Sewing with silk can be a little bit tricky, especially if it's a really
lightweight silk. So, today I'm gonna be showing you my favorite tips for sewing
with really lightweight silks, like chiffon. Hey guys! I am Sarai. I'm the
founder of Seamwork. You can find us at Seamwork.com, and we are a community of
sewists, and we're all about designing and sewing your own wardrobe. So, go ahead and
check us out at Seamwork.com. Today, I'm going to be showing you one of our
patterns—which is the Laura pattern—and how I completely transform the look just
by sewing it in a different fabric. I sewed it in silk, and added a few little
details, which we're going to talk about. But the reason I made this skirt, is my sister is
getting married in a couple weeks and originally I wanted to make a dress
for the wedding and I wanted to do something kind of floaty and pretty. It's
an outdoor wedding, something kind of 70s-inspired, and I was
sort of looking around for patterns, and I realized that it'd be really cool to
make a separate skirt and top instead of a single dress. And if I made it in the
same fabric, it could be worn together and it would look like a dress, but I
could wear the skirt separately, you know, to work with a sweater with boots,
that kind of thing when the weather gets colder. This is the original pattern, so
the Laura skirt is just a really basic wrap skirt. It's got kind of an A-line
shape. The sample here on the cover and on our photos is a—I think it's a
chambray, so just a kind of a cotton fabric. Very simple, very easy to sew. I
wanted to change it up! So what I did is I sewed it in chiffon and I lined it and
I added a ruffle and I'll talk a little bit
a little bit about that later in the video. Today, I wanted to share with you my favorite
tips for sewing with really lightweight fabric like chiffon, because it can be
kind of tricky. So, the first tip that I want to share with you—this is one of my
absolute favorite game-changing tools for sewing with silk and this is
something called spray stabilizer. This is a brand called Sullivans and I bought
this at our local fabric store. What you do is you just spray this right on your
fabric before you sew it. So, the first thing you want to do is make sure that
your chiffon or other silk is pre-washed. The reason you want to pre-wash is
because you have to wash it after you stabilize it, and you want your fabric to
be in the same state before and after you sew it, so it's not, you know,
shrinking or changing in any way. After you pre-wash your fabric, take it outside
and hang it up. This stuff can be kind of stinky. It kind of smells like glue, so
I definitely recommend taking it outside. Don't do it indoors, and hang it up. And
this is a piece of chiffon that hasn't been treated yet, so you can see
it's really kind of floaty, very lightweight. You spray it and it gets
this kind of almost papery texture that is a lot easier to work with. It's a lot
easier to sew, it's a lot easier to cut. Just to kind of show you the two
things side by side, you can see they look pretty different. Then when you're
done sewing, you just wash your finished garment and the spray stabilizer just
washes right out and you get your original floaty chiffon back! If you're
worried about spraying something on your beautiful fabric you can always test it
on a little scrap. You do have to be comfortable with washing your silk
fabric, so if you're worried about it changing the sheen
or the texture at all, I again would just take a little scrap and pre-wash it and
see if you're okay with that. The next thing that I want to share is cutting. So
when you cut a light fabric like this, I really recommend using a rotary cutter.
I've got one here. I always use a new blade with a fabric like this because it snags
easily, and if you have any little burrs or anything on your blade, it can really
hurt your fabrics. So, you just lay the fabric out in a single layer on your
cutting table. If you have pieces that are intended to be cut on the fold, you
just mirror them so you just cut one side, and then flip it over and cut the
other side, and you can actually save a little bit of fabric that way, too. It
takes a little bit longer, so that's something that you want to take into
account, but it'll make it a lot less frustrating. So just give yourself the
time and do it that way. When I sewed this, I used a Microtex needle and I used a
60 slash 8, which is a very small needle. A really sharp tiny needle like this is
gonna really help you to sew without a lot of problems. Like, if you've ever had
your fabric getting kind of sucked down into the throat plate of your machine,
like the needle is just pushing it down, that's often because the needle is just
too big or too dull. So, instead of going straight through the fabric it's just
pushing it down and then you get your fabric kind of getting eaten by the
machine. So, if you ever experience that— it's annoying! It's, you know, it's really
really frustrating. So, start with the clean, fresh, sharp tiny needle and you'll
avoid a lot of those problems. I made a few little changes to the pattern so we
actually have a pattern hack for this on our website if you if you want to go to
Seamwork.com and and look it up. But I gave it this kind of scooped-out tulip
hem in front. We have instructions for doing that at Seamwork,
if you want to try that yourself with this pattern. I added this
ruffle to it, and that's really, really easy to do. All this is it's just kind of
a big, long rectangle that you gather on one side and sew to the hem. The way I
did it is I measured the entire hem all the way around and then I doubled it, so
the ruffle is twice as long as the hem of the skirt. And then I gathered it to
fit and the ruffle is sewn almost all the way around. Because it's a wrap skirt,
and it wraps under on the other side, I didn't want to sew it all the way up to
the other side of the skirt—all the way up to the side seam here—because that
could create some extra bulk on the hip. So you'd have that ruffle kind of
underneath that lap there and, you know, that's just adding a lot of extra
fabric that you don't need. So I sewed it up just to just below the hip. The seams
I used are a narrow French seams. Obviously the fabric is sheer, it's
see-through, so you'll be able to see the seam. And a French seam is a really
nice, clean finish. I did a narrow French seam both because it is less conspicuous,
it's smaller, but also with these long seems like this,
you want something that's just going to lay really nicely and it's not going to
kind of buckle and curve and get all twisted.
I used a narrow zigzag stitch instead of a regular straight stitch. I used a
half millimeter in width zigzag. The length of the stitch is about the same,
which is about two and a half millimeters, 2.4 or two-and-a-half
millimeters, but the width of the stitch is only half a millimeter so you really
can't tell that it's a zig-zag stitch but it just adds that little bit of
stretch. Another change that I made is that I lined the skirt. Obviously this
fabric is sheer and so I wanted a lining. So, if you pull it over, I used a silk
habotai—sometimes called China silk—it's a very lightweight silk fabric. It's
light but it's still opaque, so that's what you want when you're lining a
really lightweight chiffon like this. You want something that's not going to
change the drape too much, but it's opaque so you won't be able to, you know,
see your underwear. The last little change that I made to this pattern was that
instead of doing a tie at the sides, I did a little trouser clasp here at the
side and then at the other side, so it lays a lot more flat and looks just like
a waistband on a dress. And then the last tricky bit that you might want to think
about is the hem. What you want is something that's very narrow—again you
want it to be inconspicuous because of this sheer fabric—but you also want to
make sure that the fabric still has that kind of floaty quality to it, and if
you have too big of a hem, that's going to kind of impact the way the hem lays. And
so you want to do a little tiny hem— either a narrow turned hem or a baby hem.
I can do a tutorial on a baby hem in the future. If you guys want to see that, just
let me in the comments! The last thing that I'd
really say about sewing with silk and especially with something like chiffo,
which is a little bit tricky, is just take your time with it, because if you
rush, you're gonna get so frustrated. Things will go wrong,
I guarantee it. It's happened to me a million times, so just take your time.
You know when I sew this pattern just out of the envelope with a regular fabric, like
cotton or linen or something like that, you know it would probably take about
about three hours. It's a pretty simple pattern. When I add all these changes, and
I line it, and I do the French seams, and work with this fabric and cut in on the
single ply, and all that stuff— this skirt took me probably eight to ten
hours, so that should just give you an idea of the kind of time commitment that
you have to think about if you're gonna sell with a trickier fabric like this.
So, that's how I transformed my Laura skirt and made something really, really
different just by changing a few details and changing the fabric to something
really special. If you like this pattern and you want to try out something like
this yourself, you can find it on our website at Seamwork.com. You can buy the
Laura pattern there, you can just look it up there, or if you want to become a
member, you get new patterns every month. Plus there's really supportive awesome
community and lots of tools and resources that we offer. So, go ahead and
check it out Seamwork.com. We also have a free planner there for your sowing
that you can download. It's totally free, you just enter your email and we'll
send it to you. So go ahead and check it out. And if you like this video, go ahead
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