1 Stitch for Stretch

Maybe you’ve already heard me say it, but apparel sewing is really quite simple.

As your teacher, I want you to know you don’t have to master the world or complicate things to create what you love.

& as a successful designer, I’ve created incredible pieces with just a few types of stitches for 20+ years.

We can complicate apparel sewing, like all things, but you can just as easily make magical garments with 3 simple stitches & 1 buttonhole stitch sequence or function.

What follows is a tale about being outwitted by a machine with far too many stitches for simple apparel needs:

I am big on dreaming about a piece for as long as it takes first…

Well I’d taken a solid year, I’d dreamed, planned, and sketched my ideas. I’d sat with it. I planned the perfect pattern that sang its song of my deeper design theme. I ordered the custom print (print! I almost never do prints…) on swimsuit fabric. This was going to be the swim top I could not find.

I was ready to make it. I started draping it on the dress form. I cut out the pieces -but we ran out of time before we left for vacation last year.

Have you been there? Itching to complete a creative project but away from home & your tools? Last summer, in desperation, while on vacation at the (great) North Shore in Minnesota I’d even hand-sewn some of it after being thwarted by my mother-in-law’s sewing machine. Somehow I thought I would simultaneously keep my toddler from falling from volcanic rock into the deep & cold lake Superior, and finish my swim top by hand (delusional) so clearly, it remained unfinished.

Fast forward to this January. We were set to go to Cumberland Island and this swim top would be going with me. So I grabbed my grandmother’s old Bernina machine and proceeded to finish it.

—sewing info & tip: You just need a good old fashioned zig-zag stitch & a ball-point needle in your sewing machine when sewing super stretchy fabric. When I hand stitched the sleeves in MN, I just left enough looseness in my running stitch to allow for the fabric to stretch.

No matter what I did, the simple zig zag stitch was incredibly wobbly. It was simply not straight.

Now I’m not going to ever be confused as the world’s greatest sewist, but y’all, this was a waving, bobbing, zig-zagged tragedy. Seam ripping zig zag is just no fun on the best of days, on the wavy days, it’s intensely frustrating. I thought, man, I have really become a sloppy sewist, OR this machine really really needs to go in for a tune-up.

I did what I want everyone to do when things are frustrating and not working out, I put it down & went to bed.

The next day I returned to work on it and let out a belly laugh. This old Bernina has a manual switch that gives you about 40 more stitch options on top of the 40 it has on its home board. I had accidentally hit the switch & was in 2nd tier. I was literally stitching with a waving zig-zag stitch function and not just your run-of-the-mill good old straight-shooting zig zag.

I wasn’t awful, the machine didn’t need a tune-up. This stitch meant to look like that.

After I stopped laughing I found myself annoyed. I thought: who wants to sew wavy zig-zags? For what purpose? Ever?

(& it’s ok if you do want to sew with a wavy zig zag, it just doesn’t have a use in the constructing apparel process.)

Honestly? I left most of the subtly curvy seams because of the nature of my design and the stretch, I knew it only mattered so much.

Moral to the story: Simple is brilliant. We need to master all of 4 simple stitches for apparel sewing.

& most often, if you are having a truly hard time sewing, it’s probably not you.

Even if your seams are wobbly, your clothes will still be beautiful if you’ve done the dreaming, planning & tweaking work.

Here it is -my beautiful, comfortable, well fitting swim top. Wavy seams and all:

My swim top is unique and looks a bit like a crossover regular top. That crossover gives my ample bosom support in conjunction with the superpower mesh lining.

When you design, you make the rules.