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Hi, this is Brian. Today I am demonstrating simple t-shirt construction. The t-shirt I am
wearing takes about 20 minutes on the sewing machine, has five pattern pieces and
you don´t have to use any pins. Let´s go ahead and get started.
On the t-shirt we are making today. The pattern has just five simple components.
You´ve got a back (folded in half), the front side, two sleeves and the neckband.
You´ll notice that on the sleeves I have turned up the hem and I´ve done the same on the
front and the back pieces. I´ll be stitching this first. So let´s go to the sewing machine
and put this t-shirt together. The first thing we are going to do is we are
going to sew the hems of the sleeves and the front and back of the shirt. You can see
I´ve already ironed and turned my hem under. I´m just going to use the edge of the foot as
a guide here. You don´t necessarily need to hem your t-shirts unless it starts to unravel.
But if you´d like to hem them, it´s OK to do it either way.
We are using a small stitch length so therefore we don´t need to use a zigzag stitch.
There. So this is the outside. The way I´ve done this is it´s left enough of this around
so you might actually see this peeking through, That little raw edge which I kind of like.
Let me go ahead and hem the rest of the sleeves and the front and back the same way.
OK, now that we´ve done our hemming on both body pieces and the sleeves, we´re
going to sew ONE shoulder seam together, right sides together.
There´s no need to backtack on these seams since we´ll putting a neck and sleeves on.
We just want to match up our ends.
There we go.
OK, now it´s time to sew on our neckband. So with the shirt right side up we take our
band and put it on top here. We´ll get a few stitches going then we´ll start stretching our
band. This is going to keep it from gapping in the front.
So the band we stretch, the neck we do not, and just sew this all the way around.
Now as I get to the shoulder seam, usually what I like to do is open up that seam allowance
on the other side so that it creates a flatter intersection there as I sew the band around.
We´ll just continue around.
And there we go, you´ve got a completed neckband, it´s as easy as that! Now what
we´re going to also do now is go ahead and do another line of stitching down the seam
allowance just stitch these raw edges together to compress them a little bit more.
OK. The next step is to just cut these extra bits off the ends and close up the second
shoulder seam. So we´ll put it right sides together.....
and there we go, we´ve got a closed up neck and it is time to sew in the sleeves.