Sewing

If you frequently host birthday parties, summer barbecues, or baby showers, you likely spend exorbitant amounts of money buying cheap, fragile, plastic "Happy Birthday" banners and paper streamers that instantly rip, get thrown in the trash the next morning, and look incredibly generic.

The ultimate, environmentally sustainable party upgrade is the DIY Fabric Bunting.

A fabric bunting is a massive, incredibly durable string of bright, colorful cloth triangles. Because it is made of real fabric, it drapes heavily and beautifully across a living room ceiling. When the party is over, you throw it in the washing machine, fold it up, and reuse it for the next ten years. By utilizing an aggressive rainbow palette of scrap fabric, you can sew thirty feet of premium party decoration in a single afternoon. Here is the mass-production method.

For decades, getting a massive hole in the knee of your favorite blue jeans meant exactly two things: you either threw the jeans away entirely, or you attempted a highly frustrating, "invisible" repair by trying to sew an identical, matching blue denim patch underneath the hole to desperately hide the damage.

The modern sustainable fashion movement has completely eradicated this practice.

The new philosophy is called "Visible Mending" (heavily inspired by traditional Japanese Sashiko embroidery). Instead of hiding the hole, you loudly, aggressively celebrate it. You slide a wildly contrasting, brightly colored floral fabric behind the rip, and you use incredibly thick, neon embroidery floss to sew massive, geometric, highly visible stitches completely over the damage. The repair becomes the focal point, turning a ruined pair of jeans into an expensive-looking, bohemian designer garment. Here is how to execute a visible patch.

When you sew a garment, ninety percent of the stitches are entirely hidden on the inside, locking the raw edges of the fabric together. For these structural, invisible seams, the color of your thread literally does not matter.

Topstitching is different. Topstitching is the act of sewing an entirely visible line of stitches directly onto the outside, public-facing right side of the garment. It performs two functions: it pins down bulky seam allowances inside the garment so they lay flat, and it serves as a highly visible, architectural design element.

Because topstitching is meant to be seen by everyone, choosing the wrong color—or the wrong thickness—can completely ruin the aesthetic of the garment. Here is how to strategically choose thread for topstitching.

If you love incredibly bright, aggressively patterned quilting cotton, you likely have a massive bin of tiny, irregular fabric scraps that are too small to turn into a garment or a full quilt.

Instead of throwing these expensive slivers of fabric away, you can "Frankenstein" them together to rapidly sew incredibly sturdy, three-dimensional, highly functional organization baskets. These soft, quilted bins are perfect for hiding loose spools of thread, holding makeup, or organizing a desk, and because they are made entirely of mixed scraps, they look phenomenally colorful. Here is how to construct a scrap bucket from scratch.

If you spill bleach down the front of your favorite plain grey sweatshirt, it is usually ticketed straight for the trash can. However, a stain or a hole is actually a massive creative opportunity if you know how to execute Applique.

Applique is simply the process of taking a small piece of brightly colored or patterned fabric, cutting it into a specific shape (like a massive red heart or a retro lightning bolt), and permanently sewing it down directly on top of another piece of fabric. It allows you to draw customized textile art, permanently patch holes, and instantly upgrade boring, plain clothing with massive pops of color. Here is how to flawlessly execute machine applique.

A quilt is rarely made from solid, plain colors. The magic of traditional quilting lies in taking 20 or 30 entirely different, highly chaotic patterned fabrics—florals, plaids, polka dots, stripes, and novelty prints—and seamlessly blending them together into a beautiful, cohesive blanket.

For a beginner standing in the quilting aisle of a fabric store, this is terrifying.

How do you mix a bright yellow fabric covered in massive pink roses with a blue fabric covered in tiny white geometric stars, without making the final quilt look like a dizzying, headache-inducing circus tent? Successfully mixing colorful quilting cottons relies entirely on the architectural rules of "Volume, Scale, and the Anchor." Here is how to curate a flawless fabric pull.

When most beginners learn to sew a t-shirt or a simple shift dress, they typically buy two yards of a safe, boring, solid-color fabric—usually black, navy, or simple floral cotton. The resulting garment is functional, but it often lacks style.

If you want to create a garment that immediately looks like it walked off a high-fashion modern runway, you do not need to learn incredibly complex tailoring techniques. You simply need to learn Color Blocking.

Color blocking is the architectural act of taking a basic, simple sewing pattern, physically cutting the paper pattern pieces in half with scissors, and sewing the garment back together using two or three massive, intensely contrasting blocks of solid color. It is highly graphic, visually stunning, and shockingly easy to execute. Here is the guide to color-blocking your wardrobe.