Sewing Tips

One common question from our students is: “How do I get better at sewing straight?” It sounds simple, but it’s one of those foundational skills that makes a huge difference to the finish of your garment seams and hems.

Sewing straight isn’t about perfection, it’s about a few key habits and techniques that make everything feel more controlled and consistent. Here are our tips to help you stay straight on your seam allowance.

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1. Let Your Seam Guides Do the Work

Your sewing machine already has built-in helpers, those lines etched into the needle plate are your seam guides. Instead of focusing on the needle, guide your fabric so the raw edge runs consistently along your chosen seam allowance line.

No visible guides? No problem. A simple strip of washi tape placed at your desired seam allowance works just as well and gives you a clear visual path to follow.

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2. Set Yourself Up Properly

Your positioning matters more than you might think. Sit close enough to your machine so you’re not reaching or straining, and line yourself up so the needle is directly in front of you (directly in front of your nose!).

This alignment helps you look straight down at your seam guides, making it much easier to keep your stitching accurate.

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3. Stop Watching the Needle

It’s tempting to stare at the needle, but that’s actually what throws you off. Instead, keep your eyes on the fabric as it moves along the seam guide.

A helpful trick is to focus slightly in front of the needle and a couple of centimetres closer to you. This wider view helps you anticipate movement and stay on track.

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4. Guide, Don’t Control

If your fabric needs a bit more control, use both hands, one in front of the presser foot and one behind it to gently guide the fabric.

Keep your fingers soft – the key word here is gently. Don’t pull or hold the fabric back. Let the machine feed it through at its own pace while your hands simply steer. Think of it like guiding, not driving.

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5. Check Your Presser Foot Pressure

For long, straight seams, make sure your presser foot pressure is set firmly. This helps the machine feed the fabric evenly and reduces the chance of slipping or uneven stitching (note that not all machines have adjustable presser foot pressure).

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Mastering straight stitching takes a bit of practice, but once these habits click, you’ll notice a huge improvement in your confidence and your results. Slow it down and trust the process.

The edges of woven fabrics will fray unless they are finished or covered by a lining. Fraying is the ravelling of fabric edges that occurs. Some fabrics will fray more than others.

Some of the most common methods you can use to finish the edge of your fabrics to prevent this fraying include: trimming with pinking shears, overlocking, binding, constructing French seams and overcasting.

[Read more…] about Prevent your fabric from fraying

Have you seen the note on the fabric requirements: *with nap or *without nap? 

“Nap” means that the tiny fibres lie in one direction on the surface of a fabric.

[Read more…] about With or without nap?

When you are following sewing patterns, you may come across the instruction to stay-stitch an edge (often a curved neckline is stay-stitched), but what on earth does that mean? We are here to help!

[Read more…] about What is stay-stitching?

Thread Den suggests a fat quarter as the fabric requirement for the week 1 workshop in our Sewing Basics for Beginners Course. So, what is that and what does that mean?

A fat quarter is a pre-cut piece of fabric especially popular with quilters. It is an economical way to purchase small fabric requirements that have become standardised. Most fabric stores that cater to quilters will have a wide range of fat quarters available either in bundles of complementary colours and designs or sold individually.

A fat quarter is usually:

• 50cm x 50cm square (approximately)
• 100% cotton plain weave fabric
• Cut on the straight grain and including the selvedge on one side of the square

A fat quarter is cut by; first cutting half a metre of quilting fabric off the bolt (producing a rectangle), then cutting that directly in half (achieving a square).

The size of the square produced is not exact because:

• In the USA the first cut is half a yard (45cm) not half a metre (50cm)
• The width of a bolt of fabric varies

Image from The Fabric Fox UK.

For best results, wash and press your fabric before class. You should launder your fabric exactly how you plan to wash and care for your finished garment.

Fabric should be pre-washed to pre-shrink, to remove the chemicals from the manufacturing process and wash out any dirt. Have you noticed how much softer your fabrics can feel after washing? That is due to sizing. Applying a sizing agent (a bit like starch) improves the strength and helps the fabric resist the mechanical stress applied through the manufacturing process.

Most fabrics from natural fibres shrink when you wash them. Cotton fabrics often shrink around 5%, however, shrinkage up to 10% is not uncommon.

Super quick and in some pics, here are our top bobbin threading tips:

Avoid layering up threads on your bobbins. When you get to the end of the outer thread (white in our picture), a knot can easily be created as the needle thread tries to pick up the end of the white thread and the beginning of the yellow thread all at once.

Don’t leave a long thread tail after loading up your bobbin. Each time the machine rotates the needle thread around the bobbin, it will try to pick up both the working end and the tail end of the thread. Instead, snip off the tail thread close to the bobbin.

The thread in our picture isn’t neat, the threads crisis cross each other which will encourage skipped stitches. Double-check your manual to ensure you are threading up correctly to perfectly fill a bobbin with thread.

If your thread feels squishy on the bobbin or you can easily separate threads like in our picture, you will likely be missing a tension guide when threading your bobbin.

If you are following all the guides on your machine and pulling the thread into the bobbin thread tension guide you should have a good-looking bobbin, ready for a great session of sewing!

These are the top tips for cutting out your fabric that we share when you join a sewing workshop at Thread Den. Doing a great job of cutting out all your pattern pieces before you even start sewing will help the rest of your project go smoothly.