Sewing Back-to-School: Hand Sewing

This post is part of the Sewing Back-to-School series, 30 days of helpful sewing articles by guest bloggers. Feel free to check out the original Sewing Back-to-School post for schedule and previous posts!

Kaelin from The Plaid Scottie always has a lot of great things going on at her blog. Recently I joined in her Double Wedding Ring Quilt Along. I won a wristlet giveaway on her blog a little while back (actually, the exact same gray/yellow wristlet in the above photo! It’s *so* gorgeous!); you can now purchase sewing patterns in her Etsy shop for the Grab ‘n Go Wristlet and also for the Color Burst quilt. Stop by her blog and say hello!

Hello all! This is Kaelin from The Plaid Scottie and, you guessed it, I’m here to teach you a little bit about hand sewing. Back when I picked up the quilting “habit” 5 years ago, I actually started out hand-sewing all of my quilts. We were broke newlyweds in graduate school, plus we lived in a 500 sq. ft. apartment, so there was barely enough room for the two of us and our school books, let alone a sewing machine!

So first things first. Here are the basic tools you’ll need for hand-sewing. As you can see, it’s not very much, and what is there is fairly small, so hand-sewing is very travel friendly and great for long car trips!

I have two types of thread pictured, because it all depends on your preference. Personally, I recommend buying hand-quilting thread because it rarely frays or knots and will save you a lot of headaches. But if you really don’t want to go out and buy new supplies, you can always use regular machine thread and run it through some beeswax (the round yellow thing) to strengthen it.

I’ll be showing you 3 hand stitches today that have proved to be the most useful to me throughout the years: the basic running stitch, the back stitch, and the ladder stitch (for binding). Parden my hideous color choices, but I thought the pink felt and green embroidery thread would provide more contrast than regular thread and quilting cotton 🙂

The first stitch I’ll be showing you is a basic running stitch. It’s fairly self-explanatory, and basically the goal is to keep your stitches nice and even. You want the space in-between the stitches to equal the length of the stitches themselves. But before that, we need to learn how to knot our thread. Take the end of your thread, and loop it around your finger 2-3 times.

Carefully slide the loops off the end of your finger, run the end of the thread through all the loops, and pull the end until you have a tight knot. Clip the excess thread below the knot and thread your needle.

When you’re finished with your stitch, you’ll need to tie it off (make sure the stitch ends on the back side of the back side of the fabric). Make a small stitch close to your last stitch, and pull it until a small loop remains.

Run your needle through the loop, and then under the tail end of your thread. Pull tight to make a knot and clip the excess.

BACK STITCH

The back stitch is very similar to the running stitch, except that you initiate your stitches from the left rather than the right. Bring the needle up through the back of the fabric, hiding your knot, a little to the left of where you want your first stitch to be (look down at the running stitch, and notice how my needle lines up with the end of that first stitch).

Take the needle down through the fabric behind the stitch you just made.

Now, when you bring your needle back up through the fabric, you’ll start from the left again, overshooting by a little bit to allow room for you to make another stitch to the right.

When you’re finished, the back stitch and running stitch will probably look exactly the same from the front.

But if you flip your fabric over, you can see that they look quite different.
The back stitch is one of the sturdiest hand stitches (much stronger
than your basic running stitch) because it interlocks your stitches. Whenever someone has torn their clothing at work and frantically comes to me for help, I normally use the back stitch because it will be a lot harder for them to tear the second time!

LADDER STITCH

The ladder stitch is probably the stitch I use most often, because it’s handy for binding quilts and closing up the opening in bags once you’ve finished and turned them right-side out. Now, pretend that you need to hand-sew the back of your binding, and that folded piece of felt at the top of the photo is your binding. The single layer of felt below that is your backing fabric.

Lift up the “binding” and bring your needle up through the bottom to hide your knot.

Bring your needle back down through the “backing fabric” directly below your first stitch without touching the binding. Do not start pulling the thread through – because once your needle is in the backing fabric, you’re going to turn it to the left and about 1/4″ over, push it back up through the backing and the binding in one fell swoop.

Pull your fabric taut, and it should look something like this.

Repeat the process by taking the needle back down through the backing, then turn and push it back up through both layers.

Once you have a couple of stitches under your belt, it should look a little something like this (except that it will be practically invisible, because you won’t be using green thread with pink fabric *wink*)…

And there you have it! With these three stitches, you can conquer most basic and intermediate hand-sewing projects. If you’re interested in learning more basic stitches, I have a tutorial available on my blog on how to sew hexagons using a whipstitch.

Happy Sewing!