Working with Iron-on Vinyl

If you have ever done a Google search on sewing vinyl, you know that this is one of the great curses of many a seamstress. The stuff bunches up, slips about, and then sticks to the presser foot of your machine. Solutions abound. You can buy a special Teflon presser foot and industrial needle feed machines. Hand sewing is an option, and some suggest using a walking foot for heavy vinyl. Simpler recommendations include sandwiching the vinyl between tissue paper, waxed paper, gift wrapping paper or interfacing. Adding a piece of tape to the bottom of the presser foot (some prefer painter’s tape while others recommend regular gift wrapping tape). I have even heard of applying sewers aid, a silicone thread lubricant directly to the vinyl.

A different approach is to use something called iron-on vinyl by Therm O Web. I recently came across a reference to this stuff in a pattern for baby bibs, and had to investigate. Readily available online, it comes in 17 inch widths and 2 yard packages or 20 yard bolts, and is available in gloss or matte. I have now completed an insulated lunch sack which I designed using iron-on vinyl on the liner, and have started working on the baby bib pattern I originally mentioned. It really is the easy solution.

In both cases I used the fusible vinyl with quilter’s cotton, so I can’t tell you how it would work with heavier fabrics, or with synthetics. This product is quite lightweight, so it might have difficultly holding up to heavy fabrics like denim, and I’m not sure that you can get most synthetic fabrics warm enough to make a good bond, but for the applications I tried, it’s great.

Here are a few tips:

Wash and dry fabric in same manner that you intend to wash the final product so that any shrinkage will occur before the pieces are cut.

Affix the iron-on vinyl to fabric for lining prior to cutting out pattern. Though you may waste a small amount of material this way, it is much easier than trying to line up and bond the two pieces after they are cut out.

The package for the Thermo-web provides detailed directions on how to fuse the vinyl to the face of the fabric, but it is very similar to other fusible products you may have worked with.

Pre-heat the iron and the fabric by running the warm iron over the face. This also makes sure there are no wrinkles in the fabric.

Peel the backing off the vinyl sheet and layer the tacky side to the fabric smoothing it out with your hands.

Use the hot, dry iron (no steam) for several seconds in each spot, moving with an overlapping motion until you have fused the entire piece of fabric.

Allow the fabric to cool and then proceed with cutting out your pattern pieces

Remember that every hole poked in the fabric will show later because of the vinyl. Make sure to place pins in the seam margin both when affixing the pattern to the fabric and to hold pieces together for sewing

Every machine works a bit differently, so experiment with a piece of scrap to get your upper tension set correctly. Some may find that you need a slightly looser tension on the top thread to achieve a good stitch.

Make sure you are using the correct needle size for the added weight of the fabric. Depending on how bulky your project is, you might even consider using a leather needle.

The cute bib pattern I’m using can be purchased here Pattern Play.

My pattern for two sizes of the insulated lunch sack is available for purchase here Soubrette Art.

What is Dupioni Silk?

Doupioni [doo-pee-oh-nee] Also spelled douppioni, dupioni [doo-pee-ohn] or dupioni, is a silk fabric. It is so called because two cocoons (or dupions) that are reeled as one. This created a very strong but slubbed, irregular yarn. Silk fabrics called shantung or pongee are also made from doupoini yarn. The plain weave fabric made of this yarn and labeled Doupoini will always exhibit this slubbed texture. It is considered slightly inferior to ordinary raw silk, but is very strong and with slight give. It is used for fine apparel and upholstery.

As you can see from the pictures, there is some variation from one fabric to the next in the amount of texture. Also, the fabric is very prone to raveling - something to consider when choosing it. Imitations are made in rayon and synthetics under different names such as cupioni.

A Fabric Yarn...

When most of us think about crochet, we think of yarn – defined on Dictionary.com as “a thread made of natural or synthetic fibers and used for knitting and weaving”.

It is made by spinning which is further defined as the ‘drawing out, twisting, and winding of fibers”. Wedifferentiate types of yarn based on the fiber – wool, cotton, silk, acrylic, etc.However, we can also crochet with yarn substitutes. A couple of years ago I wrote about recycling plastic grocery bags into "yarn". This idea led me to another project for using up remnants of fabric. I took some of the scrap fabric left from making a quilt, and made a crocheted fabric yarn purse.

Making the fabric couldn’t be easier.

Step 1 – cut fabric into narrow strips. I cut mine at ½ inch to make a bulky but manageable yarn. Make sure to cut each strip into the longest length possible. This will reduce the number of joins you need to make, and save time. You can either cut the strips with scissors or a rotary cutter, or if you want a softer look, rip the fabric. To do this, use your scissors to cut small snips the appropriate width about along one selvage edge of your fabric. Then just start ripping the strips. Due to the fact that fabric is not always printed to line up perfectly with the straight of grain, you may find that the first couple of rips are very short. However, this is the best way to square up the fabric, and will yield a stronger yarn.

Step 2 - cut a small slit in the both ends of each strip. Now thread the end of one strip through one end slit of another.

Step 3 – take the other end of strip #2 and thread it through the slit end which has been passed through strip #1

Step 4 – pull the resulting knot tight.

Step 5 – continue to add strips until you have many yards, then roll the “yarn” into a ball ready to crochet. The beauty of this method is that you can always make more yarn – either from contrasting and complementary scraps you have lying around, or by going to the fabric shop to buy something out of their remnant bin.