Sew Easy: #4, How to Get Fabric Ready for Sewing

one of the most common mistakes the average home sewer makes is to rush home from the store and in her eagerness to start sewing she lays this fabric out on the table and cuts out her dress without having properly prepared the fabric for sewing when she does this she misses one of the most important steps in sewing and no matter how meticulous she is with her sewing how perfect the stitches the dress may never hang correctly now today we're going over these simple but important steps in preparing your fabric for sewing this is a fabric we've chosen for our demonstration I bought it just as many of you would even though it's not sanforized in fact the clerk couldn't even tell me it had been pre shrunk so that will be one of our problems to strength the fabric so the dress will remain in [fist?] after it's made then you'll notice when these two selvages are held together that one of the torn edges is longer than the other this means that the manufacturer has pressed this fabric off grain and we will need to straighten it before we cut out our dress now both of these problems can be taken care of with one process of course you all know what happens when you make a dress out of fabric that has not been pre shrunk and these skirts will show you what happens when you make a dress our fabric where the grain has not been straightened this skirt was made from fabric as it came from the store nothing was done to straighten the grain line and as you can see this side turned out alright but this side didn't now of course you're saying that stripe material so you can readily see it but even though it were solid color this side of the skirt would hang smoothly and correctly with the figure but this side would not if your skirt pokes out on one side it's often due to faulty grain line now this other skirt was cut from the same bolt of material but we took time to straighten the grain I think you can readily see that both sides of this skirt hang correctly we've been talking about grain lines so let's just see what causes it these threads that run along with the selvage are known as the lengthwise grain of your fabric and they are usually a little heavier are more tightly twisted than the other threads in the fabric when we speak of grain lines we're referring to these lengthwise threads but we can't ignore the threads that run across a fabric which are known as the crosswise grain they run along with this torn edge of our fabric the thing for you to remember is that before you cut out a dress you should have these two sets of threads at right angles to each other not this way or this way once in a while you will buy a piece of fabric for these two sets of threads are at right angles and one easy way to check this is to line it up with your table if the selvages and the torn edges line up with the two edges of the table you know that you have the threads in place for cutting but now what are we going to do with this piece of fabric that is obviously off grain let me brief you on this process with a small piece of coarse fabric in this magnified view of the fabric you can see we've removed one lengthwise and one crosswise thread then when I place this right angle along the intersection of these two thread lines you can see that it's off grain now here's what we'll do to take care of this we'll put it in clear water and leave it there until it's completely soaked now the purpose for this is to let the threads relax and go back into their natural position or let them go back to a right angle position leave it there until it's thoroughly wet and then let them drip dry we never ring fabric when we're shrinking it and straightening the grain or you'll get permanent wrinkles that are difficult to handle we'll block this to speed up the process and now we're ready to press it as I press it you'll notice that I lift the iron up and down rather than slide it across the fabric this will make sure that the threads of the fabric stay in their position the sliding action of the iron could push the threads off grain again