 sewing skills series where today we're going to talk about gathering. We've already discussed pleats and we've discussed darts and so now we're moving on to gathers. And no skill can be executed well without the perfect tools. Clover will be sponsoring this entire series. If you don't know of Clover, they sell quilting supplies and a variety of sewing notions. They're the ones in the green and yellow packaging. I'm sure you've seen it before. They sent me a bunch of tools to be able to show you guys how to perform some of the skills that we are going to cover in this series. In addition to what they sent me, they also sent extras for one of you. In order to enter the giveaway, all you need to do is leave a comment on this video or any of the videos in the series. One comment per video gets you one entry for up to eight entries. Got it? I just wanted to show you a couple of examples of where you will find gathering in your sewing patterns. And maybe the more common one is when you are making a skirt or like in this case a little peplum and you gather that piece and you sew it to the bodice piece. It looks like this in the line drawings, not really a lot to go on other than you know as you can just tell it's kind of all ruffled up together there. This is another example of gathering here at the sleeve. The sleeve cap on this side is also gathered. So a few different examples in one pattern here. Another example is like in a tiered skirt like this one. This is all gathered. This is all gathered before it's attached to the main part of the skirt. But today I'm going to be working on simplicity 8789 where the gathering is occurring at the forward shoulder seam. So this is what we're going to be working on today. And don't be confused by this portion of the illustration. There's a difference between gathers and then like an elastic casing. So a casing is made here and that is what is bunching the fabric together. But here and also on the cuff those are gathers. And again here's what it looks like in the line drawings. And so I just got this copy of Threads magazine and in it flawless gathers has a method by Susan Kaley. So I'm gonna be kind of following that. I've read it thoroughly. There were some things I was already doing but also some things that she does a little bit differently. And that I really kind of appreciate the extra detail to something that's supposed to look really messy. You know what I mean? Like gathers are not supposed to be super super neat. But if you take the time they can look perfectly messy. Do you know what I'm saying? Okay so here is our pattern on our fabric. You can see I'm using that cheetah print that I didn't know what I was going to do with after I nixed it from the jumpsuit idea. But when you see a pattern piece and an area that is supposed to be gathered it will say gather in the area that is supposed to be gathered. So this is the bodice front and this is the bodice back. And what you will be able to tell from these two pieces is that the shoulder that is gathered is wider than the shoulder that is not gathered. So we're gonna be gathering between these two notches. And those two notches will eventually match up with our smaller back shoulder seam. So gathering is gonna make all of this much smaller so that it fits into the same area. And our two notches on each of the pattern pieces are what we are going to end up putting together. Okay so just how do you gather something? Like what is the the right way? So again here is our fabric and we are gonna be gathering between the two notches here. So the first step is to finish off your raw edges. We are gonna be handling and manipulating this area of the fabric a lot. So I like to say that you can just do a little zig zag stitch on your sewing machine or serger. Use your serger on the raw edge something just to make sure that these raw edges don't start to fray too too much. And then you're gonna transfer the notches that I talked about. We need to make those a little bit more visible and a little bit more permanent because whenever we finish off the raw edges here we're gonna lose the little snips that I put into the fabric. So I just take one of Clover's water-erasable marker pens and I'm just gonna kind of color around the notches so that I can see them really clearly whenever we go to gather this up together like so. And then after I serge the raw edges or finish them whatever way that you want. It's not really finishing it's more of just like a protecting them but I am going to sew a row of stitches at the seam line and then I'm gonna sew two more rows of stitches within the seam allowance that are equal distance apart. So if my seam allowance is 5 eighths of an inch I'll do one at 5 eighths and then I'll do one at one quarter and one half all in from the raw edge. So I have three stitches and I think one of the interesting parts about the Susan Kaylee article in threads was that she said that gathering stitches we've been taught all along that you're supposed to put your machine on the longest stitch that it has and that is your gathering stitch but she actually recommends testing out a few different ones because it may gather better at a smaller stitch length. So I'm gonna test that out a little bit on some scraps of fabric and show you what she means. Alright so here we have three scraps of fabric all gathered with different stitch lengths. So this one was gathered at a five millimeter stitch length this one's at four and this one is at three and the whole point of getting really beautiful gathers is that the area below the seam allowance is less bubbly, is a little bit more uniform and just a little bit more evenly spaced. So you can see here this is the five and kind of what that produces here's the back so you can see it definitely has like some bigger puckers if you will in it. This is the four and you can see what that is doing to the area below the seam allowance a little fewer of those puckers you can see it from the back really well how that's handling that and then here is the three and I think as you keep going down and keep testing your fabrics you want to make sure that it still is able to gather really easily and honestly I was a little bit surprised how easy it was to gather this at a three millimeter stitch length. So based on what I see here in my really kind of rough little test that I did is that I don't think I'm gonna do a five millimeter I think I'm gonna bump it down to a three point five in between these two just so I can get it to be a little bit more uniform without being too too tight so now that I know what my stitch length is I am going to actually start the process of gathering up these shoulder seams. So again I'm gonna go surge the raw edge I've got my notches marked really well with the clover water soluble pen and then I'm gonna sew gathering stitches at a three point five at five eighths of an inch from the raw edge half an inch from the raw edge and a quarter inch from the raw edge on both shoulder seams. Also whenever you are sewing your gathering stitches there are again a couple schools of thought about back stitching. Some people will not back stitch on either end for me when it's something that is this small and I want to be super super precise when I start my gathering stitches at this first notch I will back stitch there and then I'll let it run off and pull off the thread so I'll have long threads on one side that way when I pull them nice and tight I have something anchoring it over here just to make sure that they actually start where they're supposed to start. Okay so I've got one of my shoulder seams here and I've got my three long strings hanging off of one edge. Now you are going to take these strings that are on top of your seam like so and these are the ones that you're going to hold on to as you pull your fabric through the threads like so can you see it gathering up here like so and remember we're only trying to gather it so that it fits into our seam so whatever whatever that is for you whether it's a bodice or an arm side whatever it is so this seam between the notches is roughly one two three inches so we're only trying to get our gathering stitches to be three inches wide so that it will match the back shoulder seam so I've got one here one two three that's about perfect. Alright and then you want to take a pin again I really love these heart-shaped pins these are also from Clover because they are so long but you want to put it in to the fabric like so and then you want to wrap the threads around that just to hold them in place because what we're going to do now is we need to evenly distribute these gathers so they're not all like all on one side so we'll just kind of use our fingers to push them from one side to the other and then you also want to kind of tug on them vertically and this is going to help them get nice and even as well and then we are going to pretend that we have the other one done first of all but we will take this right sides up take the back of our top and place it right sides together and the raw edges should all match up like so okay so I'm going to pin this in place and then when I go to pin it I want to make sure that I'm pinning it in a way that the gathered fabric is what is touching the feed dogs the gathered fabric is what is on bottom and that will just the machine and the feed dogs will kind of just help move the gathers through the machine kind of helping them distribute a little bit but also making sure that we don't get any weird puckers and this isn't gathered a bunch this is kind of a soft gather if you will so that is not very likely but if you're doing something that has like a lot of gathering like two to one ratio or more you really want to make sure that you don't get any puckers and putting the fabric that's gathered closer to the feed dogs helps with that so I'm gonna go run this through my machine and surge the raw edges and I'll show you what it looks like when we're done so here is our seam we've got our gathered portion here matched up to the backside that is not gathered you can see they perfectly match up and you've got just a little bit of extra ease through here by way of these gathers when you go to press your fabric you want to make sure to keep your iron on this side of the seam so that you don't press them out I kind of was a little bit overzealous with my iron so some of them pressed out a little bit it was a little bit more rufflier before before I took it to the hot steam iron but nevertheless the gathers are definitely still there and they add a beautiful little detail to something like a forward shoulder seam so hopefully that helped you guys learn how to do gathers if you've done them a thousand times maybe it gave you a new tip or trick to try out next time you do gathers there you have it how to gather let me know if you guys have any questions in the comments section below down there you will also find links to the water erasable marker the thick one you will also find links to the heart-shaped pins which I can't put my hands on right now oh here they are you'll find links to the previous two videos that we did on pleats and darts lots of helpful information there so be sure to check the description box for more info but that's gonna do it for me today thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you very soon bye