How to stitch this join

[ajlelectronics]

I am making a pair of new covers for my car seats. All has been going fairly so far (This being my third attempt to get it right!).

The two pieces in the pictures are the front and back pieces of the backrest which I need to stitch together. I am concerned about the thickness of the material at the top where the vertical piping and the side wings are all stitched together.

Should I cut this away to below the stitch line, fold it left and stitch over, fold it right and stitch over or what?

Edit, The system will not allow me to post the pictures. I have two, one 33K and one 34K so in limits. It will not even allow one!

[mike802]

do you have a photobucket account?  If you don't its free and really makes posting pictures much easier.

[ajlelectronics]

I have hosted them on my own server now, but a little annoying to have to jump through all the hoops just to illustrate something. Must be something I am doing wrong because others seem to manage it OK!

Anyway, to the pics...

http://www.ajlelectronics.co.uk/invisible/miscpics/Pan1.jpg
http://www.ajlelectronics.co.uk/invisible/miscpics/Pan2.jpg
http://www.ajlelectronics.co.uk/invisible/miscpics/Pan3.jpg

[Lynn]

hello,
first you need to undo the seams with the piping, enough to cut the cording back half an inch so that you don't stitch over it when you sew the seam. Then I would fold the seams to the outside when you stitch the two pieces together. This way you are not trying to force the seam against the padded part lower down.
Hope that makes sense.

Lynn

[ajlelectronics]

hello,
first you need to undo the seams with the piping, enough to cut the cording back half an inch so that you don't stitch over it when you sew the seam. Then I would fold the seams to the outside when you stitch the two pieces together. This way you are not trying to force the seam against the padded part lower down.

Thanks for that, your advice is great. It is the way I expected to do it, but a professional trimmer in Cheltenham who I paid for some advice from tells me that I should deliberately sew over the cording to lock it in position, otherwise it migrates down the cover.

Hence my confusion! The two pieces are waiting to be sewn but I am afraid to do it until I am totally secure with the technique.  ;D

[mike802]

Lynn is giving you some good advice.  I always clip the cording back just enough to not sew over it, have never had the cording slip down, because I also clip it and sew at the bottom so how can it.

[ajlelectronics]

Lynn is giving you some good advice.  I always clip the cording back just enough to not sew over it, have never had the cording slip down, because I also clip it and sew at the bottom so how can it.

I appreciate Lynn's professional advice and will act on it. Possibly it is down to my cloth ears and lack of understanding. The trimmer's advice was the result of showing him try number two, where the cording had in fact wandered down an inch or so, maybe due to trial fittings.

[mike802]

Humm interesting.  Like I said above, I have never had this happen to me.  But I don't doubt it if you witnessed it personally.  I usually use fiber flex which is not slippery like the solid plastic welt can be, especially against fabrics with a slick backing.  I don't know what you are using, maybe sewing closer to the cord would tighten things up enough so you don't get the slippage.  I don't know how experienced you are at sewing, but I know that getting close to that cord when sewing welt can be one of the most difficult skills to master, especially in vinyl.  When I was just learning to sew I had nightmares trying to get it right. 

I have had covers that needed a little stretching to fit, of course you always want to stretch them a little to get a nice fit, but if you have to stretch them more than planned the material could stretch more than the welt and give the impression that it slid.  Sewing both ends of the cording into the seam would force the cord to stretch with the rest of the cover fabric.

[hdflame]

I am making a pair of new covers for my car seats. All has been going fairly so far (This being my third attempt to get it right!).

The two pieces in the pictures are the front and back pieces of the backrest which I need to stitch together. I am concerned about the thickness of the material at the top where the vertical piping and the side wings are all stitched together.

Should I cut this away to below the stitch line, fold it left and stitch over, fold it right and stitch over or what?

Edit, The system will not allow me to post the pictures. I have two, one 33K and one 34K so in limits. It will not even allow one!

Just a suggestion for posting pics.  Look at the HTML that is written to post a thumb from Photobucket, and just replace your picture's url with the one on Photobucket??  Not sure if it will work or not, I'm not too big on writing my own HTML....I just put up with using Photobucket. ;D

OK, I know that HTML has to be EXACT in order to work, so in order for you to see what I wanted you to see, I had to add extra spaces between the brackets.  Try using the below code and put your info in place, then take away all of the spaces.  Maybe that will work.......or maybe someone that can actually write HTML will chime in. ???  I took the code from Photobucket.  You could also go take a look at the code generated by Photobucket and see if it makes sense to you then.  Hope this helps.

[  URL=http://Put your webpage URL here  ][  IMG  ]http://img.Put your picture's image address here[  /IMG  ][/URL  ]

I just thought of one other thing.  As you try different HTML code in your message post, use the "Preview" option so you can view if your changes are working.