A lot of sewing you will do will see you needing to sew in a straight line. This is not usually something that you will magically learn to do with experience. You will however learn some helpful ways to mark lines and help you sew in a straight line!

If you are sewing a line a certain distance away from the edge of your fabric, and the edge itself is straight, you can mark this distance on your sewing machine. Lots of machines have lines and even numbers marked on the metal plate your needle goes through, the stitch plate. This shows the distance from the needle. You could try to use these lines, although they aren’t always very visible and often the numbers will be hard to read or obscured by your fabric when sewing. I usually use masking tape to extend these markings. Masking tape is great as it doesn’t leave any sticky residue behind and it can often be reused for ages. Make sure if you use masking tape you apply it in a line straight down from the stitch plate towards the front of your machine. No good if this line is on the diagonal! Then you can line your fabric up with the masking tape and keep the fabric and tape edge lined up all the way as you are sewing. This is the method I use most often.

You can also buy magnetic guides you can attach to your stitch plate. These are easier to follow if you are the kind of sewist who keeps forgetting to pay attention to the tape, as they are bulky and it would be hard to extend your fabric over them accidentally. A lot of vintage sewing machines came with these. They are a lot shorter than you can make the masking tape and it is completely possible to knock them and not realise, so that is a downside.

You can often just use the edge of the foot, either the left or the right hand edge, or gauge by eye how much fabric you can have sticking out at the edge of the foot. I use this a lot and you will definitely get better at training your eyes to spot these kind of measurements. This is also useful if your straight line is parallel to something that isn’t an edge of fabric, but something like a pocket or a line of stitching.

Some sewing machines allow you to move your needle over, which means you can use the edge of your presser foot and then put the needle as far away from this edge as you need, and still use the foot as a measuring gauge. Also very useful for keeping away from things consistently when going around curves, when masking tape can be a little bit more tricky to use.

You can finally draw your stitch line in, ideally with a removable marker or chalk, although if I am working on the inside of things like denim I have been known to use biro for ease of use. Obviously always make sure the marker is easily removable, doesn’t leave any traces at all, or doesn’t bleed to the front of your fabric if not.