Sewing Left-Handed: What I Wish I'd Known When I Was Learning

My seamstress mom and I butted heads a lot when she was teaching me how to sew.

My older sister is left-handed too, but she had adapted much more easily to learning the right-handed way. Then I came along — the rebellious, apparently less-talented one who couldn't understand why things that were supposedly so easy did not feel easy at all.

It wasn't entirely heartbreaking for my mom that I couldn't sew. It mostly meant I wasn't going to make my own clothes or make money sewing ties the way my sister did. I, however, took it a little more personally.

Which is pretty funny considering I now sew for a living.

Some of what I struggled with really did just take practice. But I also eventually learned that being left-handed can change how you use certain sewing tools and even how easy it is to follow someone else's instructions.

A few adjustments would have saved younger me a lot of frustration.

Switch the blade on your rotary cutter

Please. Please. If your rotary cutter allows you to switch the blade to the other side, try it.

This is something I didn't figure out until I'd already spent years struggling to make consistently straight cuts.

When you're cutting against a ruler, you want the rotary blade running directly alongside the ruler's edge. With the blade set up for the opposite hand, the handle can end up between the blade and the ruler. You can compensate for it, and I did, but it's considerably harder to keep that cut exactly where you want it.

I got better with practice, but cutting straight still required way more concentration than it seemed to require for my right-handed mom.

She never really understood why.

Ironically, she was the one who eventually switched my rotary blade over for me. She still insisted it wasn't that necessary.

Then one day she picked up my left-handed rotary cutter and tried to cut fabric with it.

Her cut went wildly off course.

The look of absolute horror on her face was one of the most validating moments of my sewing life.

My blade is still set up left-handed.

Learn from other left-handed people

Watching someone do something right-handed and then trying to reproduce it left-handed can require a surprising amount of mental gymnastics.

You're watching their hands move one way, then sitting down and finding that your hands don't naturally approach the same thing from that direction. Sometimes you can mirror what they're doing without much trouble. Sometimes your brain decides absolutely not.

My older sister was much better at adapting than I was. She put in the effort and figured it out.

I mostly got frustrated.

Now there are so many sewing tutorials available that there's no reason not to look specifically for a left-handed demonstration when something isn't clicking. Seeing someone hold and approach something the same way you do can make a technique suddenly make much more sense.

You don't get extra sewing points for learning everything the right-handed way.

Buy actual left-handed scissors

My sister and I agree on this one: left-handed fabric scissors are worth having.

They're not just regular scissors with handles that happen to be comfortable in either hand. True left-handed scissors reverse the blades too, which changes which cutting edge you can see while you're using them.

If you've used right-handed scissors your entire life, the switch can actually feel strange at first. You've probably gotten very good at compensating without realizing you're doing it.

I use left-handed scissors almost exclusively now. The exception is the little scissors I use for clipping threads, where it really doesn't matter enough for me to care.

For actually cutting fabric, though? Left-handed.

It's okay to quit for a while

The first time I sewed a tie, it twisted and wouldn't hang straight.

Five years later, I decided to try again.

That one twisted twice.

Apparently I had improved at twisting ties.

Another eight years passed before I came back to it again.

Now I sew and sell ties.

Walking away from something doesn't necessarily mean you've given up forever. Sometimes you're frustrated enough that continuing isn't helping anyway. You can come back with more experience, better tools, more patience, or a completely different understanding of what you're doing.

Sewing is supposed to be something you enjoy. If you hate every second of learning it, you're allowed to stop.

Your fabric stash will still be there when you're ready.

Ease your way into it

Oddly enough, I found my way back to sewing through crochet.

Crochet clicked for me much faster. I went from making beanies to baby blankets, and eventually I wanted to make a blanket that involved sewing fabric squares and crocheting them together.

Suddenly sewing wasn't this whole skill I was trying and failing to learn. It was just one part of making something else I already wanted to make.

That helped me get more comfortable with sewing machines and hand stitching without putting so much pressure on myself to be good at sewing.

You can do the same thing with a small project, a simple straight stitch, hand sewing, or even helping someone else with part of what they're making. You don't have to begin by deciding you're going to master an entire sewing machine.

I wasn't actually incapable of sewing

For a long time, I thought my older sister was the talented one and I just wasn't particularly good at this.

There was some truth buried in there: she put more effort into learning than I did. I got frustrated and walked away. More than once, apparently.

But I also didn't understand how much I was compensating for tools and instructions that weren't set up for me.

Switching a rotary blade isn't going to magically teach you how to sew. Neither are left-handed scissors. You still have to practice, make mistakes, learn how fabric behaves, rip out seams, and occasionally wonder how something went that wrong.

But you don't need to make the learning process harder than it already is.

I'm still left-handed. My rotary blade is still switched. I still use left-handed scissors. And after taking the very, very scenic route to learning how to sew, I eventually ended up doing it for a living.

So if you're left-handed and struggling, try changing the tools before deciding you're the problem.

And if that doesn't work, you can always quit for eight years and try again.