Making a Sewn In Elastic Casing

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Shawna on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I’m going to demonstrate how to do a sewn in elastic casing. This is just a 3/8 of an inch piece of elastic, and or sample piece isn’t too long. When you are setting an elastic casing or a piece of elastic, depending on the width of your sample, say we’re doing pants, you’ll have it sewn in the back, and sometimes you’re not quite sure how much elastic you’ll need. A lot of times I’ll just set it at one side, pull it so you have a little bit of resistance, and kind of pull it in and see how much that it’s going to take from that. A lot of patterns will tell you how much you need, but I like to kind of eye it depending on what project I’m doing. So we’re going to go and do about this much, so I’ll cut this off. This I will start at one end and just tack down at the very edge. Then I will stretch that out to the other end. As I pull that through, I can stretch that, and once I get a handle on the backside, I’ll know how much I’ll need. I’m going to pull that out and then I could clip this off if I wanted to, that edge piece, but I don’t necessarily need to. Once that’s in place, I can actually roll that as many times, depending on how wide you elastic is. I can roll it and I can pin it if I’d like to. I’ll roll that and stretch it, and then I can do the same thing, but do it a little bit further down so that I have a nicer width on that. I’m still pulling so the elastic is stretching, but now pulling it through as I sew. Just letting the machine pull it. I’m just following one of the guidelines on the machine so that I can keep it exact all the way through. And there is a sewn in elastic. "