Outie or Innie: How Do You Notch?

Hey, friends.

Hey, it's Lisa from Black Women Stitch and the Stitch Please podcast.

And as I say every episode, this is a very special episode because today we are talking about innie or outie.

That's right.

Are you in innie or an outie? And that is about notches.

How do you cut your notches? Notches are essential elements of putting a sewing pattern together.

They are the marks that you can find on a commercial pattern as indicated by triangles.

You have one triangle to indicate the front, a double triangle to indicate the back, the triple indicates the center back seam.

All of this information becomes important when you want to make sure that you're putting in your sleeve correctly.

You do not want to do the thing that I did when I first started sewing and would sew the back of the sleeve to the front of the garment.

That did not turn out well.

So what the notches are helping you to understand is that you are meant to put the back of that sleeve to the back of the garment.

And so this is one of the simple reasons why notches are really important.

They help us match front to backs.

They help with setting in sleeves.

They also help to distribute the ease of a sleeve.

That's why the front of the sleeve is shaped one way and the back of the sleeve is shaped another.

It's designed to go into the arm's eye in a certain way and the notches help you get there.

They help you to achieve the desired result and to have the proper amount of ease and those kinds of things.

So notches are pretty important.

So important that folks have developed some rather strong feelings about notches.

Now, I'm not going to go into my own personal approach until the end, but let's start with the outies, the people that cut their notches outward.

The way this works, you are cutting along the cut line of your garment.

You get to a notch, you make a 45 degree angle and take a snip.

And then you make another 45 degree angle down in order to make that triangle shape.