Sewing Tips and Tricks for Beginner and Intermediate sewists from a home sewist and sewing instructor teaching garment workshops in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Whether you’ve just started out or you’ve been here awhile, you probably already know there are about half a bazillion pattern companies out there and a plethora of sewing pattern options for the home sewist. As a new sewist this can certainly feel overwhelming.
Read MoreYou may have seen this label on new clothing or home textiles you’ve purchased and it also appears in fabric listings all over indie fabric shops online. As brands strive to be more ethical in their product sourcing, supply chain transparency and communication with customers, an increasing number of textile certification standards are popping up all over. Without doing your own research sometimes it’s tricky to know what to look for and what these certifications actually mean.
Read MoreMicroplastics are released into our wastewater every time we wash our synthetic clothing ie. anything made with plastic such as polyester, acrylic, nylon etc. Microplastics are a type of microfibre, thinner than a human hair. In the wash, these tiny microfibres shed off our clothing (approx. 700,000 per load) and end up in the water that goes down the drain. These microfibres usually slip through filtration systems in our sewage treatment facilities and end up back in our marine ecosystems affecting all types of marine life and inevitably, also the food we eat.
Read MoreWith Fashion Revolution week just around the corner we’ve got a lot on our minds about small changes we can make to help our clothes last longer and how we can positively impact the environment by changing the way we take care of the items we buy and make
Read MoreSave this guide to find out all the details about the fabrics you love!
Read MoreAmong the many tools and supplies you acquire in your sewing space, sewing machine needles are probably the most important thing to have on hand in the multiples. Different types of fabrics require different needles and when you inevitably break a needle, you will want to have multiple backups on hand so you can keep sewing. There are a wide variety of needles to choose from and understanding different needle types can make the difference between a smooth sewing experience and a frustrating one.
Read MoreBack to basics this week with a quick video tutorial on threading your machine. We’ve welcomed a lot of new sewists to the studio lately, including a new bunch of kids and we can’t stop thinking about all those basic steps in the sewing journey that can’t be overlooked.
Our weekly #WSThursdayTips blog series gives us the opportunity to share our sewing expertise with the community and we love the chance to pump you full of confidence with all of our tips and tricks. We love hearing when you save tips for future reference and we also want to let you know that you can search for our tips on Instagram with the hashtag #WSThursdayTips.
Read MoreWhat do you do when your machine acts up? Answer: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Unfortunately, turning it off and on again won’t do much except give the lightbulb a break (unless you have a computerized machine; then…maybe, it depends). When machines start acting up we have our go-to chain of solutions and we teach these troubleshooting steps in our Hello, Machine class and Kids Sewing Series. We believe in teaching our students to solve their own machine problems by helping them identify what’s going wrong and giving them strategies to fix it. When you come to a class our goal is to always set you up for success so you can feel confident sitting in front of your machine at home.
Read MoreWe’ve been doing these tips for over a year and I can’t believe we’ve never talked specifically about pattern markings. If you are just starting out, using a sewing pattern can be intimidating and deciphering all the markings can sometimes be overwhelming. This post is a great place to start if you want to understand what you are looking at when you use a sewing pattern for the first time.
Read MoreA few weeks back we started a beginner tips series with a blog post about pinning. Katherine talked about different types of pins and highly recommended investing in good, sharp pins! I concur. Sharp pins make all the difference. If you missed it, find part one on pinning here.
Read MoreEven if you are a beginner you have probably come across the term interfacing or stabilizer in sewing pattern instructions or in sewing blog posts. Interfacing comes in a variety of forms and selecting the right type for a project can be a bit intimidating for the new sewist. Interfacing can be described as a layer added to a garment to add stability, crispness or for longevity. It can simply be an added layer of fabric like muslin or cotton sandwiched between layers of fabric. This type of application would be considered “sew-in” interfacing. Where the added layer must be hand tacked or machine basted to hold it in place. There are many different kinds of sew-in interfacing and some you can buy in yardage as well.
Read MoreIf you’ve been sewing for a long time, you’ve probably never thought twice about how to wind a bobbin. But did you know that if you wind it at high speed the thread can actually stretch out and affect your stitch quality?!
All purpose polyester thread has a bit of stretch which allows it to withstand some pressure when putting that garment on. If you wind your bobbin at high speed the thread is pulled faster and stretches, causing it to wind unevenly. When you sew, the bobbin thread has a chance to relax in the seam making it look wavy or have small loops on the underside which can be confused as a tension problem when really it’s a bobbin winding problem.
Read MoreBreathable, durable, versatile, crisp, hardwearing. These are just some of the ways you could describe cotton fabrics. Cotton is an extremely versatile fibre, especially when blended with other fibres to create a myriad of beautiful fabrics for many different sewing applications. Cotton is pervasive in the textile world but its production has a sordid history and it’s no secret that cotton requires a lot of water for both its crop and the many manufacturing processes required to get the fibres from boll to finished textile.
Read MoreSo, you’ve just finished sewing your first seam and you might be wondering, now what?! The last thing you want is for your garment to start unraveling at the seams so the next important sewing step is to finish those raw edges.
Read MoreWhen you learn something new you will undoubtedly come across terms and concepts that you’ve never seen before or may have heard of before but never really understood. Learning to sew is no different! There’s tons of new vocabulary to learn and that’s why we are here. We really hope this series of tips give you beginner sewists some confidence to start your first project or keep plugging away at that new thing you are tackling. This week we discuss the term “seam allowance” and why it is important for sewing success!
Read MoreIf you are just getting into sewing you may have seen the term “grainline” floating around and showing up on almost every pattern piece you work with. It is typically marked by a long straight line with an arrow on each end. The grainline indicates how you should position the pattern piece on the fabric. For pattern pieces cut on the fold the grainline is the “cut on fold” line with arrows indicating which edge is placed on the fold. If you are new to this term and aren’t sure why grainlines are important then read on, my friend.
Read MoreLast week marked one year of Thursday Tips which also means it’s been about a year since I (Hali) started working alongside Katherine at Winnipeg Sews. At the time we officially met, I had just gotten into garment sewing, had printed a few patterns through WS and had already made my own big career shift; starting a pattern drafting/textiles course and a crash course in starting a small business. I decided pretty quickly that going it alone wasn’t my jam so I reached out to Katherine and the rest is history!
Read MoreWow! We can’t believe it’s been a whole year of these weekly posts. Swipe to see YOUR TOP 5 TIPS! Based on likes, shares, and saves, we collected five of our most popular tips from the past year. Most of all, thank you for following along, being a part of our community and telling others about us! We have grown so much despite the challenges of this year and we are forever grateful.
Read MoreWe’ve got another quick scrap busting project for you! Make use of those smaller scraps to make any size of bookmark you like! This is a fairly simple project that could be hand sewn as well. Or, get your kid involved and they can make their own teacher gifts this year. How great would that be!?
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