Sewing Tips: Basting Stitches for Sleeves

Video Transcript

" Hello! I’m Stephany from Stephany’s Simply Sewing on behalf of expertvillage.com. We’ve been working on our men’s shirt, and now I’d like to show you how to put basting in a sleeve cap in order to ease your sleeve into the arm hole or the arm side. This portion of your pattern, which will be here on a shirt, is your sleeve cap. We already have our markings that we found on our pattern that I have marked with dots. This being our center, this is our front and our back. The way to baste for easing is you want to set your sewing machine stitch length for the longest stitch. You may want to refer to your owner’s manual on how to do that for your particular sewing machine. I’m going to start my basting stitch right where this dot is. The reason being that I don’t need to ease the underarm portion; I just need to ease the sleeve cap. Another hint you might want to consider is when you’re sewing your easing stitching or your basting, is to sew a bit away from your 5/8 line. In other words, this is my 5/8 seam line, but if I sew a little bit towards the edge here I won’t have to remove this basting because it won’t show when my finished garment. Once again, making sure that you’ve got your tails, go ahead and stitch around the cap of your sleeve, not quite 5/8 of inch away from your garment. When you reach your other mark in this case the back of your sleeve you can go ahead and quit sewing. You need to remove your fabric from your sewing machine and clip your threads. You will want to leave a bit of thread, because we’re going to pull these threads when we ease our sleeve into our armhole. That is how you do your basting to ease your sleeve into an armhole. "