This is the latest of the ‘basic sewing skills’ post to help you mend clothes rather than chucking them out. This week is about mending a gap that has appeared in a seam of garment, for example, a shirt, a skirt or a pair of trousers, without the use of a sewing machine. The gap in the seam might look like this:
1 Go to the inside of the garment and take a look at the threads at the top and bottom of the gap. You need to pull both threads through to one side of the seam (on the reverse of the garment), tie the ends of the threads together with a double knot (= tying twice) as seen below. Then trim the threads to 5mm.
Do the same with the threads at the other end of the gap. This will secure the threads so they don’t come away any further.
2 Thread a needle with thread that matches the colour in the original seam and tie a single knot at the end of the thread.
Mending a seam – tying a knot in your thread, photo by Amanda Jane Ogden
3 Start to stitch 5mm beyond the knot you made, so you are initially stitching on top of the machine-stitched seam and then carrying on into the gap. You need to use a backstitch. Come up through both layers of fabric and go back to where you started. Then come up again from underneath, a little further along the line and go back to the end of the previous stitch. This makes a secure seam which mimics a machine-stitched one. You can see a demonstration of backstitch as an embroidery stitch on my YouTube channel here – just make sure you use ordinary sewing thread to do the mending.
Mending a seam – using a backstitch along the gap in the seam, photo by Amanda Jane Ogden
4 Continue with small backstitch stitches until 5mm beyond the tied-off threads of the original seam. Then finish off your sewing thread by doing two small stitches on top of each other on the spot before cutting the thread. On the right side of the garment the gap will be closed, as shown below.
As a quilt-maker, I have a large collection of sample quilts – either ones that I designed for my own patterns, to put in my Etsy shop Amanda Jane Textiles or ones which I designed for quilting and sewing magazines. Many of these sample quilts (all unique one-off designs) are for sale in my other Etsy shop Amanda Handmade Quilts. Click here to see what is still available, including – at the time of writing – the superking size quilt below.
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