Never too Old
Never too old to learn new ways of doing things in the world of sewing.
When I did a tremendous amount of sewing for my children there was at that time not a lot of yard goods in the stretchy selection. Well maybe there was, but I chose the woven fabrics.
When I was in Hobby Lobby, I looked at all the bolts of fabric that were stretchy every which way. I was intimidated. but I bought a half yard. Stretchy fabric comes at 60″ wide and not the 44″ of the woven world.
This week I am watching YouTubes on stretch stuff. I already have needles geared towards stretch. One down. Number 9 on the choices of stitches my Bernina can do is a stretch stitch and I tried it out on woven material. Two down. Putting my sample stretch piece under the needle . . . didn’t go so well. Using my stiletto and encouraging the feed dogs to grab the fabric helped. Any serious stitching, YouTube suggested “stay stitching” close to the edge with a usual straight stitch, slightly diminishing the stretch. When I layered two pieces together as in making a seam, with right sides together, they wanted to slip. The stretch fabric bucked at stick pins. Push, push and still not sliding in smoothly so as to not distort the soon to be seam. Hmm.
The last time I had a challenge was the year I did the remake of the five foot tall Santa. The velvet fabric with right sides together wanted to slide away from each other. As that time I had ordered a product that was 1/4″ wide and I think they called it Wonder Stitch. It came on a fairly good sized flat roll. By peeling of the protective coating, it became a 1/4″ of almost an invisible product. At that time I put down a strip on the right side of the seam allowance and then carefully put down the right side of the soon to be seam. It worked. I couldn’t get too far ahead of the machine sewing as with no pins working it kept me busy lining up the 3/8ths seam. I still had some of the Wonder Stitch.
I tried it on my Hobby Lobby stretchy fabric. It worked! As the Wonder Stitch was not stretchy, it also managed the stretch of the two layers for the seam. My next quest was to try putting on double fold bias tape. I knew I had scored that as I had just sewn double fold bias on two of Kevin’s shop machine shrouds . . . the key . . . there was no stretch. I again laid down the Wonder Stitch to sew down the opened double fold bias tape. Once that was sewn down, there was no more stretch left to fold over the bias take for the top stitching. Whew!
All of my “what if” were on a flat straight seam. Working with curves . . . that’s for tomorrow.
With all of that, I will take my leave. ♥