How To Sew a Seam

Video Transcript

"You want to know the basics of sewing? Well the first basic of sewing is how to sew a seam. My name is Daniel King. I'm a pattern maker and designer and I know sewing seams can be sometimes frustrating in the beginning. When I first learned how to sew, it was difficult to sew a straight seam. So here's just a little bit about how to sew a seam. You take your fabric and you always take your fabric and have it wrong sides together, excuse me, wrong sides out. It's always confusing in the beginning. You take your fashion fabric and you put the right sides together. You put the right sides together and there's something called seam allowance. That's that additional part of fabric that you're going to have on the outside. You take that and you sew along the seam allowance. Now this can be done by machine. You just run it through the machine along the seam allowance or you can do it by hand. If you're going to sew by hand you're going to want to take your needle and thread, I'm using a contrasting thread here, and you put it through and usually start and put it through on the bottom. You bring it through and you have a knot at the other end of the thread and you just follow along the seam allowance. And usually that's about three quarters of an inch or a half an inch. And you can stick the needle down, you can go just slightly and bring it back up, just like that right along that seam line. Now sometimes people in the beginning, will actually draw using a chalk, a tailor's chalk so that they make sure they're going along the seam very straight. So you just keep push in, push out, pull the needle through, push in, push out and pull the needle through. And that's how you sew a seam. My name is Daniel King, and good luck."