Beth Bates: Hi, I am Beth Bates with the company SewTeacher and today I am showing you how to make a custom Christmas tree skirt. We have got our patterning, cut out the lining and now it is time to place it on top of face fabric or decorative fabric. Now, for this particular decorative fabric, it does have a small pattern, but it is very, very repetitive and it is also small in size. If you have a pattern in your fabric such as this or you have large motifs when you place your lining over the fabric, you may wish to make sure that they are centered appropriately.

Okay, back to the Christmas tree skirt, we are doing today. So I have got my lining and I spread it out over my face fabric. I am going to go ahead and take the pins and begin pinning, making sure that the lining is nice and smooth, as I go around and I will actually be sewing in the next clip, this lining to the fabric. So, I am going to take great care to pin this carefully and I am placing my pins approximately four inches apart, to ensure that the pattern made out of lining is firmly attached to the face fabric.

Once, I finish that I will take my scissors and I will begin cutting completely around the pattern. When I am finished with that, we can go ahead and get sewing. Now, that we have our face fabric cut out and it is pinned to the lining, we need to talk a little bit about the trims. The particular trim that I am going to use today is made to be sewn in the seam. So, I am going to unpin my lining in my face fabric and I am going to repin it together with the trims inside the seam.

Now, please note the pretty part of the trim will be deeper down in the part where it is sewn together will be on the outer edge. So when I turn it inside out, the correct end of the trim is showing. Now, some trims and you can usually distinguish them, see how this has a really pretty decorative border, this kind is meant to be applied outside the skirt when you are all finished, you do not need to sew it in the seam and this can be applied with fringe adhesive and I will show you how to do that later, but for right now, we are going to go ahead and continue pinning this trim inside the seam and I will go all the way around skirt, again like this and when I am finished we will take it over to the machine and begin sewing.

For those of you who have chosen a trim that is to be applied outside of the seam such as these, this is really quite easy, you have two choices. You can put it on the very, very edge such as this or like a half an inch such as that. I am going to chose right on the edge and you take your fringe adhesive which is available at any craft store, put it right here on the end, fold this down, you want to hold it a moment for it is dry and then using very -- just gently and apply that all the way around the outer edges of the skirt and of course this step is to be done when you are have finished all the sewing and that is how you apply trim outside the seam