Sewing Tips: Topstitching Down a Placket

Video Transcript

" Hello! I’m Stephany from Stephany’s Simply Sewing on behalf of expertvillage.com. I’d like to show you how we finish applying our placket to our men’s shirt. If you recall, we’ve already sewn the interfacing in our placket, we’ve trimmed it, and I pressed it with the seam allowance going towards the placket, turned in a raw edge, and then folded this over so that I have covered all of the raw seams. I now want to pin, and we do call this pin basting because it is putting this together with pins, my placket down so that I’m covering up…And it’s very difficult to see, but I’m covering up this seam right here, which is what attached my placket to the shirt body. Once I have pinned basted I will show you how to topstitch the placket down. Some plackets are different, and you will need to refer to the instructions from your garment. To topstitch, I’m going to place my fabric, use my hand wheel to make sure that my needle is where I would like it to be in the fabric. I am using a guideline of this side of my toe on my presser foot along this edge to make sure I have a nice even topstitching, and sew. I like to hang on to my threads because it keeps the threads from bunching up under my machine. When I come to a pin, I do have a choice. I can hand-walk my machine over the pin so that I’m assured that I don’t break a needle, or when I come to a pin I can stop my sewing and remove a pin. When I’m sewing on topstitching, I really don’t want to end up having to stop and restart my stitching because if I do that, then I end up with my topstitching having an obvious beginning and ending. So I especially don’t want to break a needle or a thread or a pin at this point in putting on my placket. Sometimes, as with a not very tightly woven fabric as I have here, I’m noticing that I’m having a little bit of problem with puckering. If you are having a problem with a pucker, you can do 1 of 2 things. You can simply use your fingers to walk that fabric in or when you’re done, you can kind of undo the stitching on that area, ease out your pucker, and begin again. "