Video: Sewing a Collar: Grading the Seam

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An expert seamstress shows how to properly grade a seam in this free sewing video.

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Video Transcript

Hi! This is Stephany of Stephany’s Simply Sewing. I’d like to show you how we grade a seam. We just completed our collar and now we need to grade a seam. What that means is to trim some seams back at different levels so that we reduce the bulk in our garment. First I’m going to take my scissors, these are my medium size scissors, they’re awfully nice, and they’re the right size, and I’m going to cut my interfacing close to the seam line. I’m going to so that all the way around my collar. The interfacing is the heaviest and the bulkiest, so that’s why I’ve made it the shortest. Once I’ve cut away all of my interfacing, then next layer is going to be one of my collars. It’ll either be, depending on when we turn it, the top or the bottom. What I’m going to do is about half of that one away and proceed around my collar the same way. When you’re completed with a graded seam, you end up with something that appears as though it has stair steps. Here is one seam allowance, my second one, and my interfacing. The reason why again is if we were to turn our collar with all that fabric in there it would become very bulky, as demonstrated on this end. And we don’t want all that bulk, and we don’t need all that bulk. By grading our seams, when we turn our collar we can have a very nice flat seam to topstitch on. That would be how to grade a seam.

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Sewing a Collar: Grading the Seam

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