Tutorial: Welt Pockets on Seams

Well la-di-da. I've been posting on this here blog for a little over a year and I finally feel qualified to do a wee little tutorial. When I decided to add some fancy-ass welt pockets and bound buttonholes to the cape I posted last week I realized the uber basic construction details from Vogue 8776 were probably not going to cut it. Welt pocket tutorials are a dime a dozen but I had a hard time figuring out how to add them when your opening happens on the seam line so I thought I would show you how I figured it out in this welt pocket tutorial.

First off, you need to decide how wide you want your welt to be on on the finished side. I decided 1/2" added a nice graphic element to the openings so I interfaced some cotton sateen and cut pieces that were about 3/4" longer than the opening and about 1 1/2" wide when folded (you can be more precise here but I made my welt patches wider than I needed and trimmed the access later just to be safe).

You will want to iron your interfaced welt patch with the wrong sides together and pin it to the right side of your fabric. You also want to interface the opening on the main fabric, both for stability, and for ease of marking.

As for the markings, you will mark the following:

• width of the opening
• the seam allowance line (in this case 5/8")
• your sew line & the line where you want your welt fabric to end when lined up with your main fabric (both this and the sew line should be the same dimension - in my case 1/2")
• some general markings to show you where you will be cutting once you have sewn the welt to the main fabric (I marked 1/4" from the sew line and width of opening but you may trim this more if necessary)

If you want to be very precise, you can open your welt and baste the folded edge along the bottom line in the above picture to the right side of the main fabric. You would then fold the welt over the basted line, sew along your sew line, and then remove the basting stitches on the wrong side of the fabric. I skipped this step and just pinned and adjusted as necessary but the anal obsessives among us may want to go for the extreme precision route.

After you have lined up your welt patch properly on the right side of your fabric, you will sew along your sew line. You may want to baste it just to double check that it is the right width when it is turned inside and then sew again to reinforce your stitches.

Now that you have sewn your welt pocket to the fabric, you want to trim the welt along your cut lines (again, I marked about 1/4" from the sew line and width of the opening). Make sure you cut to the edge of your sew line on the diagonal. This will ensure you avoid puckers at the corners when you flip the welt to the inside of the fabric.

After trimming your opening, you will flip the welt to the inside of the opening and iron it into place. I hope the photo below makes this clear

After ironing it, this is what your opening should look like from the right side. Keep in mind, the edge of your welt MUST line up with your seam line so that when you sew your two pieces together, your welts will meet perfectly at the seam line.

After ironing your welt into place, you must sew down the edge of your welt to the 1/4" seam of your main fabric on each side. You can now trim the excess fabric on each side.

Once both welts have been sewn to each part of your garment, you can sew your seams together and press them open.

After pressing your seams on both sides, your finished welt opening should look like this from the right side (make sure you are as precise as possible when marking your openings or you find yourself with two slightly different lengths as seen below. Oops!):

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For this cape, I had 4 welt openings to produce. Two of them had pockets. You can easily sew in your pockets prior to sewing your seams closed. I forgot to take pictures of this part but I will show you how to finish the inside of the openings.

You want your lining opening to line up with bottom of the welt. Pin a piece of interfacing to the right side of your lining. Mark and sew an opening that is 5/8" (seam allowance) plus the width of your welt (in this case 1/2").

After trimming your opening to a 1/4" of your sew line, the wrong side of your fabric should look like this:

At this point you will flip your interfacing to the inside. Press it into place.

Your lining with interfaced opening will look this after being pressed:

To avoid puckering at the corners, make sure you trim your corners as closely as possible to the seam line on the diagonal.

Once you have interfaced, sewn and trimmed the openings of your two lining pieces, you can sew your pieces together, making sure to press open your seams. It will look like this on the wrong side:

And like this on the right side:

Once you have your lining and outer fabric prepped in the above fashion, you can assemble your cape. The final step is to use tiny pick stitches to attach the lining to the welt opening from the inside.

Whew. Describing this process was more difficult that I anticipated. Hopefully it is clear if anyone ever needs to sew a welt on the seam! Hit me up with questions if anything is confusing.

In other news, I will be dedicating the rest of October to making my most ambitious Halloween costume yet. Over the coming weeks I will be posting pics of costumes past, and would like to host a little giveaway to whoever manages to guess my new costume based on the hints I will be slowly doling out. Hope you are enjoying autumn!