Do you use YouTube or some other video site to learn sewing? Do you have a favorite channel(s)?
I’ve just discovered Paul Chevallier’s channel and he’s hilarious and super educational. Lots of useful info in short, easily digestible videos. No loud background music.
Also, my local library system has a free subscription to Craftsy, and there’s a lot of useful sewing (and knitting, etc.) videos there. What have you found?
I find Craftsy has the most comprehensive sewing tutorials. Janet Pray. Kenneth D King, Alison Smith are some of my favorites. But, they have beginner classes as well. Craftsy is almost always on sale for $5 or less for a year’s subscription. Just be sure to put a note in your calendar to cancel before the renewal date. Or remove the automatic renewal in your account. Good luck and Happy sewing. As for YouTube, there’s so much out there and most of it is garbage. But, I’m a total fanboy for Silhouette Patterns because she makes everything so easy. But, she is best known for her simple fitting tips (Fit 2 Stitch on PBS) which is where I think most people have problems. They make something that doesn’t look good and think they have done something wrong. When it’s usually a simple fitting issue. Made-to-measure patterns like Freesewing help, but they are still 2D and we need to fit them to a 3D body. p.s. If you get to the library be sure to check out Janet Pray’s shirtmaking class on Craftsy, even if you don’t intend to make any shirts. Just learning how to hold the fabric so you can control it going through the machines is worth the price of admission. Good luck and happy sewing.
Excellent tips, thank you! I’ll be looking those up, especially the fitting channel. I’m just starting to dabble with going beyond existing patterns.
I’ve made 3 Fairfield button up shirts from Thread Theory, and my next FreeSewing project may be a Simon shirt to compare.
I like https://www.youtube.com/@TheClosetHistorian She likes to wear mid-century fashions. She takes a basic block and shows you how to adapt it to make what she wants to make. I have leaned a lot about dart manipulation.
Whoa, such a talented & creative person! She does sewing and carpentry/house renovations! Incredible depth of videos over 10 years, with lots of playlists. So much research, and she shows us where to find information.
I’ve watched many vintage sewing videos from Bernadette Banner (great deep dive into buying linen, recently), Evelyn Wood, & Nicole Rudolph, but had never seen a Bianca Esposito video before. Thanks!
P.S. I just discovered @SewRena, and her latest short includes a description of her fixing up her old Chevy Corvair. What a Renaissance woman! She’s so elegant modeling her clothing, I never expected that at all. When we don’t limit ourselves to societal expectations/“norms”, we can do anything we want.
She has taught me a lot. I wouldn’t call what she does carpentry exactly. Although I have seen her use a jig saw. But she does a lot of home decorating since she bought an old victorian house about a year ago. She also does a lot of sequins and beading. Her embellishments of her clothing and her home are over the top. It’s not exactly to my taste. I don’t feel like I have to like the end result to enjoy the process.
Oh, I agree. I’ll never make a dress or hand-sew antique clothing, but I’ve learned a lot about fabric, techniques, and processes by watching Evelyn Wood & Bernadette Banner.
I second Bianca at the Closet Historian, especially her Drafting Dangerously series she’s been working on this year. It’s helped me understand how to use and alter blocks in a way I hadn’t been able to grasp before.
Bernadette Banner is good for fabric and historical garments. She also has some excellent videos on hand sewing.
Morgan Donner does some great content on historical garments as well, both the design, fabric choices and the construction. Explaining why she uses her machine for some parts and hand sews others.
And Evelyn Wood does some great videos on how to use your sewing machine and how to do different techniques you might be struggling with.
I see Morgan Donner even has a few men’s garments. I watched the Tunic one and, yeah, she’s an informative & entertaining watch. Thanks!
For a complete beginner like me I have found Cornelius Quiring videos interesting and also entertaining.
Also I found Pattern Studio 101 has a lot of interesting and helpful information for making patterns.
Corn! Oooooooooo! Haha, I love Cornelius. He really seems to have been taking it up a notch lately, with his shorts with great explanations.
I haven’t heard about Pattern Studio 101, so I’ll look them up. Thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/@JSternDesigns has really good fitting advice. But in general I’m aghast at the garbage that is frequently Dunning-Kugered on youtube..
Haha! Yeah, YouTube is less of a university education and more of a social network, where (mostly) amateurs figure it out as they go along. I mean a pro wouldn’t give their knowledge away for free in our (problematic capitalist) society.
That’s why FreeSewing is such a breath of fresh air. It’s like the early days of the internet, with blogs & forums, rather than locked down “platforms” like Facebook & YouTube that keep you caged in.
Some YouTubers rise above the rest. Cornelius Quiring, for example. Look at his old videos and he’s making mistakes & figuring it out. But in the past year he’s really put out some great educational stuff.
As I get more into my local library, I realize there’s such a huge wealth of books & videos from real pros there. (Does anyone read anymore?!) And I just bought a couple books by David Page Coffin (who was a self-taught amateur, but someone who investigated a topic where little freely available information was available at the time, namely men’s clothing).
I always forget about Cornelius, I struggle watching him for too long.
Dunning-Kugered is a new one to me. I looked it up. Now it is part of my vocabulary. Thanks.
Small nit-pick: it’s actually ‘Dunning-Kruger’, so with an ‘r’.
Thanks. Google fixed it for me.
Thanks 
Ooh, I didn’t realize I needed 20 characters 
I read it as the person who originally used it added ‘ed’ onto the end to denote past tense, as it was something that had happened, turning it into a verb, from the usual noun.
