Pressing & Stitching Fabric for Sewing a Shoe Bag

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Candi Cane Canncel with Expert Village. So in this clip, we're going to be actually sewing up our shoe bag. So we've cut out the measurement 17" long by 11" across. Before you actually stitch up your fabric, you want to just go ahead and press the fabric. If you're using anything like a silky fabric like a cotton back satin like I am, it has a tendency to really wrinkle when you fold it, to store your fabric, so just go ahead and press it out. Okay, and once you have it pressed out, you just want to go ahead and pin all the sides together because we're going to be stitching this. Now you can do one of two things. Because we cut it on the fold, you can actually leave that unstitched and just stitch up these two sides and then we'll come back and finish off the top. I'm going to go ahead and stitch the third side just because I think it looks nicer when they all match up. So just just pin your fabric, make sure to pin the corners. Whenever I sew, I always pin. A lot of times people will just go ahead and stitch without using pins, but I think the pins are just so much easier because it holds your fabric in place, you don't have to worry about your fabric shifting and you getting a bigger seam than you need. Okay, it's all pinned, so now we're ready to sew. So I'm just going to be stitching a regular straight stitch. I want it to be a fairly secure stitch, so I am going to do a small stitch length, a size between a "2" and a "3". In the very beginning, just remember to reverse so that you can lock in your stitch. I'm just going to shay this off and you want to remember when you get to the end to back tack, which is just stitch in reverse, and that just locks your stitches in place. Okay, then the next step is going to be finishing off the inside edges."