Adding a luxurious touch to your pattern? Then you might choose a flowing satin fabric, a lightweight jacquard, transparent chiffon... in short: flowing, supple fabrics. Although they often give beautiful results, these fabrics are not always the easiest to work with.
But with a few tips & tricks from our creative team, you will soon be a master of flowing, supple fabrics!
WELL CUT IS WELL STARTED! ✂️
All projects start with the cutting of your patterns. You may have already noticed that these types of fabrics slip and shift easily while cutting.
- Sandwich your fabric between pattern paper, this way your fabric will slide less while cutting. If necessary, use a rotary cutter to cut your lines even neater.
- When positioning your patterns, you can give a small cut in the weft and pull a thread across the full width. This way, you can lay both the straight thread and the hem perfectly in hook to avoid your pattern pieces pulling at an angle when you wear them.
- Use extra fine head pins to avoid holes. If using a rotary cutter, you may as well put weights on your pattern pieces.
TOP-NOTCH SEWING ?✨
You may encounter some 'struggles' when sewing, but don't worry: there's a good solution for everything! ?
- Insert a fine stitching needle into your machine, ideally a microtex one to avoid holes in the fabric.
- When reinforcing certain parts (waistband, facing...), use suitable interfacing. After all, you don't want your flowing fabric looking like cardboard because of the wrong interfacing. H180 and H200 are good options.
- The ideal way to work with zips and flowing fabrics? To avoid the top fabric and zip working against each other, you can stitch a bias-cut piece of lining fabric in between. You don't need to finish the piece of lining, thanks to the bias cut it won't fray. You stitch the lining between the top fabric and the zip. Think of this as a kind of non-ironable reinforcement, often in organza.
1, 2, 3, CHECK! ✅
Between cutting and stitching, make sure you check from time to time that everything is still correct. Do the reference points still match? Have I placed enough snips (add a few more if necessary for long seams to match)?, ...
Behold! With these tips & tricks, flowing, delicate fabrics no longer hold any secrets for you! Show us your results under the 'Your creations' tab or share them on Instagram with #fibremood. We can't wait to see the results!
