How to Sew A French Seam

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Candi Cane-Canncel on behalf of expertvillage.com. So our last topic was flat felt seams which is great for sports wear. Now we’re going to learn how to do a French seam which is a fabulous little seam if you’re using shear fabrics something for lingerie or a very, very light weight blouse anything that’s sort of fine, you want to take a little extra time to make this sort of fine you want to take a little extra time to make this gorgeous little seam. So you start just by taking your fabric and lining up the edges and just doing a stitch about a ½ of an inch in…once you have it in place you’re going to want to trim your seam allowance to about a 1/8 of an inch. Just trim it all the way down, next we’re going to be pressing this open, so in order to press it open just pull out the fabric and simply run the iron along the seam to press open. When it’s this small of a seam allowance sometimes it gets a little tricky so you just want to stick your fingers in there to try to open it, but of course try not to burn yourself. And you do want to make sure that this is very, very pressed very flat, so once you have this pressed we’re going to be stitching again. So now that you’ve pressed open your seam allowance you’re going to be turning it over to the other side and you just kind of want to flatten the seam a bit, you’re going to take it to your machine and we’re going to be doing a seam allowance up along side about a quarter of an inch in. So set your presser foot down at a quarter inch and stitch all the way…once your stitch is in place we’re going to take it back to the iron so that we can press it to one side and you’ll have yourself a nice little French seam. Once your seam is stitched in place, open up your fabric and just press the French seam to one side and ooh la la a fabulous French seam. For more info on this topic please visit my website at candiland.com."