Welcome to Day 5 of the Ali Sweatshirt sewalong! If you’ve missed any posts, check out the main page for the sewalong. Today we’re going to assemble the body of the sweatshirt. Last week we assembled the sleeves and yoke and topstitched the seams. For the body, I don’t usually topstitch the seams but if you’d like to topstitch any of these seams, just follow the same steps we did on Day 4. All right! Let’s dive in.

Welcome to Day 4 of the Ali Sweatshirt Sewalong! My favorite part of this sweatshirt, besides the utter coziness, is the topstitching on the yoke and sleeves. The topstitching highlights the design lines and gives it an extra sporty feel. It's is also a great place to play around and get creative, to try out different stitches or thread colors. For today’s installment of the sewalong we are going to assemble our yoke and sleeves and topstitch the center seams of each. This topstitching is totally optional but I encourage you to give it a try. You might like it so much that you want to topstitch even more seams. 

For the seams that are topstitched, I use a slightly different method of stitching, to give us a nice flat seam to topstitch. To start, we’ll stitch the seam using a conventional machine. Then we’ll finish the seam allowance together without trimming and press the seam allowance to the side. Now it’s all ready to topstitch. The method is the same for the yoke and the sleeves.

Welcome to Day 3 of the Ali Sweatshirt Sewalong. The Ali Sweatshirt is designed to be used with light to medium weight sweatshirt fabric that has at least 20% stretch. The stretch is very important because without it you may not be able to get the sweatshirt on over your head. I know this from experience. There are fabrics out there that look like sweatshirt fleece but do not stretch.