Woohoo! I finally broke 1,000 views on Tiktok, which may not be much but it’s new for me! Anyway I wanted an excuse to practice some green screen effects because I just found out Inshot has this feature.
I had tried green screen in the past with my limited skills, time, and technology in the past and found it out of my league and not very pretty either. When I ordered cut-off jeans by accident I figured it would be useful to warn others to read their descriptions carefully and to explain my process for hemming stretch jeans.
Sewing Story
When I ordered the jeans the cut-off description was in the title but not in the description. I didn’t think to zoom in on the ankle and ended up with 2 pairs of un-hemmed jeans. I hated to go through the process of sending them back, I had waited a month to receive them, and they were such a good price. I knew I could hem them in about 10 minutes in theory.
I am no sewing expert and I am sure there are those in the sewing community making faces at my lack of thread matching and/or proper technique. If you were already cringing maybe skip this next bit.
*whispering* I may even decide to color my white thread with blue sharpie if I can find a color that is close.🙈
The fact of the matter is that my process did work really well despite my nube-ness and I am happy with the results. So happy that I bought a 3rd pair of the cut-off jeans because I like that price tag a lot better than the hemmed ones!
I probably will match my thread color to the new pair coming as they are dark jeans and it will be even more obvious if the thread color isn’t close. I also plan to reduce the stitch size this time too. The last time I was very worried about the stretch. If I had had to rip out the stitches I didn’t want to be dealing with nightmarish tiny stitches!
As you can see my confidence was pretty low which was part of the reason I didn’t bother to match my thread colors. If you do end up having to rip out sewing machine stitches, they are easier to see if they are big and a different color.
For serging I really don’t change the thread colors very much. It takes more time to thread the machine, so unless I am doing a hem that will be seen by others, or I’m changing the kind of stitch I am using, I just leave well enough alone. I actually like the look of the contrasting threads, so it doesn’t really bother me.
The one thing I will say for matching thread is that matching the thread will mask a lot more mistakes in comparison to contrasting thread. I noticed with my jeans hem that the zigzag was narrower and wider depending on how the fabric fed through my sewing machine. I noticed when hemming, the fabric wouldn’t feed exactly straight. When I straightened my fabric it would stretch it some and this explains the slightly different widths of my zigzag.
Believe it or not the serger was the easier machine to use for this, when compared to my sewing machine. I already had it set up and I just sat down and used the machine without adjusting the settings. This is against every recommendation in the sewing world, but sometimes I get impatient and like to live dangerously.
I have a tendency to have to learn things the hard way. If it had gone completely wrong I’d have lost another centimeter on my jeans, which I was willing to do just to try it quickly. My spare time is limited so I don’t have a lot of time to futz around in a back room. Making sure my toddler isn’t getting into everything is more vital than my jeans hem.
So this time winging it turned out ok! Sergers can be finicky machines but they are also so amazing. I didn’t love sewing until I got my serger. I think some of it is that the serger feeds fabric through the machine straighter than your average sewing machine. At least the less expensive or old sewing machines anyway. It’s also that sergers makes a super stretchy stitch and it makes the inside of your garment look all fancy and professional, even if you do sloppy half-butted sewing like I do.
I may learn more professional sewing techniques someday but at this point time is very limited and I just enjoy being able to experiment. The serger I bought has tons of video resources so even someone who is bad with machinery can watch videos and figure it out. This was important to me because I don’t have a serger expert on deck.
Since I have no one to go straight to for all my crazy questions, I wanted to make sure I could look up questions and issues about my specific machine. The Brother 1034D is one of the less expensive but good quality sergers in general which was also a plus. You could almost say it has a cult-following if such a term is used outside of the movie world.
Just keep in mind if you are shopping for the 1034D there is also a 1034DX which is newer but looks almost identical from the front. The settings are on the right side of the DX, and while it’s more expensive I’ve read you can’t do a rolled hem on this machine, which is something you can do with your 1034D.
My 1034D serger also doesn’t function as a cover stitch machine but I find most sewists do not prefer to have to re-thread their machine to switch from one function to the next. So I decided against the combo unit to save myself some money. Plus I wanted to see if I enjoyed sewing enough to invest in another kind of expensive machine!
Green Screen Effects
So I will try to do another video soon about my green screen process. I can tell you I used a solid green fabric in the background and tried to get the green color to look as uniform as possible.
The lighting is important for successful results but that is because you want that green to look the same shade throughout as much as possible. Inshot’s picture in picture, chromakey tool works really well even if you didn’t get it perfect though. Bravo Inshot!
I shot the video of me sewing and edited and saved it. Then I took a video of me telling the story in front of a digital green screen, added it with the PIP (picture in picture), then decided I didn’t like it, and took a different green screen video (in front of a “real” green screen) of me telling the story. I decided the second green screen video was good enough, and added it to the sewing video, and then added in some captions and music.
Some of my original green screen video’s fail was that I was having a worse than normal hair day, and I was trying to do a green screen effect without a “real green screen” (which can be done but it’s not my favorite technique). When I do my How To Green Screen post I will explain this more too.
My story and video didn’t work perfectly together, as what I was talking about wasn’t always showing in the video. Since this was a trial run, and didn’t involve a ton of planning, I thought it turned out pretty ok!
My point is you don’t have to be an expert to get this to work. I started out with a simple concept, and managed to make something sharable (and hopefully interesting to some lol).
Wrap Up
Read the headings and descriptions! Don’t buy something silly like un-hemmed jeans (instead of the hemmed jeans you really wanted) because you skimmed through the heading and description. Do make the most out of a silly situation and try something a little outside your comfort zone!
I hope this story gave you some fun things to think about, and a few project ideas. Do you sew, hem jeans, or make craft videos? Are green screen effects something that you have been thinking about or trying out?
The last thought I have is that sewing skills are truly handy if you are DIY-ing your own “real” green screen!
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