Accurate marking, piping, and seams

I learned four very important lessons while constructing the christening gown.  (See previous posts for more info about the gown.)

1)  I had already tested my blue vanishing marker, and I knew the marks would come out with water.   I had copied the pattern with a ballpoint pen onto the gridded pattern paper I usually use.  Since the pattern paper is thin, I thought I could transfer all my dots by marking through the paper with my marker.  It worked.  BUT, what I didn’t know was that it had also transferred some of the ballpoint ink through and onto the fabric.

The blue rinsed out, but the ink did not.  I had to try to include as much of the ink marks into my seams as possible.  I also put stain stick on them, in the hopes that they will come out yet.  But, now I know not to do that again!  I just wish I could have learned it on something less critical and less, well, less WHITE.

2) Something I’m glad I did was that I steamed the cording I was using for the piping.  Good thing I did because it shrank up a whole bunch.

3) When piping around corners, everyone always says to clip the piping seam allowance, but I had not yet found where anyone told me where to clip.  My first corners on my collar would not lie right.  Then I tried clipping the piping my seam allowance’s width before I came to the next edge.  Plus I clipped the piping perpendicular to the seam I was currently sewing, not at an angle from the corner.  What a difference.  My piping turned the corner and lay right along the seam line like it was supposed to.

4) In several places on the gown I had anywhere from four (4) to 10 seam allowances to deal with.  That’s a lot of fabric, especially when several of the fabric layers are a heavy satin.  I figured out that if my machine was bogging down, especially at the start of a seam, if I lengthened the stitch for the first inch or so, the feed dogs were able to pull more and the fabric fed under the needle without any struggle.  After the first inch I’d change my stitch length back to whatever I needed it to be for that seam.

Now I just need to remember these lessons so that I can apply them right away the next time I encounter these same situations.

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© Sherilyn Siegmund-Roach and Cherished Needle Creations