I love piped seams. It’s the costumer in me. The trouble is that piping can get expensive, but making your own is super-cheap and easy…
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Let’s be honest – most of us aren’t buying jeans at a price point where we’re going to see a real flat-felled seam. It’s a…
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This is the classic seam associated with denim, particularly when it comes to jeans. It’s really deceptively easy to do. (It does help if you…
2 CommentsIt happens. We all loose our way some times. And we all reach for the seam ripper. I remember the way I was taught to…
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Since it’s that time of year when people here in the U.S. start thinking about what to do with their tax returns, I thought I’d…
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I recently had to make a pseudo-cavalier tabard-y-thing, using tissue lamé (hmmm…. reads like “lame”) for the appliques and trimmings. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really, it just had to work with the ones that had been bought for other costumes. If you need to tame the “HELLO, I’M SHINY” factor of lamé, there’s a way…
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Take a look at the seam in this skirt from an Indian wedding that my boss turned up…
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…without anyone looking at the finished tab and asking if you were drunk and wearing mittens when you sewed it. I mean, everybody “knows” that if you want to bind rounded tabs you just have to use bias tape. Like, duh. But be honest with me – how well does that action really work when you try it? Between you, me, and the interwebs, when I try to machine bias onto a rounded tab in one swell foop, it usually looks poo. But a miracle happened last week, and my brain kicked in. There’s a little bitty-bit of magic from millinery that makes the difference between the top corset (the drunken-mittens approach) and the bottom corset (so much nicer…). And it’s fast, people. It’s faster than fighting the normal Battle of the Bias…
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I love bound button holes. They’re beautiful beasties. The problem is, I don’t like fat bound button holes with a smaller button. Many bound button holes are half inch, top to bottom. To my eye, that’s too much for a polite jacket. I prefer 1/4″. If you are similarly persnickety, this is the bound button hole for you. This is not the infamous turnsy-foldsy bound button hole you see in a lot of sewing books, which is difficult to do in some fabrics (like leather). This one is for those of us who are better at sewing than ironing. It is what I remember from a tailoring class, which may or may not be what was actually taught in the class. It does work out well, though.
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Thank my crazy-fabulous students over at the college for this one – they’ve got a knack for asking those incredibly important, basic questions that you stop thinking about after a while. Things like, “What’s the best way to cut so I don’t get these weird edges?” or “How close to the edge of this should I sew?” I remember asking my mom forever ago: How close should I be to the edge of my bias tape?
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