French Seams on Various Seam Allowances

As a follow up to Monday's post on French seams I wanted to post how to deal with seam allowances that differ from my tutorial since I've gotten a lot of questions about this. The three pieces above have a 1/4" seam allowance, a 1/2" seam allowance, and a 5/8" seam allowance. Basically when you do a French seam, you're going to first stitch half of the seam allowance for the first seam (with wrong sides facing of course), but in situations such as a 5/8" seam allowance stitching at 5/16" is just not going to happen, nor does it need to. Stitch 3/8" for that first seam.

From there press the seam open and trim the seam allowances in half. From left to right the original seam allowances are as follows... 5/8" - 1/2" - 1/4"

Press the seam with right sides facing to enclose the seam allowances. You'll be stitching the 5/8" seam allowance at 1/4", the 1/2" seam allowance also at 1/4", and the 1/4" seam allowance at 1/8"

From left to right above we have the finished 1/4" seam allowance, the 1/2" seam allowance, and the 5/8" seam allowance. Hope this clears things up a bit on various seam allowances.