Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Sewing Techniques

Let's s o a buttonhole that's great thing to know how to do I'll get these threads out of my way and your buttonhole I'm going to sew that on this wool fabric. This is like a nice, just kind of skirt wait dress, wait wool fabric, it's movies out of my way and, um, your machine has a automatic one step buttonhole foot with it, and you actually have four styles a buttonhole if you look at the swatch or the stitch out that I have here top of the table, there are four styles of buttonhole there's, a lot of thes to kind of rectangle shaped kind of basic buttonholes are called bartek buttonholes, and there are also two sizes of what we call keyhole buttonholes, keyhole buttonholes you see on menswear on men's or women's outerwear, because often you have buttons that have a shank if you don't know what a shank button is that it's ah button kind of like this where there's um, it doesn't have button holes on the top that there's a shank here and that you need a little extra room for those butto...

ns to go through. So the keyhole is usually on those, so we're going to remove a presser foot, and we're going to put the buttonhole foot on and the beauty of this foot is that you can actually place your button in the foot and it will make the buttonhole to fit that button so we would set our button in here like so this this peace in the back just this slides so you set your button in here and close that on that button, and now it's going to tell the machine how big to make that button hole? You don't have to decide when to turn around and go back the other way. And the beauty of that too is that especially if you're doing in a garment where you have several down the front, they're all going to look identical, you're not determining when you have to turn around and have to carefully mark your fabric so that they're all the same. This is just going to measure them for you, so we'll drop the bob thie this, uh, lever back here is your presser foot release button and that's going to drop your, um, drop your foot off the machine if you look closely there's a pin here on the foot and that pin is the presser foot pin and this ankle has kind of a claw shape and this comes down onto their to clip on the pin, you don't have to try to push these feet onto the machine just lined it up underneath and might have toe move it around a little tiny bit, but when you get that over there, it'll just kind of click on in place, and they're on. So the same thing is true with your buttonhole foot. You'll just click that on it's. I know it's bigger, and it looks a little different, but you just really just clipped that on the same way. Now you also have when you get ready to say your buttonhole, there are these two guides over here on the side of the foot and there's a buttonhole lever. And you want to pull this down to make sure that this this lever is between these guides and when you put your fabric, your by the way, you probably want to let's assume this is like the placket of a code or a um uh uh, garment of some type. You probably want to add an interfacing to your plaque, it it's going to give this more stability a firmer hand. It will. You would never just put fabric in here and make a buttonhole because buttonholes air a little dense and if you just so right on the fabric without doing some kind of support to the fabric, no matter really what it is, you can get kind of puckering a little bitch shrinking in because the stitches are dense and you know there's zigzagging back and forth and you need to stabilize that a little bit to keep that from puckering so you want to definitely at an interfacing you probably want to test your button hole on a scrap of the same fabric tio see if you want to use a different color thread or a different weight of thread and you might even want to add a stabilizer um just take one of these here stable you know what, I've got a piece here that's a little smaller we just grab one of these stabilizer this is a tearaway stabilizer and you wouldn't need a piece this big you just need something smaller like this but um it literally tears away when you're finished if you're not familiar with these, you can place it on the underside of where you're going to sell your buttonhole and that will also help prevent any puckering of stitches so we're going to go ahead and we're going to just place our fabric underneath the foot, grab a hold of my thread, get out of the way sorry, I stick my kid in the way they're okay and we have four choices down here they're stitch number night fifty six, fifty seven, fifty eight, fifty nine the four different styles so I'm going to select the large style of bartek, which is number fifty six so I'll just dial it in in the tens column on in a dialled fifty and then in the single digits column a fifty six and I do have a choice of different lengths if I want but I'll try the default one um justus my test bring this down a little bit in case we want to sew a second one okay, so that back here like so and we'll start sewing so I just have to wait for it to be done does all the work for me sometimes I stop to just trim this tail so I can get it out of my way you've got a nice fine point scissor you can get in there and cut that tap the controller by accident let me go wait just continue on does the whole process automatically for me you would probably have your threat match your fabric but I wanted this to be a contrast so you see it better with our set up today, so I like deliberately left it in a higher contrast on this will actually so the whole cycle and then when it's done it'll bartek at the bottom and do two or three tie off stitches so I don't even have to tie it off myself and I can lift this out and remove my work and I have an absolutely perfect perfect buttonhole and then all you need to do then um is you can take your seam ripper if you want to cut it he would remove your tearaway interfacing from the back side so it's not there anymore and trim those threads but then you can take your seam ripper I'd probably place a pin here just in front of spartak I keep forgetting to grab a straight pin but if you but I think it's in your manual to do this and you place a pin here it's like a little stopper so that if you accidentally pushed this too hard you won't cut your buttonhole open but we'll just slide that through and what that does then is it opens up your buttonhole and your professional looking but if I do another buttonhole right now it'll look exactly like this one because it's measuring that button and they're all perfectly identical and that's the beauty of ah automatic one step buttonhole you know when someone looks at the garment you means like oh I really like what you made I really like your coat did you make it because they can kind of tell from your buttonholes but that won't happen when they're all one step automatic because they're all perfectly the same okay, so why don't we go ahead? I'm going to move on and show you some other techniques that you can do with your machine and that will be we're going to take this buttonhole foot off and I'm going to replace it with the standard foot again and I'm going to show you a ribbing insertion and what I mean by that is you might have um um you may be making a t shirt you're repairing a t shirt, a sweatshirt, some kind of garment like that where you've got these rib ings I've got different kinds of ribbing here this is ah looser one this is a very loose one this is a very tight, very firmly woven one but they're all these are all different kinds of rib that everything is like what you see on like cuffs of sweatshirts or around the next band of a t shirt and let's say you want to insert one of these into, um your project so what I'm going to do here is temporarily cut a little neck band opening and then well, so a ribbing on and we'll see how to use one of our very useful um utility stitches, which is thie over edge stitch over lock stage and that one we're going to use stitch number twenty two so here again I'm gonna dial in twenty two and we're going to I'm going to change the width of that to make that really wide to cover the edge of my fabric and as I saw I'm going to just get this started and now I'm going to with ribbing what you do is you use just stretch stretch the rib as you so but the bottom fabric you just kind of guided straight so as this is going in here I'm going to try to straighten this and keep it straight as I go but the ribbing you're going to stretch stretching it what it does is it keeps it it'll keep it tight against your body when it's fully inserted, lift that up and tuck that under there keep it up against your body and the other thing it will do is give it that tightened where it pulls in tight so this however much you stretch it is how much it's going toe to toe just finish this out, lift this up and remove our work and I see here what we've got them theres are over edgy looking stitch it made our seem on the finish all at the same time somebody was asking earlier today about is it like a surging machine and this is kind of the effect you get like I would often do this with a surge er but this stitch is a good substitute on a standard machine if you don't have a surge er and then you have a perfectly inserted neck band where you see pulling it helped that to draw in around the neck band like that so you could repair a hoody you could make a t shirt or a t shirt dress baby clothes it's a great little technique to know how to do okay, and then we can also we have a multiple state zigzag in here and we can use that to repair the hole so let's say for example, your kid's clothes you know, work pants, whatever you get a hole in them and you really I just want to fix that hole and so that so that up so what you would do there is select probably your multiple stitches, eggs, egg and on this machine that stitch number six on a dial and stitch number six or zero over here and a six over on this side and this is normally like a stitch I would use kind of decorative lee the way that it comes pre set, but I'm going to stick take my stitch length and make it much shorter so that my stitches are closer together to be more like a darning kind of effect and so you would probably if you were really doing this have your thread match so it's the least obvious but here because I want you to see it we're going to um you have the contrast thread, so we'll just go ahead. And so that looks like a little too dan so just lengthen that one little notch and probably just perfect going back and forth instead of a zig zag zig zag like this were stitching multiple stitches back and forth so it's almost working like it's done which is the term for wearing the whole way you get to the end if you wanted to, you can leave the needle down in the fabric because it'll be like a placeholder lift the presser foot lifter and then just pivot around looking on eat that looks and just imagine if that was really thread that matched, you wouldn't even really see see if you could just continue so right over what you just did to really reinforce it and having that little piece in the clips that is, I just I just broke a needle, so if that happens to you, just all you have to do is re stream will of your work from the machine, okay? And then simply loosen this up and you don't want to try to like if you have that happen, you don't want to try to sharpen them or anything like that. You just want tio just replace them, you just discard them and then you your machine comes with a a package of replacement needles, and these are this size twenty twenty fourteen that's that average size for woman's so you can just turn this up and take one of these out and we'll replace it breaking noodles happens to you, to becky, it happens, it happens, you know, it could be that you even had a needle that just maybe it was a little bit of a flawed needle it might have already I had one one day the other day I was I went to go so somewhere and I was looking at this machine and I was that doesn't even look right and it was it was already just a little bit like till did looking and I thought is it even in their right? And it was just it was it was just was a flawed needle so it could be but anyway we'll just replace it and continue on and continue to march so that's how you would do darning but that stitch is also great for elastic insertion I love this on because this is just a neat little timesaver I love to do this where you take the presser foot off and you see this elastic it's got it's like this's a quarter inch elastic it's great for this presser foot you can also do the one size bigger I think that's the three eighths size and just cut that out a little bit of an angle so you make sort of a tip out of it and you can feed that through the whole of the presser foot even the three eighths inch wide one the wider writer with of that state would work perfectly for this but what this does is that when you snap this on this uh um having this run through the whole of the foot is kind of like that third hand that you wish you had when you're doing the last a concession, when you do it, where the elastic is going underneath the foot, you kind of have toe you're tryingto stretch the elastic and guide the fabric and the elastic at the same time. It's like where's that third hand I wish I had, and when you use that, hold it, help guide that through keeps it straight free, so I love that little trick, and so we'll just lengthen this out a little bit. We don't need that quite so short for what we're doing here, and you can insert it right at the edge. This might be for swim where for baby clothes, anyplace where you do have, like, you know, just this lighter, thinner, elastic insertion. You can turn this over and press it and then stitch it on this side to do your insertion right here and have this finished or you can do it right on the raw fabric itself. It just depends on what your project is. So what happens here is when we start sewing. What I'm trying to keep myself out of the way here you want to stretch the elastic from behind and stretch the elastic from in front? I just kind of keep a finger on the fabric to help steer it through here street, but she wants you stitch with wide enough to cover the elastic which it is and then just so along stretching the elastic issue so much that you stretch it kind of depends on the amount of fullness that you want on the fabric and if you were really doing this, usually your pattern tells you make your peace this big and your elastic this big and you would just stretch from quarter it with from pins and then just stretch from pin depends so that it's consistent and even across the piece but this is just I just love using like when I'm using these narrower elastics to use that what does a helper on it just keeps it moving nice and smooth you can use a feather stitch some of the stretch stitches were great for this. This again is the multistate say there's a number of them that were just great honey comb stitch you've got quite a variety of them built into this machine that are wonderful for a lasting insertion and then just raise your needle and remove your work from the machine and there is your elastic great for doll clothes like everything I said earlier and it's, just nice and even and it's in there. It's. Great!