Making Sewing Together Easier

Dear users, dear authors,
how can you make sewing handmade projects together easier?

It always depends on what you want to sew together. If it’s woolen items like knitted or crocheted pieces, it’s best to use a wool needle and wool thread to sew them together; there are several methods, which in turn depend on the specific item you’ve made. For example, the mattress stitch or the overcast stitch.
When sewing with a sewing machine, it’s easier: you place the pieces right sides together. If you’re not experienced, baste and pin them together first, then sew them together on the machine. Personally, I skip the basting; I pin them occasionally, but that depends on the fabric. If the fabric is quite slippery, I pin it or use clips and then sew it. For me, it’s usually enough to just pin at the registration marks—like when setting in a sleeve—and then sew.
Since I sew a lot with my coverlock machine, I have the advantage that sewing and finishing the edges happen in one go, so I usually skip pinning or clipping, not to mention basting. But here’s the thing: I trained as a DOB seamstress—that is, an industrial seamstress for women’s fashion—where there’s neither the time nor the opportunity to waste time pinning or basting, because we worked on a piecework basis on the assembly line, and time was money. Eventually, that becomes second nature, and you don’t even think about it much anymore.

Best regards, Inge

These days, knitted items are almost always knitted in one piece and without a seam. That way, you don’t have to sew anything together at all. But of course, it can also be a bit boring to have nothing but top-down raglans in your closet and, for example, not a single “classic” cardigan with set-in sleeves.

When sewing knitted pieces together, I think it’s important to have neat edge stitches. By that I mean, above all, enough edge stitches. If you always just slip the first stitch of a row, you’ll end up with only half as many edge stitches as there are rows. That results in a loose, holey seam. That’s why, wherever there’s a seam and wherever stitches need to be picked up (e.g., a button placket), I always knit all the edge stitches in both right-side and wrong-side rows.
It never ceases to amaze me how little interest there is in even trying this out.