Benchwarmer Tee Tutorial - Matchy Matchy Sewing Club - Cotton Knit Tee Pattern

Hi guys, today we're going to be sewing our bench warmer tee which is a short sleeve t-shirt or a long sleeve t-shirt sewn with knits and in this video you will learn how to sew a version using your domestic sewing machine with just a zigzag stitch that's all you need it's actually quite simple or you have the option to do it with a serger and this is the short sleeve version and we also have it in a long sleeve version so let's get sewing this is going to be a size medium we're going to do the front this is going to be the fold so we're folding our fabric this way against the along the selvedge edge and align the fold line to the fold of the fabric put down my pattern weights it's probably easier if you use a rotary cutter for knits but since we don't have a cutting mat yet i'm just going to use scissors okay i'm gonna cut one notch here at the center front at the collar but really really small maybe even less than a quarter of an inch okay it's pattern piece one so the grain line will follow the selvedge so that's the selvedge that's the grain so that's two sleeves and all we have left is the neckband this neckband the grain line is running this way so it's the short side which means you want to line that grain line up with this selvedge so it looks like that not like that like this also this is knit this is stretchy this way it's not really stretchy as much this way so we want the greatest stretch all right now all of our pattern pieces are cut out we've got the neckband two sleeves one back bodice one front bodice i'm actually going to put some blue tape on the correct side of the pattern pieces so that's the front all right now we're ready to sew so let's start sewing our shirt the first step is going to be sewing our shoulder seams so right sides together the right side has your tape on it in case your fabric looks the same on both sides so right sides are facing and you want to align your shoulders and pin in place i have to go get some pins i'll be right back all right pin in place so we'll just put a few pins in here you don't have to do too many or you can use clips try not to stretch it while you're going we're just going to keep it as flat as possible so that's all pinned all right so now we're gonna sew the shoulder seams using a zigzag stitch so a lot of people kind of feel that sewing with knits might be a little bit trickier than sewing with wovens it really isn't it's just using a different stitch so with wovens you use a straight stitch because you don't need anything to stretch but because the knit is stretchy we use a zigzag stitch and a zigzag stitch just allows some flexibility and it allows your seams to stretch so let's do that you can also practice which zigzag stitch you want to use they're all similar but every fabric will take stitches differently so give it a try this is a home sewing machine that has a zigzag stitch feature on it you can use a stretch needle that should be helpful i happen to keep a denim needle in my sewing machine all the time and for me it works for everything but every sewing machine and every fabric will react differently so i encourage you to practice and see what you like so i've already tested this out and i kind of figured that i like my zigzag stitch at two well let me let me look it up because i did take a picture of this but i can't remember what it is right now where's my phone what did i like 2.4 and two okay all right so we're gonna set this sewing machine up to do a zigzag stitch right now i've already practiced on my fabric and i've decided what stitch i like but again you can use whatever you like it's personal preference so this is zigzag for me number four and you can kind of see it's doing a zigzag here this up and down is going to show you like how long or how wide your zigs and your zags are gonna be and this stitch here that's like this going up and down this is going to be like how long the zigzags are so how much space is between each zig and zap so what i've decided is i like this one to be at 2.4 and i like the length to be at two this sewing pattern is going to use three eighths of an inch seam allowance and we did that because that works well for a serger and we'll talk about that later that means i'm going to line my fabric up to the one the line that says one so i'm assuming that's one centimeter my presser foot down i'm not going to stretch my fabric i'm just going to go ahead and let the machine do its job and it's going to sew itself at this exact step there's also a stitch called the lightning bolt stitch i don't know where it is but it's just like a really tight skinny zigzag that works too okay let's do this i do want to back stitch i'm not stretching my fabric i'm not pushing my fabric i'm just letting it go and if you've never sewn with knits before just do it slowly and you're going to be fine so this is what your zigzag looks like that looks pretty good let's do the other side needle down back stitch okay uh you shouldn't sew over your pins but you know shoulder seams are done that looks great i'm gonna go press the shoulder seams towards the back press the seams towards the back of your body you could do it from the or the back side of your garment now let's attach the sleeves so with your garment laid out flat right side facing up we're going to attach our sleeve to our body so right sides together and the center notch of the sleeve head matches the shoulder seam that's the shoulder seam so that will match with this notch and pin that in place the ends of the sleeve will match the end of the armhole your sleeve head will be slightly larger than your armhole curve you want to just stretch it out slightly to make sure it lines up together and that's just to provide some ease for movement later on and i like to do one in the center and then have smaller sections to work with this gives like a more even distribution you're seeing that i'm stretching it slightly and i'm gonna go into the center put a pin in it and then i have this little section to work with and i'm stretching it slightly so they align and i'm gonna put another pin in the middle and then i'm left with this tiny piece here and i'm gonna stretch it slightly to align and put a pin in the center okay so there you go all lined up we're gonna do the same thing use the same zigzag stitch three-eighths of an inch and sew along the sleeve head back stitch okay so when we're going around the sleeve head just position your fabric stretching it ever so slightly so that the two are even if you feel like it you can put additional pins in here but i think it's just as easy to like stretch and place as you go okay so here we are at the shoulder seam i just want to make sure that my seam allowance is still facing the right direction it should be facing the back and that's the back so just sew to the end and back stitch yeah so i didn't do really good right here see how it caught i didn't stretch it enough so it stretched on itself i mean do i not like that enough to unpick it yes i'm gonna unpick it i need to go get an unpicking thing all right that will do i didn't even have to unpick it that much and then i'm just gonna zigzag right over it again and i'm just gonna back stitch and back stitch so the stitch is tight all right that'll do that's a nice patch there's no bubble in it okay so when you're all sewn like this we are going to press the seam allowance towards the sleeve and we're just gonna press and steam i'm not stretching while i'm going i'm just pressing okay well done now we'll just do the other side other side so with right sides together we're gonna sew the side seams you want to align at the armpit right here pin that in place and then do the same thing for the sleeve there's it all pinned up and i'm going to sew from the bottom down to the sleeve edge three-eighths of an inch seam allowance back stitch i'm letting the machine do all the work i'm not stretching i'm not pushing i'm not pulling it's just self-feeding itself through i'm really just guiding the seam allowance okay when you get to this arm intersection follow along at the same seam allowance and gently curve instead of doing like a straight pivot because our bodies don't really have angular junctions we're gonna slightly curve come back around and continue down the sleeve all right that's one side seam done we're gonna do the other side all right you have a shirt let's turn it uh right side out so you can see how like fast and easy that was when you finish your side seams press the seam allowances towards the back do that for one side sew up the side seam for the other side press towards back and all we have left to do is we're going to do the neckband and we're going to hem the arms and the body and you are done all right i need to go eat lunch and then we'll do the neck you like now let's do the neckband we're gonna pre-press this in half we're gonna fold with wrong sides touching each other and we're just pressing and steaming to form a now we're going to flip it to the right side and we're going to match the two short ends so this is right sides together match the two short ends and we're going to sew with a 3 8 inch seam allowance okay this can be tricky because you don't want it to get caught inside of the feed dogs because we're right at the end of the fabric so i just use my hand crank to get it started and then i'll back stitch a couple times and come forward if you're having a lot of problems with this section here go ahead and stick a piece of paper under it and sew on top of the paper that will help stabilize your knit fabric and then when you're done sewing you could just tear the paper away all right and for the neckband we can actually press our seam open and then we're going to use the press guidelines that we made earlier as just a guide for us to know where to fold this in half so wrong side stitching fold it in half matching at the seams i'm gonna pin it in place and since i pre-pressed see it just kind of did it itself but we need to find the center points and the quarter points of this neckband to make it easier to line up with our neck hole so this point here that we just marked is going to be considered center back and then we want to find center front in order to do that fold your neckband in half the point that is directly across from center back is going to be center front i'm going to mark that point again with another pin alternatively you can mark it with a fabric pencil or pen or do a tiny tiny little notch but since our seam allowance is only three eights do not exceed that seam allowance so now we want to find the quarter points which are these points here and to do that we're just going to bring in center back and center front match them together pull the sides out all right these two sides are now going to be your quarter points put a pin in each side okay now we have a perfectly quartered neckband let's go do the same thing to the neck hole on our shirt okay here's our neck hole from our paper pattern we already marked center front and center back so we don't have to find those marks again but to find the quarter marks it's not going to be the shoulder seams because this dip is a lot larger than this so it's going to land somewhere around here but let's find it exactly all right so to find the quarter points here we're going to match center front and center back like such and try not to stretch but you're going to just align your fabric walk it along this point here will be one of the quarter points mark it with a pen or a fabric marker or teeny tiny notch okay go back to your center front and center back walk it along without stretching your fabric and this point here will be your other quarter point all right so when i open my shirt up you will see that we have center back center front these two side points are going to be your quarter marks they are going to align with these points on your neck band so the seam is going to match with center back center front will match with center front and the two sides will match with the sides okay so let's do that so it's going to be right sides together so i need to flip my shirt actually to the right side this is the right side of my shirt i am now going to match center back to center back that's the notch and pin in place now center front with center front pin in place okay let's do the same thing to the quarters so this is one side on the neck band and one side on the neck opening pin that in place same thing on this side pin that in place okay so now you'll notice that you have four equal quadrants but the neck band is smaller than your neck hole that's exactly how you want it to be so start with one quadrant stretch it stretch your neck band to match the neck hole find the center point and pin that in place it's the same concept as what we did with the sleeve but it's in a circle so next quadrant stretch kind of walk yourself into the center and pin in place next quadrant same thing stretch walk your fingers to the center pin in place and the last one we will stretch it walk to the center pin in place and there you go so now we're gonna go ahead and sew all the way around the neck hole with our zigzag stitch okay let's do that so i'm gonna sew with the neck band facing up towards me all right and we're gonna sew with the same three eighths of an inch seam allowance i'm gonna go slowly and just stretch as i go making sure that both of the neck line the neck line and the neck band are lining up correctly you can see that my rib is stretching here and just take it quadrant by quadrant continue to stretch it and sew until i meet the beginning point and i'm going to overlap this point by like i don't know four or five stitches and that should lock it into place and i am going to back stitch here real fast okay okay here's our neck band isn't that cute okay so now we're gonna go press this down the seam allowances are going to face down into your shirt oh by the way i'm using a contrasting thread so you can see but if you're just going to use white or something you're not going to be able to see these stitch marks okay so this seam allowance is going to go down towards the shirt i'm just pressing and steaming as i go if you find that your seams are a little bit stretched out or wonky because it's a knit fabric your steam is going to relax all that so don't be afraid to use steam it's going to be really helpful for knits so i've pressed my seam allowances towards my body and right now we're going to top stitch around this entire collar to attach the seam allowance to the body side of your shirt we're going to do that with a zigzag stitch before i do that this is going to be a stitch that you're going to see visibly so if you want to you can adjust your stitching from your zigzag stitch which i'm going to do because i provide i prefer a wider zigzag so i think i'm going to go to 3.2 and maybe 2.4 practice see what you like and go with what feels best to you so the idea is to anchor the seam allowance to the body so it's not like flopping around and we want to get as close to this seam line as possible so i'm gonna start here and see how it goes i feel like that's good my seam line is lining up right against this like hole of my foot i always try to find like a guiding point and yeah you don't really want to pull or tug just let your fabric naturally go through the sewing machine at this point okay so i'm approaching the starting point i trim off these tails just so i can see what i'm doing when i overlap okay so we're gonna overlap the beginning stitches just by maybe three and i'm gonna back stitch a couple times so here's our almost finished neck line and if you find that it's wavy here we're just gonna go steam those waves out on the iron okay so i'm just gonna steam press i'm not really like moving my iron like this way i'm just pressing down and steaming and you can see all the like waves came out of it so now we're kind of left with a little bit of seam allowance that exceed the zigzag so what you can do because knits don't fray i'm going to trim my seam allowance as close as i can to this bottom zigzag stitch without cutting through it and that's just going to clean everything up it's going to reduce bulk and it's going to like tidy everything underneath just go slowly here you don't want to cut through your shirt or anything but we're cutting through all these seam allowances including like the neck band seam allowance see how like neat that looks okay so i'm just gonna go all the way around this neck band and then we will sew the hem of the sleeve in the kind of same fashion now we're gonna hem the sleeve so we're gonna fold this towards the wrong side by three quarters of an inch you can also leave all these hems raw which i actually prefer with these knit fabrics because they don't fray and it looks really cool raw especially when you wash it they start to curl a tiny bit so it's just a different look but if you like that look i would encourage you to try it because then you don't have to finish any of your hands okay so that's three quarters of an inch all the way around and i'm gonna pin that in place again you don't want to stretch just pin where the fabric is naturally falling okay let's go sew it because i have ironed this three quarters of an inch towards the wrong side i'm going to do my seam allowance at five eighths of an inch right now and i'm gonna start like on my back sleeve and i'm gonna sew it from the front side following my five eighths of a line seam guide here i'm using the same style zigzag stitch i did on my neckband so they match so unlike with wovens when you're doing knits you technically don't have to do a double rollover hem because again the knit isn't gonna fray and it reduces bulk if you just do one fold over gonna overlap by a couple stitches and then back stitch okay let's go press this into place you can tell this is like super wavy right now but we're gonna just press and steam you see how it just like popped itself back this is the inside and you can see that we caught all of the seams here but i'm going to do the same thing that i did with the neckline and i'm going to trim this extra seam allowance just up to the stitch line and not going through it we're going to do that all around the entire sleeve this part's optional but i think it really does clean it up and gives you a professional look okay so there's our sleeve and now we just have to do the other sleeve and the hemline we're gonna do it in the exact same way once you've pinned your hem in place we're gonna zigzag stitch it again just like we did the sleeves so you might wonder can you sew these hems with a the answer is you can probably do whatever you like but if you want to do a straight stitch i would just increase my stitch length at least to three maybe even like three point two three and a half that will give you a little bit more stretch even though a straight stitch is technically not stretchy but you're not going to be stretching this hemline that much it's different from the neck hole so if you want to do a straight stitch here go ahead and give that a try let me know how that works out i've tried it before and i think for me it's been okay i don't think i've run into any issues okay your hemline is almost done it's a little wavy right now we're gonna go fix that on our iron so when i'm doing this i'm not pushing i'm just pressing down and letting the steam do all the work yeah that looks pretty good okay i think we're done and here's the finished tee it's super cute i hope you enjoyed sewing that with us and you make as many of these as you can all right so if you guys want to sew this shirt with a serger that will be even faster and it's a very very simple process so this is a shirt that we have serged and this is the wrong side of the shirt so you're going to go through the exact same sewing instructions you're going to do the shoulder seams the sleeves the side seams the neck band and then hem you will notice that i did not do a straight stitch and then serge that's not necessary you just go directly to your serger and because this pattern is designed to be a three-eighths inch seam allowance you can butt your seam very very close to your blade or just trim off a tiny bit and this is how it looks from the front and you can see like a serger is meant to stretch so no stitches are breaking and you can stretch your seams any which way so that's like the construction of the shirt all of the top stitching this one doesn't have it yet but our it's still going to be done with a zigzag stitch so a serger is just to complete the seams the finishing stitches still have to be done on your home sewing machine and you could do a zigzag stitch here so try it out both ways and see if you like it yeah that's about it what do you think you try it on how does it look amy is it i can't see we don't have a mirror here okay so this is a size medium um i measure inside of our xx small on our size chart but i never make that size um i usually do any around an extra small or small this one happens to be a medium but i don't hate it i feel like i like this oversized this might be my size i might like to wear this size well backwards oh okay it's very cute oh yes i think it's very cute i like the contrasting thread yeah oh i love the fabric