Tips & Tricks: How to be a speedy sewer

When it comes to sewing, sometimes, it feels like there just really aren’t enough hours in the day, right? from distractions at work, to simply having to be responsible when you get home, a lot of the time life can just get in the way of your hobby. This week, we’re sharing our top tips for super sewing productivity, so you can feel like you’re getting the most out of any sewing time – no matter how big or small of a window!

Batch cutting

Let’s be honest, cutting out is not the most fun part of any sewing project. To ramp up the productivity, we quite often like to sit in front of the TV and cut on the floor with a cup of tea during the week, that way, when it comes to the weekend and it’s time to sew, you can get stuck straight in because everything is ready to go!

Skip the scissors

Rather than pinning you pattern pieces to the fabric and then tirelessly going around the edges with scissors, simply lay your fabric and pattern pieces onto a cutting mat, add some pattern weights and take a sharp, 45mm rotary blade to them. If you struggle to keep a straight edge or you’d like to keep those curves perfect, invest in a metre rule and a French seam which will help you to keep it crisp.

Go pinless

We know, we know. Whenever we mention this to the non- convert ed, they look at us like we’re absolutely mad. Don’t get us wrong, we know pinning can help, but often, they can distort the fabric, break the needles on your sewing machine and it takes AGES to sew the simplest straight seam when you have to stop every 10 seconds to remove the pins – try it we think you’ll love it!

Bye bye back stitch

Nobody wants their seams to come apart, we get it, but if you look at the construction of your garment, you’ll quite quickly notice that if you’re sewing a skirt for example and you stitch the side seam, it’ll be locked off by your finished hem. Save yourself a few seconds at the start of each stitch by just going straight on through!

Batch sew and press

Back to batch. If you’ve got all your pieces cut, why not ‘get into the zone’ and take all your pieces and do all of the darts at once? or if you’re about to finish up, add all of the zips to all of the pieces so that you are able to cut down on the time fiddling about swapping between feet. The same with pressing seams, although most instructions will tell you to press in between steps, use your keen sewers eyes to select areas that you can finish in bulk and then steam all at once.

These tips and more are the reason we’re able to chuck in a sneaky sew every now and then and of course as with anything, preparation is always key.