In Support of Hand Sewing

People have a lot of complaints about hand sewing. The more common ones include “it’s slow” and “it makes the hurty in my wrists”. There’s actually a really easy thing you can do to help speed up your hand sewing, and take some of the strain off your wrists….

Trying to hand sew fabric that is lying flat, on a flat surface, is about the worst case scenario for your body and your stitching. If you support your stitching from underneath with something slightly rounded, you’ll find it’s much easier to pick up threads and push the needle through the fabric. It also changes the angle of your wrist. With the right height of support, you might find that you sew entirely with your fingers no twisting of the wrist required!

A seam roll (aka, the sleeve roll, sleeve ham, or “sleeve pressy thing”, depending on where you learned about them and how frustrated you are that the darned thing has disappeared again) is a really great support for hand sewing normal sized items. I found out the other day (in a fit of desperation, owing to the disappearance of the sleeve ham) that the narrow base on Vicksie works just as well, if you can get over a doll peeking out from your sewing. (Only try this with a sand-filled base!) If you’re sitting on the couch and sewing, try putting a pillow in your lap under your sewing and your sewing arm.  It makes a difference. The human knee is another astonishingly great sewing support – and a very traditional one!

The trick, of course, is to avoid sewing your work to your support. (Believe me, having to choose whether or not to cut the thread from your hand work, or cut a hole in your jeans is quite the dilemma… For me, it usually depends on how long I spent sewing, and how well the jeans fit.) If you have a problem with this, it helps to add something that’s hard to sew through to the equation – a spare piece of leather or a rolled up magazine work well.

If you’re sewing for a doll, you might find that most of the normal supports are all much too large. Dowel rods, small rolling pins, and empty toilet paper tubes have become my friend lately… They aren’t tall enough to take all the strain off my wrist, but I’ve found that combining them with a second support (mostly the curved arm of the sofa) gets the job done!