Sew Gr8ful

I love Moto patches on clothes. Up until now the only one I have actually done though, was on my green pair of DIBY club Augusta Moto pants. These are legit fold and stitch pintucks! While I absolutely love them, I wanted to find something a little quicker when I got the idea to do a moto patch on a hoodie for my husband.

When I first decided to make this hoodie with the moto patch hack, I wondered if I could do a faux pintuck using my coverstitch. Over the past year, my coverstitch and I have had an interesting journey. I struggled to figure out all its little quirks to avoid tunneling and skipped stitches. We seem to be mostly on the same page now, so wanting to intentionally create tunneling made me cringe. Oh husband, how much I love you.

I cut some scrap fabric strips, cranked up my needle and looper tensions, and just gave it a try.

Well, hello there, you gorgeous faux pintucks!! Maybe I should just use this coverstitch for exclusive faux pintucks and get myself a different one for regular coverstitching. I’m only sort of kidding.

I have a Janome 900 CPX and the settings I used were, both the needles and the looper on 9, the highest tension it goes.  Then I set my stitch length at a 2.5 and my differential feed at 1. You will need to tweak your own settings depending on the fabric you use and your machine, but the basic goal is to have a longer stitch and tighter tension to pull the two rows of stitching together, pinching the fabric and making a tunnel.  Pro tip: before you start messing with your tensions and other settings, jot down a little note saying what they were set at for proper stitching. There is nothing worse than forgetting how to get back to your perfect coverstitch.

Now that you know how I made these faux pintucks, it’s time to talk about what I used them to create. I hacked the sleeves on the Greenstyle Creations Hudson Pullover, and made this awesome hoodie for my husband. I am so proud of this one !!

After seeing a similar hoodie on Pinterest I showed it to my husband, thinking he would say no. Obviously, I was wrong. I admit, it doesn’t happen often (wink wink), but in this case, I’m glad it did. Since I have made this hoodie once before, I knew exactly how it fit on him and if I needed to make any adjustments for this slightly different look.

Let’s talk about making the moto patch first. If you are like me, when someone says they “eye-balled” something, you just want to smack them. How are you supposed to duplicate eye-balling?? So I’m ducking over here as I say, I eye-balled most of this. To help with my eye-balling, I took pictures and general measurements that you can use to create your own, “eye-balled” moto patch.

The first thing I did was take the sleeve pattern piece and find the halfway mark. I used the wrist hem to find my center since the sleeve is a raglan and not exactly the same from front to back. I needed that center point though, to ensure the patch was centered on his arm when worn.

Once I had my center line I made another mark, approximately 12.5” down from the neckline, along the center line. This line will serve as the bottom of the moto patch. You can bring it lower if you want it to come closer to the elbow, or make it shorter if you wanted a smaller patch. Eye-ball away.

 

Now that I had my lower mark on the center fold, I needed to determine what kind of a shape I wanted for this moto patch. Since I was using the seams for the full top and most of the side lengths for the patch, I just eye-balled a curve. It ended up being about 9.5” down from the top for the back side and 7” down for the front side. Both were more than halfway down the total seam length.  Make your marks and smooth out the curves until you are happy with the size and shape. If you have your recipient handy, you can even hold the sleeve piece up on their arm and make sure you like where it will hit. My husband was gone so I just winged it.

Once you have your moto patch pattern piece made, you will want to measure it. I prefer cutting a square piece of my fabric, mirrored, the size of the patch pattern piece, plus some. Then I take that square piece of fabric and do my pintucks. Once it is done, I cut out the moto patch from it. When you tunnel, it will shrink your fabric piece. My 16”x17” piece ended up being around 14”x 16.5”, when done.

If I did this again, I’d make my piece 17”x 17”, which is about 3” bigger than my moto patch pattern piece. I ended up really close to the edge on my pieces.

Don’t forget to add seam allowance to the bottom curve of the patch pattern piece and the top curve of the plain sleeve pattern piece.

You don’t need to add seam allowance to any other part, as the pattern already includes it.

Making the faux pintucks is seriously my favorite part. Make sure to do a few test rows on your chosen fabric, to get your level of desired tunneling and double checking that there are no skipped stitches. Once you are happy with your pintucks, grab that square piece of fabric. Line up your fabric edge, with the edge of your presser foot, and go. It’s important to take your time and make sure the first row is straight. You will be using the first row to line up each subsequent row, and if it is off, your final stitches will be REALLY off. Make sure you keep your beginning and ending threads at each row too, this prevents your threads from being pulled back in and unraveling all the tunneling you just did. Once you have your first row complete, line up the edge of the presser foot with the edge of the first rows stitching, and make the second row. Continue in that manner until you reach the end and your fabric square is complete. Repeat the same steps for the other patch piece, then sit back and admire all those beautiful pintucks  ❤

If you want to see my tunneling in action, you can watch my time lapse video here. I have to say, making the faux pintucks and watching the video is really soothing and mesmerizing, even my kids enjoyed watching it.

This is a good point to finish cutting out all your regular pattern pieces and preparing them for assembly. I don’t cut my moto patches from the pintucked fabric, until the very last minute. Once it is cut, you have to be careful not to pull or mess with them too much. As soothing as I find making the pintucks, I think I’d find it less so, if I had to double my work.

In addition to the moto patch sleeve change, I also made a slight change to the hem of the shirt. The inspiration picture had a curved hem and my husband thought it looked cool too. Brace yourself, here comes some more “eye-balling”. I lowered the center of the hem an inch ish, and free handed an upward curve as it reached the side seam. Then I mirrored the back pattern piece so they would line up when done.

At this point I started assembling. Since I wanted to be able to secure the pintucks in as soon as possible, I skipped ahead to the hood assembly in the pattern instructions. Once the hood was complete and ready to attach to the bodice, I went back and cut my moto patches. Remember, be very careful with those patches once you cut them.

I placed the moto patch, right sides together, with the lower sleeve piece, and sewed them. Repeat with the other sleeve.

Now you will have two complete sleeves that can be attached to the front and back bodice.

Do the front sleeves to the front bodice, right sides together, stitching both. Then take the back sleeves and attach them, right sides together, to the back bodice.

You will now have a circle with only the neckline of the moto patch, unsecured.

Since we already did the hood portion and it is ready, we can attach it to the bodice, following the pattern instructions.

Now all the moto patch stitching is secured in another seam and we can go back to finish the sleeves and side seams, then hem the sleeves and bodice. Whew, if you hung with me this whole time, you now have an awesome faux moto hacked hoodie.

Would you believe it took me longer to write this up than it took to actually sew the hoodie?? It did! Now I’m thinking of other places I can sneak in these faux moto patches. Where would you place a moto patch?

The fabric I used to make this hoodie was brushed French Terry from So Sew English Fabrics. I used the hooded version of the Greenstyle Creations  Hudson pullover for this hack. If you want to watch my time-lapse video of coverstitching these faux pintucks, you can on my youtube.

 

This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you make a purchase through that link, I may get a % back, at no additional cost to you. Let’s be honest, we all know it goes right back to adding to my fabric stash. All opinions on this blog are my own.