seam allowance, which is about 5/8 of an inch. We have our stitching
line or a seam line, and then this is the
wrong side of the fabric. What does that look like on
the right side of the fabric? When you open it out, you should see a
pretty clean line. You will see a little
bit of perforation where you see all of those stitches
going through the fabric. But if you've done a
nice tight stitch, which is the right
size for your fabric, it should not be too noticeable
or too much of a problem. You can test the
strength of your seam by just pulling at
it, yanking at it. What may happen is
you'll see that the fabric doesn't
like being pulled. That might be a good
sign that you need some interfacing or maybe you need to do a smaller stitch just to be a little
bit more secured on the fabric that
you've chosen. But it's nice and strong here. It may be a little
bit difficult for a new sewist to keep the
fabric going straight. But remember the
presser foot and the feed dogs are moving
the fabric for you. You don't need to push it, you don't need to pull it. You basically barely touch it, and slightly guide it. But there's some more stuff that you can do if you want to make sure that you're keeping
a good straight line. One thing you can do is
take some tape and put it down here on your machine on the line that you
want to follow. This is somewhat helpful when you're doing a tight
seam that's marked here. But if you needed to do a really wide one
that isn't marked, you could also use the tape
to keep that consistent. Now, and I'll just show
with the same fabric, when I put the fabric on here, I have even more to watch. Instead of watching
up by the needle, I can make sure that it's
saying right up next to this line through the
whole length of this scrap. Now that you've learned
about how to stitch a seam, let's actually talk about how to do different types of
stitches on the seam. The first we're going
to do is basting. Basting is when you use long machines stitches
to sew something. Basting is really helpful
because it allows you to sew stitches that you can easily
remove with a seam ripper. They can be temporary or
they can be permanent. But let me show you
some basting stitches and show you how easy
it is to take them out. To set yourself up for
sewing basting stitches, you want to put
the fabric under, drop the presser foot, but what you need to do is increase the length
of your stitches. Right now we've
just been going off of the factory setting, which is whatever happens when
you turn your machine on. Now we're going to
get a little bit more intentional about the
length that we choose. On my machine, the length
setting is right here. I can move these plus
and minus buttons in order to choose how long
I want the length to be.. Right now, let's hit the Plus and go as
high as we can go. Most machines max out at 5.0. I'm going to stitch
the seam so you can see exactly what 5.0 looks like. These are basting stitches, which is a 5.0 length, and if we compare this to the stitches that we
did at the 2.5 length, we can see that
they're much longer. When we baste, we don't usually want to backstitch at the
beginning and the end, and we'll talk about
that in a second, but what we do want is the ability to easily
remove those stitches. Let me show you a device that
we use to remove stitches. It's called a seam ripper, and allows sewists talk about how the seam rubber
is the big bad, how they hate having to use one. But I actually think
this is your friend. It allows you to
practice something, to sew it in a temporary stitch and then easily remove it. Just so easily, you can take these and
pull out these stitches, and because I didn't
backstitch at start and stop in order
to secure my stitches, I can take this thread
and I can pull it together or I can pull
it all the way out, remove the bobbin thread, and that seam is gone. Now it's your turn. You know how to do stitches, you know how to do seams. Play around with
some different tests fabrics and have at it.
5. Pressing and Hemming: I'm going to put the
machine aside for a moment while I
show you pressing. Just as I've said that back
stitching is essential to sewing seams, so is pressing. I will say that your seam is not done until it
has been pressed. There's a couple of
different ways to press it so let me show you how. Pressing is so important
because it will help your seam to be flat and straight and it also can help your stitches melt into the seam a little
bit and be secured. When you're pressing, it's
really important to choose an iron setting that
corresponds to your fabric. I have some cotton here, so I got my iron pretty hot, pretty much up to the max. Cotton and linen can
take a nice hot iron, but polyester and rayon, for example, cannot. Make sure that you check your iron settings and choose the appropriate
temperature. There's two different
ways to press the seam. One, to press it to a side, and two, to press it open. When I say press it to a side, I mean, open up your seam, take your iron and push the whole seam
allowance in one direction. Use the appropriate steam
settings for your fabric. It's good to have a nice steamy press because
what you're doing right here is you're setting it in and it's going
to stay that way. Now that I've pressed
the wrong side of my fabric and I've got my seam allowance
going in one direction. I'm going to flip it over and I'm going to press
it on the right side of the fabric and just get rid of these wrinkles so that
it's nice and good to go. With pressing you want to put the iron in place
and hold it down. It's not like ironing
a shirt where you're trying to cover a huge distance. You just want to let
it get in there. This is the right side of
the fabric and this is the wrong side of
the fabric with the seam allowance
pressed in one direction. Next, we're going to take our other test and
press our seams open. The reason why you might
want to press your seams open is so that you don't
have too much bulk. Especially if you're
using a heavier fabric, like denim for example. If you look inside your jeans, you'll find that some of your
seams are actually pressed so that the seam allowance is going in two
different directions. That's so you don't
have a bulky line that you can see from the
outside of the garment. In this instance,
I'm going to take my fingers and I'm
going to open it up. The first thing I'm going to
do is just finger-press it. With a good fabric like
this that holds a press, it's actually pretty effective. You can just use your finger and get it to stay the way you
want it to stay. Now that it's
finger pressed it's easier to get that
iron on there. I'm going to take the iron, and again we're not
doing a bunch of motion, we're just holding it down and letting that heat
work its way in there. Now on the right
side of the fabric, we're going to do it again and
get rid of those wrinkles. This is what it looks like on the right side of the fabric. You can see a beautiful straight
line, no wrinkles here. On the wrong side of
the fabric again, beautiful straight line with the seam allowance
butterflied open. Cotton is a really
easy fabric to sew with and it holds
a press really well. If you're working with a finicky
fabric like a polyester, especially a thicker one that doesn't take a
press really well, you can use a tool
called a clapper. A clapper is a wooden tool that basically you
use with steam. After you've put the
iron down on the fabric, you hold the clapper
on top and it absorbs the steam into the wood and
it locks that press in place. These things cost $20 and you don't have to have
it as a beginning sewist, but as you're leveling up, it's one of the
fun ones to have. Now that we've
learned how to press, I want to put you on to hemming. Hemming is something
I'm sure you probably want to know about because if you've ever needed to alter a dress or
a pair of pants, chances are you're shelling
out cash to a tailor or a dry cleaner to hem
that garment for you. I'm going to show you how
to do it really simply. The first step that you
need is some fabric. We're using a scrap here
for a little practice. What I want you to do is put the fabric with the
wrong side facing up. Then let's just decide
how much hem we want. I'm going to do a one inch hem. What I'm going to do first is tuck in the raw
edge of the fabric. I'm going to fold this up
about a quarter of an inch. Now I can usually eyeball it, but you can also take
something like a seam gauge and adjust this little slider till you get to a
quarter of an inch. Use that to measure
all the way up and down your fabric to be
consistent with that line. What I'm going to do first
is now that I've chosen that quarter inch and I
got it finger pressed in, I'm going to hold it down,
I'm going to use my iron, and I'm going to
press it in place. Now because I said I wanted
to do a one inch hem, I'm just going to take this
and fold it up an inch. I'm going to check all on
the line and make sure it's an inch and I'm going
to press it down. Now, I want to put a couple of pins in it so it stays in place. When I pin it I actually
want to pin this folded up bit, not the edge. Now we're going to go back
to our sewing machine and sew our hem. When you're sewing the hem, you have a couple of options. You can sew it on the wrong side of the fabric if you're pretty confident with how good your bobbin thread
is going to look. That is perfectly okay. Or you can level
yourself up a little bit and sew it on the
right side of the fabric. Because I know that I've
pressed this at one inch, if I just go exactly
at that one inch, it's going to catch right
here on the fabric, which is maybe going to go
off the edge of my hem. Just to make things a little
bit easier for myself, I'm going to use
the one inch guide, but I'm going to change
my needle position to be over one-eighth
of an inch. As I use the one inch guide, I know that that
hemline is going to be seven-eighths of
an inch from the end. I can just put my
presser foot down, backstitch at the
start and stop, and sew that line. [NOISE] Now because I moved it over an
eighth of an inch, it's about an eighth
of an inch from the edge on the inside. But the raw edge is
neatly folded in, and on the right
side of the fabric, I have a hem. All of the things I've
taught you so far, we're going to use in
our final bag design. Meet me in the next lesson where we talk about sewing curves, which we are going to incorporate
into that bag. [MUSIC]
6. Sewing Curved Seams: [MUSIC] Welcome back. In this class we're making an accessory to ease you
into garment sewing. But if you're going
to sew for the body, you need a master curves. The body doesn't have
any straight lines. It's all in the round. Whether that's your
neck, your arm, your waist, your hips, everywhere you go, it's
going to be curves. I want to give you some really important skills so that you're comfortable
manipulating the fabric and getting it on the
machine through a curve, and then also how to press a curve so that you get
a nice, beautiful scene. Let's dive in. First things first, we're going to create a really
quick pattern so that you have something to use in
order to sew your curve. I want you to get a
piece of paper and a pen and get your paper scissors
ready so we can do this. With your pen, I
just want you to draw a pretty generous S, grab your ruler,
and let's just draw a straight line down
the center of the page. I'm going to find
the middle point and just make a little mark. Doesn't matter if it's
not the real middle. I'm going to try to be
even and go up about two inches above and below the
line, make little marks. Then I'm going to
go four inches. Somewhat arbitrary. I'm just trying to give myself
some guides to work in. I have a nice curve. Now I don't want my curve to
be too deep because it will be very difficult to sew
and then press flat. I'm just going to go one inch to either side of
this line and make a mark here and up here. Now I'm just going to draw an
S connecting those points. Now when you're sewing anything, you need to think
about seam allowance and seam allowance we've
talked about before. It's the amount of distance
between the edge of the fabric and where
your stitching line is. It's important to
have seam allowance because your fabric
will fray a little bit, so you need to give it
a little bit of extra. You never going to
be searching a seem exactly on the edge. I'm just going to add 3/8 of an inch of seam allowance along this line on this side of the line to give me
something to cut. The way that you add seam allowance on a curve
is you place it down on one section and then you just walk the curve and rotate
the ruler as you go. I've just done these
little dashes. You can leave them as dashes
or you can fill it in. But remember, the dashes that I created are going to
be the seam allowance. So that's the cutting line. I'm just going to cut along this line that I've just
added for seam allowance. [NOISE] Next we're going to
cut this out of some fabric. I'm stitching a seam, so I'm going to want
two pieces of fabric. I have this fabric folded
over along the salvage edge, which is the edge of
the fabric that's finished on the machine
that makes the fabric. I'm going to line this up with the salvage edge and
then I'm going to pin down the pattern so
that I can cut it out. Because you have this
nice curve here, it's going to be hard to use your scissors with a
flat on the table. You just want to pin
in any spots where you need it to stay
close to the fabric. Let's take our scissors
and cut it out. As you're cutting, you want to try to
cut with as long of strokes as possible so it
doesn't get all jaggedy. Now we can take the
pattern off of the fabric. Now we have our curves here. The next thing we're
going to do is take it to the sewing machine. If you're just getting started, I can recommend that
it might be helpful to draw in your stitching line so that you have
something to follow. It might be a little bit
easier than trying to watch your sewing machine
and follow it on there. I'm just going to draw that in. Basically I'm trying to emulate this exact line that I had here where I added
some seam allowance. Now I'm going to take away a little bit of seam allowance. I like to use this chalk wheel. It's temporary. This doesn't have to
be like absolutely perfect because your curve
was a little imperfect. But as a good
reminder to yourself, if you need a little
bit of help following a line and a curve
or sewing straight, you can just put it on
chalk on the fabric. Let's go to the sewing machine. I did a 3/8 of an inch
seam allowance and I can't really see where the 3/8 of an inch line is on my machine, but it could be the edge
of my presser foot. I'm just going to
measure and check. Three-eighths of an inch is
the edge of my presser foot. I can use that as a guide for following the fabric
through the machine. Like I said before, let's put the needle down. Let's always backstitch
moving forward. [NOISE] Now I'm ready to stitch and as I sew
I'm just going to watch the fabric stays on the
edge of this pressing foot. I drew the line
into that you can have the needle
aligned with the line, but as much as possible do
try to watch the edge of the presser foot for
continuity of the line, rather than watching where your needle is going
exactly [NOISE] As you're sewing the feed
dogs and the presser foot, we'll move the fabric
in a straight line, but you're not sewing straight. This is where it starts to
get a little bit tricky. Rather than just letting
it push forward, you have to be attentive and you have to guide the fabric. As we start to
come to the curve, let's watch it and
move the fabric in the direction that we needed to in order to stay consistent. Go slow as you need to here, especially in the curves. [NOISE] You might come to a point in the curve
where it seems like it's folding up a little bit. What you can do is lift the presser foot with
the needle still down and just rotate ever so
slightly to make an adjustment. Make sure that when you do that, the needle is down into the fabric [NOISE] I'm at the end, so I'm going to backstitch. [NOISE] I'm done. It looks
a little bit wrinkly, but we're going to
talk about that next. Let's move the
sewing machine out of the way and talk about how to work with this as a seam. Now, you didn't see me
use any pins to sew this. Cotton is pretty good
at sticking to itself. But as you're trying
this for the first time, I highly recommend using pins so that you can keep
your two fabrics together. Now that we have this, it's two pieces of fabric
sewn into one. But if I try to open it up, it doesn't know what
to do. It's bulky. It won't press straight. I can't pull this around. It's going to look like that. How do we get it into a
way that we can press it? How do we get it into a
way where it's going to be a shape again once we flip it around
to the other side. That's the tricky bit with curves that I really
wanted to show. You have to clip curves. There's two different
types of curves. There's convex and
there's concave. We're going back
to geometry here. Convex is where it pushes out. Concave is where it pushes in. This is our convex curve and
this is our concave curve. We're going to start
with a convex curve. What we need to do
in order to make this folder round to the
right side properly, is to clip notches into this fabric close to but not
through the stitching line. We're going to start
with that one. I like to start in the
middle and work my way out, but that's a little arbitrary. You just want to go in
tight and make a clip, but make sure you don't
clip your stitches, if you do, take it to your sewing machine
and stitch it again. I'm just spacing
these out every like 3/8 of an inch along this curve. This is also why I like using
the scissors for it because they are sharp all the
way down to the point. Now that I've
clipped that curve, it's ready to be folded to the opposite side when
I go and press it. With the concave curve, we need to do something
a little bit different. We need to take some
of this fabric out. Instead of just
clipping notches, I'm going to clip Vs. You can start making
them ever so often. But you might have to go back in and add more if you don't make
them close enough. This is what that
looks like now. You can see my notches and
you can see my little Vs. It's going to push
that off to the side. Because the next thing that I
want do is flip this around to put wrong sides together. I'm just going to practice
by pushing it out, both of these curves. You can already see
it's done its work of creating that
shape that I wanted. The next thing that I need to do is just
take this to the iron. You can press it around the
right way from the inside. But that's not going
to do you much good. Better is to just push that out. Use your fingers or
use something blunt, not sharp to try to get that shape and to try to get that seam
right in the middle. Then it's still a
little bit wrinkly, but once we hit it with
a nice hot steamy iron, it's going to behave
exactly how we want it to. Remember pressing is more
about pressing then moving. Let's just press it down and come all the way
through this curve. Use my fingers to
press it first. You can see it's nice and
smooth on both sides. We could have gone in
here and trim this seem a little bit more and make that a little bit shorter. But for the purposes
of the curve, you see exactly what we did. Now let's just compare it to
the pattern that we made. The bold line here is the pattern and the cut
line is the seam allowance. This should just about match up with the S we made on
our pattern, and it does. I encourage you to
give that a try. Do a little bit of
practice with curves. Obviously this S is a little bit more extreme than
the curves you're going to have on your body more than
like your hip to your waist. You won't always need to clip
your curves on your body. But it's important
to know how to do this so that as you're
doing neck lines and facing and some smaller curves and the project
we're about to start, you know exactly how to get this nice and
beautiful flat finish. See you in the next lesson for drafting and cutting our
bag pattern. [MUSIC]
7. Preparing Your Zippered Bag Pattern: [MUSIC] Welcome
back. It's finally time to start working
on our project and we're going to draft
a pattern and start cutting your fabric
to make your bag. First things first,
get your paper, get a marketing tool, get a pencil, and
get a nice curve. I'm using a saucer and let's
draft out your pattern. We're going to be
making this bag, but I don't want you to get
locked into the dimensions. The key here is that
we're going to be making a bag with a zipper, a curve of 90 degree angle and no whining, That's about it. Let's create a pattern
for making this. First things first, we're
going to be sewing the zipper. You have some choices
when it comes to zipper. You can either get
one like this with a nylon cord which is
really easy to saw through. These are your cheapest zippers or you can get a zipper
like this with metal teeth. A zipper like this
is usually known as a denim zipper and it's really
super sturdy and strong. It's really great for bag-making and it's great for jeans, so this is what I'm
going to choose to use for this project but I really encourage you to do some practice stitches if
it's your first zipper. With a little cheap
one like this you can find it on Amazon. They're cheap, buy
a bunch of them. Get some practice in. We're going to take a zipper
and I'm going to measure it out in case I didn't
know how long it was. My zipper from the very
top of the metal to the very bottom of the metal is nine inches which
is good to know. This is sold as a
nine inch zipper, but it's important to know that exact measurement
because I'm going to be drafting my bag around
the size of this zipper. Now that we know
it's nine inches, I want you to draw a straight line close to
the top of your paper. That's going to be the
upper bound of our bag. Now I want you to draw a line that is at 90 degrees
from that line. One of these clear rulers that also is line is perfect
because you can see through this ruler
and just have it perfectly lined up on that line. That's going to be
one side of our bag. I'm going to make this
into a whole box. Let's just go around
but on this side, the bottom and the other side here I'm going to give myself a little bit of
space just because I'm going to add a little
bit more of seam allowance. Now I have a little rectangle that seems pretty
simple, doesn't it? I just want to take one of these corners and
turn it into a curve, so I'm going to use this
bottom corner to draw my curve and I'm just going
to line up the plate. You can use anything that you have that makes a nice curve. You could use a washer, you could use a roll of
tape, a cup, whatever. I just thought that this
was a good size for my bag, so that's what I've chosen. I'm just going to
follow the curve. When you're sewing curves just like I did in
the last lesson, it's helpful to have a little bit less seam
allowance than you would have with you when just
doing straight lines. Instead of doing 5/8 of an inch or 1/2 of an inch which
you sometimes will see I'm just going to do
3/8 of an inch or one centimeter because
that's completely adequate for what I'm doing. Just line up my little
3/8 of an inch and draw it straight down and then from this side as well and now I'm just going to walk the curve and add the 3/8
of an inch all around. We said that we wanted the
width of our bag to be nine inches so I'm going to make it nine inches plus
seam allowance. We've already added the seam
allowance on this side, so I'm going to measure over nine inches and then add
seam allowance to this side. I'll just make a little dash up top here where it's going to go then I'll measure over 3/8 of an inch and make another little dash and
then I'm just going to use this bottom line to make
it square and draw it in. This internal line
with the curve and all around is the bag and then this external bit is
the seam allowance that I'm going to
leave on there. When we're cutting we're cutting the paper out along
the seam allowance, we're cutting the
fabric out along the seam allowance and
we're sewing along the stitching line [NOISE]. Now we have our
paper pattern and we're almost ready
to cut our fabric, but before we get into that I want to talk to you
about grainlines. I have this giant
piece of fabric because it help
explain grainline. What is the grainline
and why is it important. Keeping things
simple, the grainline runs parallel to
the salvage edge. The salvage edge is
the finished edge that comes off of the roll
as the fabric is produced. The fibers that are running
parallel to this are almost always the
strongest fibers and they're going to have
the least amount of stretch, so it's not going to stretch
any in this direction. Also because this is
a non stretch fabric it won't stretch much
in this direction, but it's still has a
little bit more give. You don't want the stretch
to go up and down. You don't want gravity
to make your clothes sag so you need to make sure
that when you're sewing, you're always aligning
the vertical lines of the pattern with the grainline so that they
sew up and hold their shape. The other problem is
as you're sewing it, sometimes the machine can make those fibers stretch
a little bit extra, so if I were to just throw this pattern onto this
fabric in any old way, what could happen
especially if I were sewing something
bigger is that it could just get ever
so slightly stretched because along the bias there's
a lot more stretch here. I just want to make
sure that it's instilled in you to always be respectful of what is the
grainline of the fabric, to always draw a grainline
on your pattern, and to always make sure
you cut out on the grain. Like I just said, we're going to do the
grainline top to bottom. I'm going to draw
that onto my pattern. This is usually how you'll see a grainline denoted
on a pattern. They'll be little arrows
telling you the direction, the way that it's
supposed to go. We're ready to start cutting, let's get the pattern
and the fabric together. I'm just going to
lay the fabric out. This is a nice, well-loved
piece of fabric. I have made bags out of it. I have made a course out of it, I made a belt out of it. Keep using your remnants. Don't throw them away just because you're done
with the project. On a denim if you don't have
a grainline on here anymore because again this is a nice
well-loved piece of fabric, you can look at the
lines in the fabric, and these lines are going to
run at a 45-degree angle. Find the 45-degree angle, don't get too dizzy in it and create a straight line from where that 45-degree angle is. When we're cutting
a pattern again, we're going to want two of
them and so I'm going to fold over my fabric so I can
cut them both at once. If you're being conservative, you just want to fold it over enough that you can
fit the pattern on there while keeping the grainline how
you want it to be. Now again, you have a couple of choices for how you get
this pattern onto here. You can either use
pattern weights. I actually use these
washers that I got for 1/4 from the hardware store
as my main pattern weights, but you can also use
pins to hold this down. Grab your fabric scissors and let's just cut along
this line [NOISE]. We can fold this up and save
it for another project. We're just about
ready for sewing. In this lesson, we have
created a pattern, learned a little bit about grainline and cut out our
pattern on our fabric. Now we're ready to bring
everything [MUSIC] together. In the next lesson we'll add a zip and finish
our bag. Let's go.
8. Adding Your Zipper: [MUSIC] Welcome back. I'm so excited that now we're
going to work on our bag. The first thing that we're
going to do is sew a zipper. Let's take one side of our pattern and put the other
side of the pattern away. Because we've made this pattern about three eight of an inch
bigger than our zipper, we're going to sew up to the zipper on
the seam allowance, but not through this metal. In order to sew the zipper, you're going to
need a zipper foot. The key to a zipper
foot is that it has these indentations so that the needle can go
really, really close. As you're running the zipper
foot down the machine, it's going to go along
the side here and the needle can go up pretty
close to that zipper. A regular presser foot sticks
out all the way through that width and so it's not possible to get so close
to the zipper teeth. Let's switch out
the presser foot. The other thing is
that once I put the zipper foot onto my machine, I need to move the
needle position. My default needle position of my machine is over to the left, but I need it to be in
the center in order to really take advantage
of the zipper foot. So I'm just going
to switch that to the stage where the needle
positioning is in the center. I can see here on the
pattern of my machine, the location of that needle positioning by the dot
that's just right in here, so I know if I press this
button and go up to one, it's going to move it
over to be centered. I also do like to
double-check and so before I put all of the pressure
of the machine going fast, I like to turn my hand wheel
and just watch where it goes and make sure
that it's not going to hit the presser foot when
I put the needle down. Let's line it up so that
the outside edge of the zipper matches with the
outside edge of our pattern, with the right
side of the zipper facing the right
side of the pattern. Then I'm just going to
adjust it so that we have three eighths of an
inch seam allowance at top and at the bottom. If you want it too, you
can measure that one to your fabric and
make a little mark. Do that if you can't eyeball it. Now that I know that
I've given myself enough clearance on both
sides for my seam allowance, I'm going to take
some pins and I'm going to pin the
zipper to my pattern. We have the zipper face
down against the pattern, and what we want to
stitch on is this edge. I've just put it under the presser foot and I'm into the seam
allowance back here. I have the zipper foot
as far over as I can go. This stop is going to make
it a little bit difficult to actually stitch
super close right there but that's perfectly okay. I don't like breaking
needles and there's a lot of metal here.,
so once again, I'm going to use my hand
crank to put the needle down safely and make sure it's in a good position before I start sewing with
my presser foot. Again, first thing we're
always going to do is, go forward three stitches, go back three stitches,
and back-stitch. Now that we've back-stitched, we're ready to sew. Go slow and be careful
around your zipper pull. See, it's going to
get a little stuck so I'm just going to
lift it up over it. You might have to
maneuver a little bit, it's okay [MUSIC]. All right, we're done. I'm just going to
snip these and get rid of any loose threads. I'm going to take my other side, and I am going to basically do the same thing by putting
the right sides together. You can either put it on top
this way or you can flip it over and put it
on top like this. You want your pattern
to match up so the curves are in
the same direction. Once again, I'm going to give
myself the three eighth of an inch seam allowance
on either side of the zipper pull and stop, and I'm going to pin
this to the fabric. We're about to do
the exact same thing but on the other side. Now because we're
on the other side, instead of starting
with this zipper pull, we're going to be ending
with the zipper pull. Just make sure that you have the other side
of your fabric out of the way and that the seam allowance
isn't showing either. Let's put this back here
in the seam allowance, we haven't moved our
needle at this point, we haven't moved our stitch
settings at this point, so I'll put the needle down, we're going to
back-stitch at the front, stitch, and then
back-stitch at the end. If you get a little stuck, it's just because
the presser foot is getting stuck against
the stop here. So just to lift up a
little bit and put it back down and try to
get that on top of it. Just do a little practice and
make sure it moves [MUSIC]. We're now at the tricky bit
next to the zipper pull, we're trying to go
as far as we can and just finish it out
in the seam allowance. Back-stitch, lift up our needle, lift up our presser
foot, and clip. By the way, these
little thread snips are super cheap and my favorite thing to have
at my sewing machine, because they are easy to hold in your hand while you're
working, so you can go fast. Let's put our sewing
machine aside, grab our iron for the next step. As we're pressing it open, you'll see it's open with
a zipper in the middle, so we're going to press
it down this way. Be mindful, I'm using
a metal zipper, which means that it
is going to get hot. You can burn yourself if you press it super
hot and then you touch it so we're not going to touch the
metal after I do this. That's the wrong side. Let's do it on the
right side as well. Now it's pressed nice and flat and you can see
our beautiful zipper, and on the wrong side, it's nice and open. Let's give the metal a second to cool before we go back
to the sewing machine. We were just introduced
to the zipper foot, and now I want you to meet
the edge stitch foot. The edge stitch foot is
used for edge stitching, which is sewing a line of
stitching close to a seam line. Generally speaking,
an edge stitch is one-eighth of an inch
away from a seam line, while a top stitch is a quarter of an inch
away from a seam line. Both are basically
top stitching, but by definition, they're
slightly different. We're going to use
the edge stitch foot so that we can sew
a line of stitching close to the seam line here
so we can make sure that our seam allowance and
our zipper tape stays away from the zipper
as we have the clutch. The other thing that this
will help do for us is, finish the edge of this fabric. Because, you'll remember, we didn't do anything with
this denim and you can already see it's
fraying even though we only cut it a
few minutes ago. I'm going to do a row of edge stitching and then we're going to come back and do a
row of top stitching, which I think you should try your hand at just to
see how it works. Let's switch out
our presser foot. Put this one on. I don't usually turn
my machine on and off, but I do try to keep my foot far away from the pedal
whenever I'm changing the presser foot so that I don't accidentally put the needle
down into my finger. The purpose of the
edge stitch foot is to effectively help
you get that line. It's going to go right in this [inaudible]
of the seam line between the zipper teeth and this denim and
that's pushed back. Right now because I'm
in the center and I have the edge stitch
foot mostly close, they're basically
in the same line. But remember, I want to stitch an eighth of an inch
away from the edge, so I'm going to move
the position of my needle by
switching down to the zero-zero stitch so that I can get an eighth of an
inch away from the edge. Let's make sure that
we have enough of your fabric underneath
of the needle. A common problem with
sewing is trying to start sewing exactly on
the very edge of the fabric but that's not
going to work for you because the feed dogs need a little bit of
something to grab onto. The reason why we
have a little bit of seam allowance is so we
can start in from the edge and push it back past the
needle a little bit so we have something for it to grab onto and push
through the machine. I'm just going to fold
this up a little bit and I'm ready to start
stitching [MUSIC]. Just a word of caution, as you get close to
the zipper pull, you might get it caught a little bit in the
edge stitch foot so go a little bit slow
and make sure it can find its way
without problem. You might need to
lift up a little bit to get it over the hump and
if it still won't go for it, just help it out a little. We're at the end,
let's back-stitch. Split off and cut it. You can see how that edge
stitch foot helped us to achieve a perfectly
straight line. Now, if I had to do that
free hand just with like a normal universal foot, I wouldn't have had
that level of control. But because this little
edge went down in here, it kept it perfectly
straight for me. That's another really
good hack for a beginner, so it's also for someone who's
more intermediate, even. Use your presser feet to help you keep those
straight lines. I'm going to take and do it with the other side now and
go a lot faster [MUSIC]. I have my row of edge stitching. Now again, I challenge you to go and do another row
of top-stitching. Top-stitching again is a quarter of an inch away from the edge, so it's just another
eighth of an inch away from your first
row of stitching. I'm just going to widen out my edge stitch foot
a little bit so that I can get that
quarter of an inch. Press it down just to confirm I like the width [MUSIC]. There we go. So let's just
clip all the threads off. All right, our edge
stitching is all done and we got some nice, slightly imperfect
top-stitching, but it keeps our fabric from fraying too much because we have these rows of
stitches securing it. The last thing to do with
a zipper is just cut off this little excess
that we have at the top and the bottom
because we don't need it. In the next lesson, we'll finish our bag.
Let's go. [MUSIC]
9. Finishing Your Bag: [MUSIC] The first thing that
we're going to do before we close up this bag and
stitch it all together is open up the zipper
so that we'll be able to turn it to the right
side once it's done. Get that nice and open. Otherwise, you're going
to have problems. [LAUGHTER] The next step
again, right sides together. We're just going to fold
this over and match up the edges all along the bag, and then we're
going to put pins. Put as many pins as you feel
you need to really hold this together and make sure it doesn't shift as you're sewing. I like to put it into
key pivot points. I start on the outsides
of the corners, or start in the middle
of a straight line, and then bring them
out to the edges. As we take it to the machine, we're going to stitch all
around the curve here, all the way down to the corner where we're going to
pivot and we're going to bring it back up to the top and backstitch once we get
here to the zipper tape. Back at our sewing machine, let's take the edge stitch foot off and put our
universal foot back on. You remember that we put a three-eighths of an inch or one centimeter seam
allowance on here. Remember where it was on your machine for
three-eighths of an inch. We're going to be starting
in the zipper teeth, but I want you to
start a little bit in. Again, because I'm up
close to this metal, I'm going to start
by putting my needle into the fabric with my hand wheel and making sure that it's not
going to hit metal. I'm going to sow a couple of stitches and then
backstitch as always. It's a pretty long backstitch since I didn't
start at the edge. Now that we've
gotten it started, we can be off to the races. I'm going to go just
a little bit faster. [NOISE] We're starting
to come to the curve. Remember what we learned
about sewing curves. [NOISE] Guide the
fabric as you go. [NOISE] As we come close to
this pivot point, remember we want to come to about three-eighths of an inch away from the edge
before we turn. I'm going to bring it down to that point and then
pause to show you. [NOISE] One more. Now it's time to pivot
and the way that you do that is leave your needle all the way down
into your fabric. Bring up your presser foot, rotate it 90 degrees and put
your presser foot back down. Make sure that the
needle does not leave the fabric as you're
doing that so that it can have the
next stitch be going in the opposite direction
without jumping any stitches. [NOISE] We're just going to keep sowing with
that three-eighths of an inch seam allowance
until we get to the end. [NOISE] A word of caution
because you're up with a zipper teeth and
you're close to this top, it might be a little
bit tricky at the end, just go slow,
[NOISE] backstitch. [NOISE] Lift up your
needle and time to trim. Remember what we talked about in the sewing curves lesson. This is a convex curve, so we need to take
little v's out of it so that when we turn it around
to the opposite side, it will go nice and flat. That's the first thing
that we're going to do. Remember, don't go through
your stitching line. If you do, you can always
just stitch it again, but try to avoid it. They don't have to be perfect. The key is that you just
want to remove more fabric from the edge than you
do from the inside. [NOISE] The next thing that
we're going to do is clip the point of this pivot point at the 90 degree angles so that when that turns
to the inside, it doesn't have bulk in
there and you can get a nice angle point
at the corner. The way that you do that is by coming at about a
45-degree angle to it and clipping across, but not through that seam line. There's still a bit of
bulk here and here, so I'm just going to
take that angle in a little bit further
in both directions. [NOISE] We're almost done. The only thing we
have left to do is to finish our scenes. There's a couple of different
things that we can do, but I want to talk about the really easy things that don't take a lot of equipment. The first option is to use
pinging shears in order to trim the fabric down
in these little v's that will keep
it from fraying. Another thing that
you could do is use your sewing machine to sow a zigzag stitch along the edge, if you have an Overlocker, you could run this
through the Overlocker to show the overlooked edge. But for simplicity sake, and because I have
some thinking shares, I'm just going to
do this for now. Just come through and take out the bits that
are going to fray. Don't worry as much about this curved edge because you've already
basically done that. You don't want to
take too much away. [NOISE] It's going to be a
little tight because you got like six layers of fabric here. [NOISE] This is a little
bit messy of a part, but that's okay.
We're almost done. Then because these are
just a little bit longer, I'm going to take my
scissors and just cut these a little bit
shorter to trim. [NOISE] Can you believe it?
Your bag is just about done, but it's on the wrong side. The most satisfying
last thing to do is to take it and reaching
through that open zipper. Remember that's why
we kept it open. We're going to
come with a corner first and we're going
to pinch as far as we can into that
corner and pull it out. Flip it the right way. We're just going to use our
fingers to find that curve. You can use something like
the edge of scissors, but make sure it's blunt
enough to not go through your fabric and just gently
try to push this corner out. The last thing that we do with every single seam that
we sow is press it, so one last press
and it's all done. [NOISE] That's it,
our finished bag. Now it's your turn to bring everything that
we've learned in this class together and
make one for yourself. Everything from stitching
seams, sewing straight lines, sewing curves, and finally
putting a zipper in. I promised you can
keep leveling up. Check out the class
resources where I have instructions on
how to add a line into this bag and keep trying to learn new skills
every time you sell. [MUSIC]
10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations. You made it to the
end of this class and together we've sewn of bag. You might have never
touched a sewing machine before or maybe it's been
years since you touched one. But now there's so many skills
that you have from sewing straight lines to sewing
seams, curves, even zippers. You have so many
skills that you can now use for garment making. I really hope that you'll
take my other classes and learn more about dressmaking from patterns to fitting. Don't be afraid to
experiment with this bag design that
we drafted together. You can change it up, add a little squiggly at the
bottom, change the curve, play with the
handle, add a strap, whatever you want
to do, you now have the skills to make
anything you can imagine. Please share your creations
in the project gallery. I can't wait to see
what you sew. [MUSIC]
Robyn Burgess, Sewist & Designer
