Sewing Tips: Sewing in the Sleeve Cap

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Stephany of Stephany’s Simply Sewing on behalf of expertvillage.com. We started sewing our sleeve in, and I’ve already sewn a portion of the underarm. And we’ve talked about pivoting along this line instead of trying to stretch it straight. Once you get up to the sleeve cap, you’re going to have some interesting little details. Because what’s going to want to happen is your bodice, which is under here, is going to want to wrinkle, and you’ll end up with a tuck. What I do is I reach under here, so that I have my bodice with my hand, and I guide with my other hand. Then as I’m sewing, when I need to, I simply move this fabric, which moves that little ripple to the back behind my presser foot, and continue to sew. There are times when you’re going to be frustrated because things get in the way, and that’s okay. The miracle thing is that we seam rippers. And if we do have a tuck, there is a way to deal with it without taking out your entire sleeve. If we’re lucky I’ll be able to show you that too. As I said earlier, I’m going to go ahead and stitch beyond. The fabric does twist so you’re going to want to stop and re-rotate that fabric so it doesn’t wind up all twisted like hose or something. Here you can see how those ripples were beginning, and if I were to continue stitching without readjusting that fabric, I would have had a pucker. I’m stitching. Right now I’m going across the top and down the side. Here I go rearranging that fabric on the bottom side to hopefully avoid puckers. I’ve reached my beginning stitching, and I’m going to continue, because remember we want that double stitching along the underside of our arm because there’s a lot of stress there. I’m going to go ahead and finish this stitching, and that will be how we do our sleeve and sew our sleeve cap into our shirts. "