Tips and Tools for Getting Started Hand-Sewing

16 November 2022

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It doesn’t take much to get started with hand sewing: Once you’ve learned the basic stitches, there’s a lot you can do with very simple tools. However, gathering some helpful tips before you tackle your first stitches can make the next steps on your journey easier. This tutorial focuses on information that will help absolute beginners choose their supplies so they can start on the right foot, and then goes on to explain how to prepare the thread for sewing by hand. If you’re an experienced sewist already, I hope you might find a thing or two here that will improve your hand sewing experience.

Sewing tools photo by Josiane Richer dit Laflèche.

Copyright © Josiane Richer dit Laflèche except as indicated.
Josiane Richer dit Laflèche – 1

About Josiane Richer dit Laflèche

Text and textile are the main threads that have run throughout Josiane Richer dit Laflèche’s life and they, along with neurodivergency and disability (ME/CFS), have had the biggest influence on the shape it has taken. A linguistic anthropologist by training, she works with words––both hers and those of others––in various ways, including in her capacity as the agent of writer and storyteller Éric Gauthier. The rest of her time is divided between reading, spinning, sewing, weaving, knitting… and learning other fibre and textile arts! Josiane is currently channeling her interest in language and culture into crafting a podcast that aims to provide listening practice to people who are learning French or who want to maintain their knowledge of that language. Learn more at yourfrenchspeakingfriend.com. She lives in the N’dakinna, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Waban-Aki (Abenaki) Nation, more specifically in Kchi Nikitawtegwak—the name given by the W8banakiak to the city otherwise known as Sherbrooke, Québec.

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