 Hi you guys, welcome to the Sew Along for the Seamwork for Inky Dress. I am Lindsay, the host here at Inside the Hem, and I am happy to walk you through how to make this really, really super cute dress. These kinds of patterns are so fun for me because you get to utilize so many fun, unique sewing skills and magical moments. Like there's just gonna be a lot of fun sewing ahead. In this video, we are going to be pretty much preparing the front bodice. Get your sewing caps on and let's get going. Okay, you're going to surge or zigzag or even turn back like this and hem the long unnotched edge of the front facing. And that's gonna prepare us for attaching it to the bias neckline of the top. Go ahead and grab some stay tape as well. We are gonna use this when we attach it to the neckline. We're gonna use this just as extra reinforcement that the interfacing is gonna do a little bit of the work, but this is going to really ensure that our V neckline never stretches out even though it's on this bias cut, this angle. This is gonna make sure that those stay nice and beautiful throughout time, whether you wear it a bunch, whether you wash it a bunch, no matter what happens. So I'm just gonna cut a couple pieces of those and have those ready to go as well for when we attach this to the neckline. But first things first, before we do any of that, we have to go to step number three, which is to stay stitch this thing to death. We're stay stitching a lot of stuff. We're doing the yoke neckline. Okay, so all through here. So this is my yoke. I am gonna start at one shoulder and stay stitch this, come all the way down, come to the center front, break my stitching. Then I'm gonna come to the other side, come all the way down from starting from this shoulder, all the way down to the center and break my stitching. So one of them is gonna be face up and then the other one at your machine is gonna be face down. That's how you start at the shoulder on each one. So we're gonna do D, which is the yoke. We're gonna do A along the center front here. And this is when I would go ahead and attach this to the stay stitching, okay? So when you're stay stitching, you're also attaching your stay tape. We are gonna do F, which is the facing. We're gonna do both of the top and bottom edges. So you're doing this little guy here and this guy down here, okay? And what else? E, so the midriff piece gets interfaced. I'm sorry, stay stitched. And that is gonna be similar to the back. I'm sorry, similar to the yoke. You're gonna start at one side seam and come up to the middle, break your stitches, start at the other side seam, come up and break your stitches. And again, you're gonna do one face up and then one is gonna be face down at your machine. As the instructions state, a stay stitch is a seam line at your normal stitch length at a scant. They say quarter inch, I go scant eighth of an inch. Like I try and get it really, really close to our five eighths. So I'm doing it at like a half or maybe even between a half and five eighths. I want it to be really, really close to the actual seam line because that's the part that we don't want to stretch and that's what stay stitching does. Stay stitching prevents the fabric from stretching out over time. And then in areas where it's super possible, we add the stay tape, like the front neck. Okay, so again, for stay stitching you're using your normal stitch length. Don't judge me, but I like a longer stitch length, okay? I use a 3.5. It's one millimeter more than you're probably using. It's not that big a deal. And then I'm gonna move my needle over. That's it. Okay, so that's gonna make it my seam one millimeter closer to the raw edge than if I weren't to have moved that. So it is going to be very close, very, very close to my actual seam line and that's what I want. Okay, don't forget to apply your stay tape to the front edge of the bodice at your seam line, but I try and get it, man, this is very sticking together. I try and get it so that the needle is gonna go through the left-ish side of the stay tape. That way it doesn't create extra bulk. So that's my stay stitching on top of my stay tape. Okay, so now this seam line is going, the stretch that was here on this bias is all gone. It won't stretch out anymore. One more thing I wanna point out with stay stitching is that obviously we're trying to remove the stretch element through all of these areas, right? So when you are running this through your machine, you're really not pulling here or in the back. You're just letting it glide through and kind of going slow because the feed dogs will cause there to be some tension in the fabric as well if you go too fast. So take your time with it. You really wanna be gentle with the fabric at this point to ensure that there's no stretching at all. After you got the stay stitching in, you can kind of be as rough as you want. While you're doing this, this is also a really great opportunity for you to double check that your needle and everything is operating correctly. If you hear, mostly you can hear it when your needle needs to be replaced, whether it's dull, like old, or if it's not the right type. I'm using for this lightweight fabric, a Microtex needle, but if you hear any popping or you feel it pulling, like not breaking the weave of the fabric, but whenever it puts the needle down, it's almost like pulling the threads in the weave, then you need to change your needle. So we're gonna grab our bodice pieces, and you can see that to stay organized, because these pieces are very drapey, it's kind of hard to see what's what, you know? So in order to make sure everything's organized, I, after I stay stitch them, I place them on top of their corresponding pattern paper pieces, so that now I know this is A, okay? So I'm gonna grab A, and we are gonna attach the facing F to the center front neckline right sides together through here, and it's gonna be the notched edge where you want the notch on this side and the angled edge to be down here. I always pin in this order, I will pin on the top, I will pin on the bottom of the seam, I will pin the notch, and the notch is here, matching it up there, because those are the three anchor points that we know for sure that they go together. We know the edges go together, and we know the notch goes together, pin in between. If there was supposed to be some easing or some gathering, you'll see that coming up on the shoulder seam, I would be doing that here as well, but these should all be like one-to-one, there shouldn't be any extra space. If you're having a hard time getting your facing to line up like this, your facing probably grew while you were adding your interfacing. So take it off, compare it against this pattern piece, and trim off any of the length where it got too long. It happens a lot, especially depending on the quality of your interfacing. I only use heat and bond. If you put your iron down and you move it, like you slide it, that's when it starts to stretch out, especially on these lightweight fabrics, especially on a bias seam, which your facing piece was cut on. So if you're sliding your iron, that can cause it to stretch, you really need to press it down, lift, move, and press it down. It's like pressing, not ironing. All right, so we're gonna sew those down, and then the next step is to trim and grade, but they also are illustrating understitching. So we're gonna do all of that, both bodice pieces over at the machine. Trimming and grading. So when you are trimming, both of these pieces get cut essentially in half. The seam allowance gets removed by half. So I'm gonna be cutting both of them about a quarter of an inch I'm taking off. Then the piece that lays closest to your body gets trimmed again by another half. So for this one, that's the facing. The facing ends up touching you. So you take that and you trim off maybe an eighth of an inch of that. Okay, now we understitch. Understitching means you're gonna take your seam allowances and they are gonna be folded toward the facing, and we're stitching them down to the facing. So if you have a machine foot that has like a little, I don't know what you wanna call that little thing, a little tail or a little fin, little fish fin, that would go on the bottom and you can run that right in your seam line, place your needle just a little bit to the inside of the facing side. And then this will be a perfectly straight line every single time. Okay, it's gonna be hard to see it on my right side because the thread matches, but you can see they're really beautiful set of stitches. And this is gonna cause the facing to roll to the inside and take that seam allowance or the seam line with it so you never see the seam line from the outside. All right, if you've ever done one of my sew-alongs before, you know I'm a bit of a shortcut girly or a work smarter, not harder type person. So the next section is about gathering the front, but gathering is especially at the sewing machine is so tedious just sewing those three lines of stitching over and over again. So I'm just gonna get it all out of the way now. All right, so what you are about to gather, we're gonna skip around in the instructions. We're not gonna totally follow them. We will pick up with attaching the bodice to the mid-drip and all that in the next video. For the rest of today and the rest of this video, we're just gonna be gathering the following. We are gonna be gathering the front piece A between these two notches and you're doing a row of basting, which is the longest stitch length you have. For most people it's five, it might be four depending on your machine. You're doing one at three eighths, one at five eighths and one at seven eighths. So a quarter inch in between each one. All right, so you're doing that here between these notches. You're doing it on your shoulder seam between the shoulder notches here and here. Then you are gonna go ahead and do it as well to the tops of your skirt pattern. And before you're like, oh, but wait, you know, the instructions have us sew the skirt panels together first and then gather them. I actually prefer to not gather an entire skirt in one gathering stitch. For me, it's too much to manage. I like to break it up either into quarters if it's just a two piece skirt or in this example, I will break it up into each individual section. So even though eventually we will sew the vertical seams of the skirt, I'm gonna go ahead and gather them. And furthermore, so I just wanna kind of get ahead of this a little bit so that whenever I'm in the groove and like we're moving forward with everything in the next few videos, I'm not having to stop and do this boring, tedious thing of doing the gathers. So I'm gonna go ahead and just do them all and get them all out of the way. That way it's waiting for me and I can just keep doing the fun stuff. That's kind of how my brain works. Okay, so to get this midriff attached to the bodice, we are gonna take one of the midriff pieces and one of the bodice pieces. And we're gonna place them right sides together, placing the bottom of the bodice piece on the top of the midriff piece, where the facing is on the highest peak of the midriff piece and the side seams are matching. So again, just like I did for the facing piece, I'm gonna pin each edge, the facing gets turned toward the inside and that's what gets placed exactly along that stay stitching line that you made in the last video. Like so and I just really, really wanna make sure I have the edge of this right on the cross section of these two stay stitching lines. So once I got the side seam and the center front done, this is whenever we start pulling up our basting stitches, our gathering stitches and because I anchored one side, I'm gonna find the one with the long tails and we're gonna pull that until the bodice matches the midriff. So that's a little too much. Can you see how the midriff is too big now? So I'm gonna distribute these and let out some of them until they come together and they're also even, like so. And then we go and stitch all of this in place. So we're gonna stitch from the raw edge over here through all of our gathering and we are gonna stop that stitching right at the dot or right at where these two things cross over each other. Okay, once that side is done, you have this. Okay, now we're gonna do the same thing for the other half of the bodice. Okay, and now this midriff piece has to be right side up. So in order to do that, you kinda have to take the bodice you just put and lay it over top of it, then you can take your bodice piece and now you can lay that, again, right along that intersection where those two things meet, where the two stay stitching lines meet, keeping the other bodice kind of out of the way like that. Now we pin this in place and do the same here. It's gonna feel really bulky underneath your fingers here, but at the seam line, it should be totally free. Okay, now grab the midriff and you're gonna do the other side seam, like so. And then we're gonna pull up our threads and match our notches just like we did before. All right, now go stitch that in place. Okay, now we want to double check that at our seam line, where those two things come together, you get a perfect point and that nothing's really crossed over and there's no pucker in this at all. To take the other midriff piece and pinning it into place along here. So the ultimate goal where we're going with this is to have these seam allowances, like sandwich in between this, where all the raw edges are going to the inside. The way that you do that, because this clearly isn't it, neither is that, that's not it. So you've gotta turn these bodice pieces back underneath the garment so that all you have exposed is the midriff, the outer midriff. Then you're gonna take your inner midriff and it's gonna go right side facing up and then this whole thing lays on top. So now you have the bodice sandwiched in between all of your midriff pieces. That's what you wanna check for. You want it to be inner midriff, bodice, outer midriff. It's not a terrible idea if you're nervous to go ahead and baste this first and then do your final stitching. Another helpful tool while you're here is an awl because you can take the awl and that acts as a very sharp pointer finger to ensure that you're getting the needle exactly where you want it to go and that the fabric is laying flat and you're not getting any puckers. So that's the point. So now needle down, lift your presser foot, rotate and you're gonna come down the other way, again, making sure that everything is out of the way. If you feel it in there, it's probably in your seam line. Okay, so now that you've got this, you wanna double check your work, pull all your pins out. If you don't already, I know I have a bad habit of sewing over my pins, I'm sorry. Okay, and then you wanna peek in here and you wanna see how everything looks. At this point, you should have your midriff, should be wrong sides together and when you pull your bodice out, you should have a beautiful little peek on the inside, or that's the outside and the inside should be beautifully encased as well. And then when we go and trim these seam allowances, this little pouch that it's creating, this little bit of bulk, that'll all go away. You just wanna make sure you don't have any puckers. So I'm good, so I'm gonna ping this down. I'm gonna do a slightly smaller seam allowance than I normally would, especially throughout the point here, cause I want it to be really tight. All right, was that fun? All right, so now we're going to trim our seam allowances. They also say to grade, that might be a little bit tricky, we will see. I'm using my serrated scissors, these are from Kai. I'll put a link in the description box where you can grab them, but they just make really great work of grabbing this very like slippery fabric and making sure nothing slips. So I'm just gonna take this back by half and we're cutting through all the layers. So even the gathering stitches, making sure your bodice is free from this section. Obviously you don't wanna, you'd have a hole, you'd have to start over. That would be awful, we don't want that. Okay, so through here, okay, all of that comes away. Now we're gonna go down the other side like so. Now we need to address this, the point that's just gonna get clipped off right there. And then I'll also come in and just make that really small, like so. For your curved areas, you can come in and clip those. Now you pull all this out and you should have very little amount of bulk here. That little pouch we had should be totally gone. All right, we did it. So now we are gonna baste the midriff, the bottom of the midriff down. You want to maybe, maybe go ahead and press this too lightly, just to keep everything nice and even as we continue along, because we are not done with this bodice yet. I know you probably think that was the hard part. And in a way, the hard part is over. If you have ever done, if you've ever done burrito method before, for a yoke or a bodice lining, the rest, if you've done that, the rest will be smooth sailing. If you haven't, stick around. If you've made it this far, we all deserve a pat on the back. That midriff is not for the faint of heart, congratulations. But the hard stuff isn't necessarily over. I shouldn't say hard, I should say fun. The fun stuff isn't over. In the next video, we're gonna be attaching the yolks and then also attaching the back. But yeah, go ahead and finish up your front bodice and I'll meet you back here for the next video where we will finish up the entire bodice.