Another Simple Little Sewing Tip

Well actually this is an unsewing tip.

Sooner or later, everyone who sews has to unpick or seam rip.  When I first started sewing back in the seventies, I used the method my Grandmother taught me; which was to very, very carefully cut the seams apart using a razor blade that had a piece of medical tape taped over one of the sharp sides.  Then when I started home ec, one of our required tools was a seam ripper.  What an improvement that was in safety!

If you google seam ripping, you find all sorts of different descriptions of how people go about unsewing seams.

You can unpick one or two stitches at a time.  You can do the same thing between the fabrics.  You can also use the cutting edge of the seam ripper to cut the threads between the fabrics.

But I’ve recently discovered a much faster way to unpick a seam without having as many of those little threads everywhere.

Back in March, Anita over at Bloomin Workshop explained the method she uses to unpick a seam.  At the time, I thought… Cool, I’ll have to give that a try next time.   It wasn’t until this past weekend when I was working on the green teddy baby quilt that I had cause to do just that.

I had straight-line machine quilted for several inches before I realized that when I shifted the quilt over to sew the next line, I had forgotten to shift the needle position for using that side of my walking foot.  I was using the edges of the walking foot to space my lines of quilting but my walking foot isn’t symmetrical, hence the need to shift needle positions.

The quilt was completely hand basted so my options for taking out that line of quilting were limited.  The thought of picking out those stitches one by one wasn’t a pleasant one.  Then I remembered the method Anita demonstrated on her blog; which is to clip every two or three stitches on the top and then pull the back thread.

It worked like a charm.  In no time at all, I had the seam unpicked and was back to quilting.

For a more detailed description complete with photos, click over to Anita’s “Rippit” post.

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