You Should Learn To Sew

1621 words | ~ 8 min read | Aug 7, 2020 | last modified Aug 8, 2020 |

What are the most important General Life Skills that everyone should know? Or, to put it another way, if you could design the ideal Home Ec class, and Home Ec classes existed anymore, what would you teach?

Well, cooking, probably. How to clean the bathroom and do the dishes and wash your clothes. Enough general handyperson skills that you can put together flat-pack furniture and hang curtains and wall art and do minor repairs. If you have a bike or car, you should probably know how to maintain it, or at least what symptoms mean you should take it into the shop.

I would argue that you should also know how to sew. By hand, with a needle and thread, because sewing machines are expensive and hard to store, but a needle and a spool of thread you can take anywhere. Why? Well, you wear clothes, right? Just like you should probably know how to maintain your bike or car if you have one, you should probably know how to make basic clothing repairs, many of which are easy and quick enough that you can do them by hand in an evening after watching like 2 YouTube videos. Adding patches to holes, reattaching belt loops and buttons, adding pockets to tragically under-pocketed womens' pants, making minor alterations like hemming pants and sleeves… if you’re feeling ambitious, you could also do slightly harder alterations like taking things in at the waist, but that’s out of scope for this post.

When I’m hand-sewing, I use a nice big sewing needle with a nice big eye that’s easy to thread. It may in fact be an embroidery needle. I use a spool of white mercerized cotton thread that I inherited from my grandma, along with the rest of her sewing supplies, because it’s very strong. You may want to get other colors of thread, like black and denim-blue, depending on what color your clothes are and how much you care about matching, but don’t compromise on strength. If you want to fix a specific item that’s a weird color, take it into your local store that sells sewing supplies so you can find a color-matching thread. Or, you know, if you don’t care that much you can just use white thread for everything, like me. You may also want a seam ripper, some straight or safety pins (I recommend safety if you have to pick one kind), and sewing scissors (these will dull rapidly if you cut paper with them, so keep them separate from your normal scissors).

You will want to know how to do a running stitch and a backstitch. Bernadette Banner can show you how. She uses very tiny needles and stitches; I am lazy, so I use (as mentioned above) a big chonker of a needle and long ugly stitches.

For additional strength, I typically sew with the thread doubled-up, which as a bonus makes it impossible for the needle to come unthreaded. Cut a length of thread, thread the needle, then move the needle to the middle of the length of thread and tie the ends together. When you start sewing, put this knot on the wrong side of your work (the side where you’re less worried about aesthetics, typically the back), but don’t pull it all the way tight against the fabric; leave a small loop. After you’ve made your first stitch, thread the needle through the loop. This makes a nice strong knot.

How to sew a patch: Cut a piece of fabric from a material that won’t fray on the edges (this way you don’t need to finish the edges). It should be a little larger than the hole all the way around – this is called a “seam allowance” because it’s the extra room you need for the seam to go in. If you have pins, pin the patch fabric in place. If you don’t, depending on where the hole is you can use magnets or paperclips or just go without. Stitch all the way around.

You can get special denim-patterned patches for denim jeans, which you would probably want to put on the outside. However, I also patched one of the holes in my jeans using a piece of black scrap fabric with shiny rainbow dots on it, which I put on the inside of the jeans so it shows through the hole. There’s no rules! Do whatever!

How to add a pocket, or make an existing but stupidly small pocket larger: Get a pocket lining material (should be thin-ish so it doesn’t add too much bulk and optimally not stretchy; I’d recommend some kind of woven cotton but I have also cut pocket material out of a career fair t-shirt that was too small). Decide how big you want your pocket to be – measure your phone or hand or whatever if you’re not sure. Add half an inch of seam allowance all the way around. Cut out two of those shapes. If it’s a rectangular pocket, you can also cut out one big long rectangle and fold over, and you have one less seam to sew. Sew up all the sides except for the top to make a kind of bag. If you’re extending an existing pocket, cut off or seam-rip the existing bottom seam, and attach your new bag to this raw edge (you probably want to put the pocket-inside sides together so the seam ends up on the outside of the pocket). If you’re adding a new pocket, pick a seam where you want to attach your pocket and seam-rip it open. Put the inside of the pocket-bag and the outside of the garment together, so that the seam ends up on the inside of the garment. You can watch Morgan Donner do some very neat pockets with a sewing machine here, but the principle is basically the same for hand-sewing pockets.

Reattaching buttons: Video here. Essentially, you sew it to the garment through the holes a bunch of times. Reattaching a belt loop is much the same, except that belt loops do not have convenient holes in them and they’re like a billion layers thick. I recommend getting a thimble, or using small pliers to push the needle through, if you’re reattaching a belt loop on jeans.

Hemming pants or sleeves: If there’s not a complicated cuff or anything that you want to preserve, you can fold up the extra material on the inside of the pant, then stitch around the edge. You can do a more complicated fold if you want to keep the original hem of, say, jeans. Button-down shirt sleeves, however, are complex enough that you might consider using a professional alterations shop1 (or just wear it permanently cuffed – a flannel shirt cuffed halfway between your wrists and elbows is a classic gay look). Use a running stitch for non-stretch fabric, or a zigzag stitch (exactly what it says on the tin) for stretch fabric.

If you search YouTube for sewing tutorials, you’ll find that a lot of them use a sewing machine and press things after every step and stuff like that. You don’t really need a sewing machine for basic repairs like the ones I’ve discussed in this post – you can do the same seams by hand. Pressing stuff will make it look neater, but it’s also really annoying (and you have to make sure to set the temperature correctly for your fabric type), so I typically don’t do it. But I also never weave in the ends on anything I knit or crochet to the point where I’ll just wear a sweater everywhere with strings hanging off of it, so take that with a grain of salt.

Other, non-clothing things I’ve used my sewing skills for: Repairing my roommate’s rocking chair (it’s a wooden frame with canvas stretched over it to form the seat and back, which tore). Attaching a loop of string to my bath towel so it hangs on a hook better. Embroidering my initials on a kitchen towel that I kept in my dorm’s communal kitchen. Making little quilts (I don’t have the patience for a whole quilt, and these are admittedly less useful but they ARE cuter). Adding a drawstring to a pride flag so I could use it as a curtain in my dorm room. Making a weighted blanket (much cheaper than buying one would’ve been). Fixing a pillow that had a blowout. Attaching a cheap fleece blanket to a comfy chair with really itchy upholstery I got for free when Stata was replacing everyone’s desk chairs. Attaching a nice edging to a cross-stitch where I stupidly went way too close to the edge of the aida so it was impossible to mount in a frame. Making miscellaneous bags. And, of course, finishing work on an untold number of knitting and crochet projects.

  1. If you’re not already hip to the concept of clothing alterations, and my primary audience of engineers probably isn’t: Off-the-rack clothes don’t really fit anyone very well. However, if you get something that fits you in key areas, a professional alterations person can cover up a multitude of other sins. Clothes fitting in the general sense is out of scope for this post, but a few general rules are that shirts/jackets need to initially fit in the shoulders (armscyes are hell to modify), pants should fit in the butt and thighs but they’re easy to hem or take in at the waist, and extra fabric can be removed but more cannot be conjured. Minor alterations can make a surprisingly large difference in how put-together you look, and they’re not that expensive, especially on a programmer salary. I really can’t evangelize this enough. ↩︎