Sewing Couch Slipcover Piping

Video Transcript

"Okay, I've cut several strips of fabric for my piping, and we want to sew together a continuous line of these strips of piping. So you put them right sides together, and with a normal stitch you want to sew them together. Now remember, you should have a needle that's appropriate for the fabric that you're using. I'm using a denim needle. Check the instructions on your machine to see what's appropriate for doing upholstery-type fabrics. I'm using a normal stitch of 2 1/2; a 2 1/2 length stitch, and you just want to secure it a little in the beginning, and then sew straight to the end, and secure at the end. Now we're going to switch to a longer stitch width for like a basting stitch, so I'm putting a number 4 for basting, and then we'll sew the cording into the fabric to complete the piping. So you come to the end of your fabric here, and you have a zipper foot. And the foot is the needle is positioned so that the cording; the bump of the cording, so place your cording on the fabric like this, and fold it in half, and place the zipper foot next to the bump like that. Now the cording; the whole roll of cording can go onto the floor, or somewhere that it will freely feed as you're sewing; you don't want that to be getting caught and knotted as you're sewing, and you keep the cording down the center of the fabric. And we'll sew with a basting, I'm just going to secure it by a few backing up stitches, and then I'll go right along, keeping the zipper foot right at the edge of the bump of the cording, and stopping once in a while to place the cording in the center, and to readjust. You're going to be, if you're doing piping for your couch, you'll be making quite a bit of this, so it's a nice thing to do and get done before you start cutting the rest of your couch. When you come to the seam of two pieces of the strips for the piping, you want to open up that seam like this, so that you don't have too much bulk in that section. If you left it folded down, you'd have quite a bit of a bulky piece right here. So we'll open that up to cut down on the bulkiness. Just lay the cording over that, and fold it in half, and then continue down right over that seam, and just continue with your piping all the way."