Six Tips for Sewing with Knit Fabrics Video

Today I’m excited to share a new video with my top 6 tips for getting started sewing with knit fabric. When I first wanted to start sewing knits over 10 years ago, I was really intimidated because I didn’t know what to do. Over the years, I’ve done a lot research and had a lot of practice and now I love to sew with knit fabric. I’m planning a whole series of videos about sewing knit fabric so after you watch this one, make sure to subscribe to my channel on YouTube so you won’t miss any future videos. 

Six Tips for Sewing with Knit Fabric

1. Find the straight of grain by holding up the fabric with the selvages of the fabric aligned. Shift the selvages to the left and right until the fabric hangs straight and doesn’t have any drag lines.

2. Use a rotary cutter for better accuracy.

3. Use a stitch with stretch (more on that down below)

4. Use a walking foot or, if you don’t have one stitch with tissue paper under your fabric to help it feed through the machine.

5. Use a ballpoint or jersey needle. This will prevent holes from being made in the fabric during stitching. Bonus tip! Test your stitches and needle on a scrap of fabric.

6. Jump in and practice. Every machine and fabric will behave a little differently so it’s important to practice and figure out which techniques work best for your machine.

I hope you enjoy this video. Let me know in the comments if there are any sewing topics that you’d like me to cover.

How to Hand Stitch Knit Fabric

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This is just a quick little post today about hand stitching! So we know from my topstitching knits tutorial a few weeks ago, that when you're sewing with knits it's very important to use stitches that stretch. It's pretty rare that you'll need to hand stitch a knit fabric as they're a more casual fabric. But on that occasion, you'll need to choose the correct kind of stitch to suit the fabric.

When I made my Sequin Mesa dress, I used a stretch sequin fabric and lining. Because I didn't want any topstitching to show, I used a hand stitch to secure the hem and attach the lining at the sleeve and skirt hems. At the sleeve hems, I wasn't really thinking and just used a regular slip stitch which means that seam does not stretch very much. I just wasn't really thinking at the time. But, when I went to sew the skirt hem, I realized that it would be best to use the fagotting stitch. I had done this stitch before but it felt really tedious. This time, I figured it out and it was quick and easy to stitch.

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How to Hand Stitch Knit Fabric

Important note: You will be working from left to right for this stitch.

1. Secure your thread to the fabric. Then insert the needle from right to left through a few threads of the garment.

2. Moving to the right, insert the thread again from right to left through a few threads of the hem. Loosely pull the thread but don't tighten it all the way. It should be tight enough that the stitching is secure and the thread won't get caught on anything. But not so tight that it warps the fabric or doesn't allow it to stretch.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until the entire hem is secure.

And that's it. This is a helpful stitch to know and easy to sew once you get the rhythm down. It can also be used to join two pieces of fabric in a decorative way, as seen here on the Colette blog. Are there any other sewing tips or tutorials you'd like to see on the blog? Let me know in the comments.