The Basics of Clothing Repairs

1. April Jackson Introduction: Are you looking for a career opportunity where you will be in high demand, where you can learn at your own pace and earn while you learn than trying to become an alteration specialist. I have people saying to me all the time, this is a dying trade and it is definitely not dying due to lack of work or a need of finding qualified individuals to perform these tasks, to become an alteration specialists is difficult these days, primarily because there was a lack of training, but nothing has been available that teachers clothing alterations and repairs as a trade until now, my name is April Jackson and I have created an extensive customizable video how-to series on how to become an alteration specialist. With the skills, you will find employment in the retail sector in stores such as men's wear stores, ladies, or you may choose to be self-employed. Depending on where you live, you will be able to demand a wage of anywhere from 18 to twenty-five dollars an hour. And when you're self-employed, you will be able to make more money. To give you an example, I charge $10 for each pan him and I can do five to six times per hour. This is what I'm going to teach you in this course. You can choose to learn everything you would need to know to work in this trade and your own business. Or you can just choose the skills necessary to work in a specific area. Within this teaching, I will not only be showing you every step that you will need to know to perform the alteration. I'm gonna be teaching you all the tips and tricks that I have learned over my 30 years of sewing that will help make every job quick, but also very professional. You will learn things like how to complete those Pat hams in under five minutes. How do you take out a coat zipper in a minute or two? How to put that code super backend within half an hour. How to do men suit sleeves and do those within an hour. You will learn every step of the process from properly fitting your client to marking the garment all the way through to the finished alteration. If you're struggling with a particular technique, feel free to contact me and together we will work through it. You may have never even considered sewing as a career option, or you may be inexperienced. So are looking to upgrade your skills. 2. Lesson 1 - Repair a Jean Button: The darkening technique that we used on the back of the pocket of this pant. Another area where it comes in handy is if a client brings you jean button at sometimes the gene button gets pulled rate through and there's damage done to the material itself. So we're actually going to use that darkening technique to close and reinforce this area and then put on a new gene button. For this. I'm not going to add material on the back. It just looks neater. And the darn thing we're going to be doing will be heavy enough to hold the new gene button into place. So we're going to put our work underneath the machine-like we did kinda push all the extra material that's kinda frame down because our darkening will seal that altogether. You may notice that it's really thick and this area, because we have the waist band. Whenever we're doing this technique, It's always easier going forward and going up onto a thick area. Then if this wasn't behind, is just something I have found. And you'll see what I mean when I start doing my little darkening technique. Sure. You have a small threads and just go over top frontwards and backwards over top of that ball. Because it is thicker. I'm given this a little bit of a push to get up over that little bump. But I wanna make sure I reinforce this. Well, you don't want your new button pulling through. Alright, let's take a look and see how that's looking. I can feel that there's still a little bit here that needs the weaving. So I'm going to ensure my threads are up and out of the way and go over that a little bit more. There we go. I missed a little bit, so I'm just going over that to make sure. Well, there we go. Now I'm happier with that. We're going to clean up the threads. Clean up the threads on the back and we can see how that's reinforced. They're also feel like your hand just to make sure that feels nice and secure if you're worried. You can also have your stitches go in the opposite direction. So like it's perpendicular if you want just for a little added stability. It's not going to show because your buttons going to be right over top. That feels better to me, that feels nice and secure. I don't I wouldn't worry that the new button would pull through. There we go. Now we've got our new gene button here. Most of the time, Jean buttons are just a two-piece application. You have the button and you have a screw. And they just usually get pounded on. So I'm going to take my screw section and kind of push it through a little bit. Especially as you can. If it doesn't come all the way through, That's fine. As long as you can see the point. Because once I got the point there and put my button on top, I'm going to pound that into place. I don't want to pound rate onto my gene button because it may, I don't want to discolored or chip it. So I usually take a piece of the pant, that radon topic that nothing too fancy, and just give it a little bit of a tap. And your button isn't a place now, just make sure it's pounded all the way down. There's no space. Give it a little bit of a Paul doesn't come out. And that is your new gene button. 3. Lesson 2 - Pinning Shirt with Darts: Our client has come in today and he has the shirt that he loves. Though it fits lovely in the front. The back is really bagging. He wants a more slim fitting. So I'm going to walk you through how we're going to pin this excess out. And the alteration that this relates to is where it's putting in darts in a men's shirt. So let me walk you through the painting process. So I always have the client. So I can see the extra photos and you can see how if it's great here and here, we just have all this excess. I'm gonna have you turn just a little bit like that. Thank you very much. So now our main objective is to just pin equally. As a rule of thumb, our darts are only going to be one inch taken in on the fold at its, at its thickest point and that's usually at the waist because even though we're taking out the fullness, we still need to leave some 0s. So I'm going to pin on the other side. Now we're going to continue this pinning up towards the shoulders. We put enough pins in to simulate the scene, but we don't necessarily have to put them right back to back. Let's not overdo it just enough to stimulate the where the stitching would be. It helps your seamstress nowhere to take it in, as well as it helps the client better see what the finished result will be. I'm just gonna move this over a little bit more to the center of his back. If it's beautifully up here on him. So I'm just tapering that often. Nothing there. Continuing down in finishing off this pleat are actually a dirt. Now, don't worry if your pins actually end at the exact same spot. We're going to make sure when we put our darts in that the end of the darts and where they taught start are going to be at the same point. You'll see how that fits much nicer. He's still has some ease in here. We always want to have some 0s, but this Fitch much more flattering on his back. And it also isn't pulling in the front. And whenever you can, you still always want to ask your customer how it feels. Because we can always see how it looks. You need to get feedback from your client that if feels good for them and they're happy with the way it looks. And that's it. 4. Lesson 3 - Shorten Skirt from Waist: Our client has brought in this lovely skirt she would like to have at hand the total of three inches is what we determined at her fitting. The only issue with this skirt is we're not going to him it from the bottom. It actually has details. Strikes which you will see, we will want to have this skirt by taking the excess from the waist. Bad. Let me show you what the skirt looks like. Let me move this out of our way. Here we have the skirt. You can see that down here we certainly could have three inches rate from the bottom here, and it would look okay. But because the majority of the skirt is black up here and we only have this little bit of off-white. We want to try and keep that as much of this detailing intact as possible. So we're actually going to take the excess from the waist band. We've determined that we're going to have this three inches total. We're going to remove the band, cut a three-inch piece out, put the band back, and then everything is going to be fine for the customer and she's still keeps this detailing on the bottom. So let's begin the steps that we'll need for this alteration. Put this back up here. This particular skirt, is it just a simple knit with a solid band? There's elastic inside that's been just searched on. And what I want to do at this point before I take this off, I like to use my chalk to mark some points. This is the center back. And I also know that because there's actually, yes, seem this is where the band was sewn together and the elastic insert it so I know this is the back, but I'm going to put a chalk mark here. I'm gonna do the same now. I want halfway to the front. And then I also want the point where the side seams join on my band. These are just points that will help us when we go to put the bag back onto the skirt that we get them into place a little easier on the front. Actually, I'm going to continue this down. Just so I have that mark, you'll see where that's going to play in afterwards. I don t have to do that at the back because there's already a central vaccine. I'm going to use my razor blade. This particular skirt does have some tags. This is one of the few times that I will put tags back. My reason being is because it's just a knit skirt and it's much easier to see where the back is. When we have the tags on the inside, the pattern blends really well. The customer might not see the same. So I'm going to keep these aside and we'll put that back in the end. Just so it just makes it a little easier for them to determine which is the back of the skirt when they're getting dressed. Use our razor blade. And I'm going to separate the waist band from the skirt. Okay, Let's get this going. There we go. It doesn't come out really quickly just because it is actually surged into place. It's not stitched and searched. It. It's just searched so they use a closer stitch to make sure it stays secure so it's a little harder to get out. Let's flip this around and click Continue. Just like we always do. I'm putting some tension on the materials and just having to touch the threads. You can see some of the knit is kinda pulling here. I'm not worried about that right now. It's more delicate because at single layer, we're cutting three inches off of this anyways. So I'm not worried about that. I just want to get the to the waist band separated from the main skirt. We're almost around. This is what takes the most is just getting it separated. There we go. Set that aside. The waist band. So it's most important right now because we want to make sure that, um, it's, it's a band with elastic loosen it. I want to make sure that doesn't come open and these layers on dunk, so there'll be a much harder for us to put back if that happens. So just keep that the way it is and just clean up. There you go. I'm not pulling this string because this string also is what's basting this closed. If it happened to come on down, it's not a big deal. We just have to reclose that. But the last work we have to do, the better set our band to sign. I'm not even going to fuss a lot with the top of the skirt because we're cutting it off. Anyways. You want just some of these strings that ever way. But we don't have to do a really full clean because we're cutting. We want to lay the skirt. I want to lay it Where? There we go. The front on the top and side seams here and here. Laid out nice and flat. You can see that they were careful and made sure our details all line up. What I want to make sure when I cut this, then I'd like to make sure that that white line is on the white line here. Just so that doesn't get shifted. There we go. We've determined we're going to shorten this three inches. I have the the seam allowance that was inside with the waist band. It's all out. So I just need to put a mark three inches from where it is cut. And I'm just doing a little three inches from the cut. And you can see it's just a slight curve. I'm going to join it. And I'm going to cut right here. So I am eliminating three inches of material that has gone label. Now, when I put my waist band back on, the skirt will be three inches shorter than what it was. Spring this backup here. Now we're going to pin the waist band back on. I just wanted to make sure I know which I'm considering the right and the wrong side. It doesn't make much of a difference on this. I can just tell though that this was oh, I know because I had my chalk marks on the outside. So I know this is good side and goods side. Good sides together. I'm going to line up my front. I'm going to put a pin in there. So I've got that mark that I had on the skirt and, and my chalk mark on my waist band. I'm going to put a pin in like this for now. Go over to the side seam, line up where my sightseeing marcus to the side seam here. I'm going to put a pin in. Now we're at the back seam. Line up the back seam of the waist band to the backseat of a skirt, put a pin through. And at our last slide, see, there we go. At this point we're going to go to the searcher and we're going to surge. And so this together all in one step. Of course, we're going to have to stretch the waist band in order for the skirt to fit it. But that's something I want to show you how we're going to do while we're at the surgery. So let's go there now. We're at the surgery. I still have the skirt inside out. When we saw the two layers together. I want to have the waist band on the top. And the, so that the skirt itself, the material is on the bottom. I'm going to start just before my center C. And at this point my main objective is to get this under the foot with a needle in. Before we can do any pulling or anything to stretch. So what I'm doing is I'm slipping all my material under because as far as it'll go, I'm going to let it go a couple of stitches just to get a needle and make sure the needle stays in because just like with our other machine, when your needles in, it's helping to secure your material, make sure you take out any pins that you're coming close to. And this is one of those jobs where you're going to be pulling but helping to guide them material through. And I'm wanting to make sure that my cut edge of my skirt is even with the cut edge of my waist band. It's something that always takes a little bit of practice, but once you do it, you just get used to it. And don't be afraid just to do it in a little shots. Don't think you have to do one. Continue with stitch. Take your time if you have to reposition, go ahead and reposition. I want to get as close as to my pen without getting hitting it. Of course. Stop. Make sure the needles in before you reposition. And even if we look back here, you can see how that's enclosing that theme. And when all is said and done, we're going to double-check if for some reason this material slipped out somewhere and didn't get caught, we'll just go over that a second time and make sure it gets caught. Needle in, reposition your fabric. We're on our last quarter already. Before we leave, are just going to check and make sure everything got caught. Let's just go around. So far so good. Like I said, it's not the end of the world. If you missed it, you're just going to go over it and make sure it gets caught in. Looks good. Looks good. Okay. There we go. At this point, I'm just going to go to the straight stitch machine and Retallack our label on at the back like they had. So let's go there. I mentioned that I am putting our label back onto the skirt because this will help our clients when she's getting dressed. Just to know which is the vaccine. One of the few times that I do. So this is our siem, we create it when we searched. Just center the label on there. And I'm just going to put a little tack here and here through the seam allowance, just the tack those on, use a small stitch and the same on the other side. And there. At this point you're alteration is done. All you have to do is go, do go to the iron and clean up your chalk marks with heat. But at that point, That's the only pressing we have to do is just to get rid of our chalk marks. Otherwise, you'd just have a skirt through the waist band. 5. Lesson 4 -Pant Rise Adjustment: Sometimes your parent is going to be really baggy in the back and it will have nothing to do with necessarily how wide the acinus, It's more has to do with how deep the rises. The rise is the distance from the waist band to the center of the crotch underneath your seat. And if that is too full, too long, then that's going to give you a really baggy seat. So I want to show you now how we remove that. It's going to eliminate some of the bag in behind your bum. I'm at the back of your leg but also make your pant fit more, fit it towards the seat. So let's take a look at how the pinning is done for this alteration. It always looks funny when it's on your client. This is the back of the dress pant and our center seam. And you'll see that we have this funny pin here. When it's on the customer, it'll feel a little uncomfortable. But what it is, we're shortening up the distance, this center seam here so that it fits closer to our client's body. We have this pinned here, so of course it's on a fold. We're going to see how much is pinned out. Here. We have one inch pin doubts. So in the finished product, we're going to actually take two inches out of the rise. With that in mind to remove that pin. And the rise is always taken out of the back of the pant and through the insights seem. So let's begin those steps so that you will see how that's all going to come together. First thing we're going to do is turn the pant inside-out. Keep in mind too, that if you're doing a combination alteration where you're doing the rise and vaccine, you're always gonna do your rise alteration first. The first thing we're going to want to do is undo some of the stitching in the crotch. This is the front of the pant where the zipper is, and this is our back. And I see that we do have a nice interlock stitching, so we're going to remove that. I'm going to stop my interlocking. I don't want it to go any further than the front of the pant just past where it joins up on the inside leg. And I'm going to undo at least two inches back. So we got to take two inches and maybe another inch just to give us room to work. So let's get that. Hopefully that'll undo easy enough. One. Once again, even with the dress pants and interlocking, they'll lot of times they'll do two rows of stitching. Let's undo that. There we go. So now this is the inside leg. We're actually going to undo the same halfway down the leg or there's generally a notch. You can see that they're not overly visible, but because of the surging, We're going to undo that side. The inside same rate to the notch. Because I know there's interlocking stitching. I'm going to take advantage of that. Pop that out. There we go. And do the same on the other leg. The more often you do this, you'll know that the interlocks stitching is which direction they go. So it just makes removal that much easier for you. Here's our notch halfway down the leg. If there isn't a notch, you can always just remove your stitching halfway down the leg to the knee area. Okay. So now what I want to do is we have the inside seam opened up and this is the back seat of our pants. This was where the original stitching was lying. I want to put a mark two inches inside at that two inches back on one side and the other side. I'm just going to line up. Get it in the same spot by marking it. Just by lining up the vaccine to inches or you can mark it individually. You're going to need your iron for a little bit. Now we're going to take the front of the pant. Line up. Your friends seem to your new mark. Put a pin through that. And I want you to take notice of something. I want to get this laying down for you. Note now that because We are changing the position of this scene. This piece seems a little longer, like we need to make more material in here. And that is true. It's just because it's perfectly lined up here. We're bringing it back here, which this distance is a little bit longer than here. But that's easy enough to correct your iron. I'm ironing just the back piece and I'm stretching it just ever so slightly. Getting out the old scene but just stretching it just enough. If I were to put a pin hole here. And you can see now how that lines up beautifully. Just a nice straight line. So I'm going to pin that into place. I'm gonna do the same to the other leg. The back of my pant. Join up the front. Under radar, the crotch area on our new line. Use the iron pressing the back, getting out the old crease, but also allowing the steam and the heat. A little bit of tension, stretching that ever so slightly. That lines up nicely now. And I'm just going to put a pin in the middle just to hold that in place. So now we're gonna go to the machine, close this area up, and then finished up the alteration at that point. Let's go to the machine. At the straight stitch machine, we're going to close up the inside leg scenes, overlap a little bit from the original scene. Once again, I'm using contrasting thread so you can see better where I'm sewing. I'm actually sewing in the exact line where the front scene was sewn. But you can see how now that we've taken out this extra material from the back. This particular alteration. We have taken out just two inches, so we do not necessarily need to surge off the remainder of this material. If there was any more than two inches taken off of the rise, we may go to the searcher and trim it down so that we have anywhere from inch and a half to two inches left inside this where there's not so much bulk. Click my threads. Now we're just going to the other leg. Remember this is the inside lexeme. Remember one of the techniques that we've learned, holding the front and the back with a little bit of tension. See how, if I let that go, it seems a little flimsy yet. Putting tension front and back makes for a nice clean scene. This is one of those times when you want to make sure you're using that technique. At this point, we can stay at the machine and we want to close up. The bombs seem that we opened up in order to do this alteration. I generally like to make sure that to the back of the pant is to my left. Got my center seems inside the rise lined up. And our main concern with this extra material is we don't want it pulling getting caught into this seem that it's causing the leg to pull. I generally will just play with the material, laying it down if you want, you can eliminate that totally by flipping that under. So it's not even caught into that machine, into that stitching. That actually might be the better option because even if we play with this and get this to lay down, if it's pulling, it's going to affect the inside of the parent. So let's just fold that under like that. Pin that at a place. It's still going to get caught in and be a clean finished. It's just going to not cause any distortion on the inside once it's all done. So I'm going to do the other side. Just flip that under just enough. So we're only going to be catching this little bit. Into our finished seam. Now I'm just going to continue on this and blend, connect the dots. We get this flat so you can see from the been seen at the back and I'm going to blend that to the front. Just underneath the zipper. Like always, we always double stitch any seats seem this way. It's nice and sturdy. So we're gonna go over that piece once again. Remove our pins. I'm going to flip this around just the double stitch that reverse direction. And let's turn this right side out now. And you can see that's closed up and the leg is closed up. So now what we need to do is we need to go to the pressing table and get everything press back into shape and then this alteration is done. So let's go up there and we will show you how this is finalized. We're at the table to finish pressing. You can see that the inside seam here, we've already got it open on the inside. We need to give it a nice clean finish here. But also because we took in from the back. If we were to line up our front treason and underarms, under legs seems, you can see that the crease from the back now is rolling a bit to the inside and we're just going to straighten that up with our press. I've got my pants on bullet on the side. I've got the side seams inside and outside lined up. The first thing I'm gonna do is press and clean up the inside. Since we stitch that. Use my Clapper when I do this just to kind of seal that press. Now I'm going to smooth out where the front seem came unlined. I want a nice clean scene. Here we go. And we're going to do the same for the back crease. There we go. Flipped pan over the do the other side. Make sure your seams are lined up. I generally can just feel that they're lined up underneath, but I always do a little check. Straighten out the inside leg, seem that we did our work on. I'm going to join up the crease in the front center. Cool those down with the clapper. And then I'm going to straighten note. You can see where that was, the old fat crease and now we're just going to press and the new one. And the rise alteration is done at that point. So when your client is wearing their pant, it's going to fit much closer to their body in the bomb and they won't have like droopy drawer look. 6. Lesson 5 - Seam Repair Lined Garment: The client has brought the suit jacket To me. Those siem has come apart in the back of the jacket. So they'd requested that this be repaired. This of course, is lined. So it's not as easy as an unwind garment for us to get into do the work. This particular jacket to is a better quality jacket. A lot of times we could usually get in through the sleeve and then access all the jacket from the inside of the sleeve. But this jacket is sewn down at the slaves so we can't access the body of the jacket from the sleeves. So what we're going to do is undo the lining a little bit where the lining and the other material meat. And always try and do that close to the scene, whichever seeing you are doing a repair on. So this is the same. I'm going to open up and we're going to undo the lining from the outer material at the bottom. You want to undo as little as possible because with this particular jacket, we're actually going to Han Solo this back down. So we don't want to take out any more than what we actually need to. I'll just do a little bit more. Undo my seam, tacking there for a second. Alright. So now that allows me to get inside the jacket. You can see how we can go into the jacket now. And if you need to find your seem to stick your hand inside the two layers, grabbed the seam that you need and pull it through air we go, That's the broken seem. I have put the proper color of thread into the machine for this type of repair. Clean up any old threads from the tear there. So what we're going to do is put this under the machine, overlap or stitching, close it up and overlap again. So let's put this under the machine. Keeping your needle in always helps to anchor your work, especially when you're doing something like this, because you want to make sure that other parts of the jacket or not getting underneath and you're sewing something, you're not supposed to. We're making sure that the seams are lined up and just sew down the broken seem overlapping, the goods seems a little bit of front and back. To secure that. This point is always good then to flip it right side out. Check your work. We are going to the iron for this, so I'm not worried that it's not perfectly flat yet. Just clip any threads that might be caught in your work. So it's clean. Get rid of that one. And that one there too. So now they're seen has been technically repaired. With this particular job. The scenes are all were pressed open and they're already still being pressed open. Wouldn't need to go to the iron to do that in a separate step when you're doing a repair like this, most of the time the scenes will still stay press in the direction that you want. Now we're going to close up this opening. I'd like to close up as much as I can with the sewing machine first. So we're going to flip our work inside out like this where the two seams are joined. I'm going to put that underneath. I hate hand sewing, so I like to do as little as possible. I'm going to pull my lining out. Lay the outer material engineers were trying to close this up as much as possible with the machine. And then the last couple of inches we will hand. So do a little bit more. As far as we'll go, you'll see what I've just done. I flip this right-side-up. You can see that's the part that I've closed up by machine. And now that little bit there we are going to Han Solo closed couple of pins in here to hold it into place. The stitch that we're going to use for this. I'm using, it's a very common like a little slip stitch. We'll finish this off, but it won't show on to the other side either. Alright. I'm just using a single thread. Going to start. I can see where they're stitching. It's still locked in there. I want to just reinforce that a little bit. Hide my knot, my symbol. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I dropped my needle down into the facing piece, jesse enough to pick it up, slide it over about a quarter of an inch, but you don't want it to catch the outer material. Drop the needle down right where you came up, hits the facing, come up about a quarter inch over, grabbed the lining, just that piece of the lining, but nothing showing on this side. We can see there's nothing on that. That was my pin to prenatal down right where you came up. Slide it through the two layers, but quarter of an inch, pick the lining doesn't show. You don't have to keep looking once in a while, do a chat just to be sure. Once you get the hang of it and you do this enough, you'll just know you're not catching the other side. We're going to overlap just a little bit on our stitching that we did. And once we've got it nice and secure, we do our little three back stitches to tie a knot. And now that is closed, put back into place and our repair is done. So now we would go to the iron, give this as the light, good Press. It looks nice and flat. And then this ultimately is done and ready for your customer. 7. Lesson 6 - Seam Repair near a Zipper: Sometimes we will have a same repair than a client wants fixed, but it may be joined in adjacent to a design element like your zipper here. So this is a little bit more involved. So we're going to take you through the steps. This is a skirt. What's nice with this skirt, even though it is lined, the lining obviously is not a stitch down, so we can get inside to our work area very easily by just turning it inside out. That's always a nice element. Before we can actually do the repair to our siem, We have to lift up the zipper that is joined so we can get inside. So whatever stitching is holding our zipper down, we're going to lift up a little bit. So this is actually an invisible zipper. And the invisible zipper, they actually top stitch the tape of the zipper down to the seam allowance. There we go. And you can see that even with the opening here, it's still too close to our zipper. So we're going to continue undoing the zipper just enough for us to get in and do our work. So when you use the razor blade and lift up or zipper enough that of the actual stitching that's holding the zipper down along with their top stitching. Okay. That should give us enough area to work in. At this point, we do want to make sure we get rid of all this thread, clean it up nicely. Because when we put the zipper bag down and use our zipper foot, we want to make sure that none of the threads get caught in the old threads because they're very difficult to get out at that point. So we want our work to be nice and clean. Alright, so now that we have it opened, the next step is actually just to do the initial repair. So clean up, flatten out the seam that needs repairing. So we can see this is where it was originally reinforced for the zipper itself. Just below the zipper opening. Put this under our machine, do the actual repair that was asked of us. And now we actually have to lay the zipper back down, get it put back into place. Return this to the to the right side. I want to just make sure this is all nice and cleaned up here. That is the actual repair that we'd need it to do. Now, we are going to stitch the invisible zipper back into place. I'm actually going to change my foot out. I do have an invisible zipper foot. I prefer to use. This is just my choice and you'll find, you may find it works a little easier. I'm a basic zipper foot when putting in an invisible zipper. Switch out our foot here. The foot's on. Good. Okay. All right. You can see the invisible zipper lined up right there and right on that fault. So our stitching is going to go right along that full there. So I'm just going to line that up. You'll learn this also when we do invisible zipper. In the zipper section. It's why it's always good to know how to do zippers because when we're doing just basic repairs, we may have to do zippers. You can see I'm just laying out my material. Putting the zipper teeth lined up with its original folds. It as close as you can your repair. Take a look and see how that's looking. Good, sign. Good there. So now we're going to do the other side to lift up or zipper little. We're going to go down the other side. The zipper foot, the zipper. I'm flattening out the seam allowances, making sure it's nice and flat on the bottom. Place that stitching. And since they did have top stitching along the tape, we're going to replace that also. We always want to keep the same look, especially if we're not replacing the entire unit. We want to continue the same look. We wouldn't want to have their top stitching hair and then us not finish what they had originally had in the garments. Will replace the top stitching on the zipper tape they had here. And now we can see this is on the inside how we've replaced the original broken stitching and we've put our zipper back into place and let's see what that looks like on the good side. And we can see how we have the initial repair. And then we've replaced our zipper stitching. We'd go to the iron, give that oppress. And then this repair is finished. 8. Lesson 7 - Seam Repair near Slit or Vent: Our client has brought in a dress that has a backslid. And what has happened is from walking stress. The vaccine has opened up and the seam is visible. I want to show you how we're going to go through the steps to repair this. But on the flip side, if you have a client who brings in a similar garment and has a slit, but maybe wants the slit closed. Maybe it's just too high. This is going to be the same two steps that you're going to use to do that. So let's look at the garment that we have to work on today. Here we have our dress. This is the back of the dress. This is the back slit. And just from where you can see that the vaccine has undone as well as where joins that the lining. So we're actually going to go inside to repair that. But, um, like I said, let's say this particular client also said, well, this slit is too high up. Can we lower it down? The difference just would be that if to do the repair, we're going to end our stitching here. If they wanted a little lower on the inside, we would just continue on our stitching and just bring it down a little lower. So it's the same steps that will get the same effect. What we need to do with this, we're actually going to go inside the garment. I want to show you the scene. That way. You can see when we open up and I'm inside. Let's flip this inside-out. Show you where the repair is here. This is the backseat and this is that same area here. Now, if for any reason the lining itself was getting in your way, you could undo that a little bit to do your repair to the outer material and then just replace that. But I think with this particular repair, we don't necessarily need to do that. Once we get this all closed up, um, that the lighting is going to be fine there it hasn't and-and its stitching. So what I wanna do is I want us to go to the sewing machine and then I will show you how we're actually going to walk through that. We're at the straight stitch machine. What we're going to do is we're going to reach inside to pull this up in wanting to say inside it is aligned garment. So we're going to reach inside it as loose on the bottom to bring out that seem that we are going to repair. Grab bag inside out. There we go. And I always like sewing top to bottom as opposed to yes, we can flip it this way. And so that same seam this way, but the reason I don't like doing that is then you have to work a little harder at getting the same smooth, making sure it's perfectly smooth here. And then sewing up because if not, then if one side's buckled, you're gonna get a little pleat. When it's done sowing where if you so top to bottom urine don't even have to think about that. This is our center back seam. I'm actually using black this time, so I want you to see what it's gonna look like when it gets to the white of the interfacing overlap. The stitching that is all still intact. And at this point, our main goal is to make sure this fold is on top of this fold. I'm going to kinda do what kind of wonky, so you can see what happens. It looks good on this side. It looks fairly good. I'm gonna put a big stick so I can take it out. Doesn't look too bad here. So down. But I want to show you how this is probably not correct. From this side it looked great. But on this side at veered out from the good side, this is what it would look like. The pleat is totally off centered. These need to meet. So it's going to take a little trick of pinning just to make sure that that does get lined up. And I'm going to show you how that happens. Believe me, I've done it before where I thought, Oh, it looks great on this side. But then when I get down to turning it right side out and I see that it wasn't even close. Go inside. And actually from the outside, the technique we would use to make sure to seams are perfectly lined up on genes or anything that has aware Mark, I've got my center seam and I've got my hand, I'm pinching that from the inside. Those are lined up. So now I'm going to go inside, keep my finger there, put a pin through there. And another way to verify that is on this side, if I put a pin through that fooled. See how it's pretty close on this fold here too. And that's our goal. Good. Now that's being held into place. I'm going to start back at the top. Make sure the linings out of the way. This is nice and flat on this side. This is also where if a client wanted the slit closed, you can just keep on going down as long as as far as where they want it closed. At this point though, I don't need to do that. I'm just going to do the repair. But you could always so down a little further, just make sure the folds are lined up. What I want to do though, is just make sure I do a good reinforcing at the base of the slip because anytime you have an opening like this, it does take a little bit of stress and clip our threads. Okay? You can see, even though it's veered off a little bit here, by pressing is going to fix that. But my main goal is that it's nice and straight down here. Let's flip this right-side out. Remember how I said that the lining was good anyways, so the lining still is intact along here. The seam is nice and flat, nice and secure. And that repair is done at this point. All we would do is go to the iron, this on the board, give it a good Press and call it a day. And now you've learned how to fix the US seem repair, add a slit or event.