Seam (sewing)
sewn join between two pieces of textile material
In sewing, a seam is the join where two or more layers of fabric, leather, or other materials are held together with stitches. Prior to the invention of the sewing machine, all sewing was done by hand. Seams in modern mass-produced household textiles, sporting goods, and ready-to-wear clothing are sewn by computerized machines, while home shoemaking, dressmaking, quilting, crafts, haute couture and tailoring may use a combination of hand and machine sewing.
In clothing construction, seams are classified by their type (plain, lapped, abutted, or French seams) and position in the finished garment (center back seam, inseam, side seam). Seams are finished with a variety of techniques to prevent raveling of raw fabric edges and to neaten the inside of garments.
The most common standard for seams is ASTM International ASTM D6193-16(2020) This standard also covers various types of stitches
Types
All basics seams used in clothing construction are variants on four basic types of seams:
Plain seams
French seams
Flat or abutted seams
Flat Felled or Faux Flat Felled
A plain seam is the most common type of machine-sewn seam. It joins two pieces of fabric together face-to-face by sewing through both pieces, leaving a seam allowance with raw edges inside the work. The seam allowance usually requires some sort of seam finish, usually an overlock in ready to wear or bias tape in couture sewing, to prevent raveling.
Either piping or cording may be inserted into a plain seam.
In a French seam, the raw edges of the fabric are fully enclosed for a neat finish.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Seam (sewing)” as sewn join between two pieces of textile material. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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This entry incorporates text from “Seam (sewing)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.