What do you do…

When your interfacing doesn’t come wide enough for the piece that needs to be interfaced? What a pain in the butt! Anyway, the 2nd shirt for the sweetie is cut out. This pretty much uses up the last of that fabric, thank the gods. Really thin, no recovery, and a b#$% to cut out. I am much more excited about the other two knits I have, especially this blue one I posted yesterday. It’s going to look adorable with the cream elastic and cream topstitching. But the sweetie’s shirt first. I bought a metre of knit interfacing, thinking surely this would be plenty. This is my first time using a knit interfacing, and my first time interfacing a knit.

Can I just say, what a pain? Although the fabric doesn’t roll too badly at the edges (its one saving grace), the interfacing does like CRAZY. Also, do not drag the iron while you’re fusing.

Did I mention, don’t drag the iron around?

Even once you think it’s all fused in place.

Don’t even slide it. Not even a millimetre.

Yes, you. You, too.

Let’s just say, there’s going to be some bad creases that will hopefully be hidden inside the button placket.

And then, after blockfusing a ton, I realize that the interfacing itself isn’t wide enough for the back piece. What do you do in this situation? I wouldn’t want to change the grain (the knit interfacing stops almost all lengthwise stretch but leaves plenty widthwise). Butt the interfacing pieces up against each other? Overlap slightly? Either way, I think you’d have a problem. What I did, since I had already blockfused the whole freakin’ piece, was to narrow the back yoke. So now I need to mess with the neckline and quite possibly the shoulder-widths. Bleh. And, after cutting out the back yoke, the rest wasn’t long enough to do my front placket, so the bottom of that is pieced in. Hopefully I can get the seams to line up, although with the bubbling I mentioned above, I think I’m just going to hope no one ever looks closely at the inner placket at all. Ever.

The interfacing leaves the fabric surprisingly soft. Although it no longer crawls around and sticks to itself, it’s still very pliable and slippery. So it goes from being an absolute pain in the backside to cut, to merely being annoying.

I also tried out the pinning-the-fabric-to-the-carpet method for cutting it out this time. I think that’s a real method. At least, I’m pretty sure I’ve read about other people pinning out difficult fabric on various boards and things. Anyway, I had the carpet.

It worked… somewhat. Though I tried not to stretch it too much, a certain amount of that almost has to happen with this fabric to get it to sit smooth (or, y’know, I’m incompetent). Even with all the fussing with pins, it was less of a pain to get the two layers spread out with a passably straight folded edge. Cutting out itself was a little trickier; I think some angled shears would be perfect for this kind of thing. Or a rotary cutter—except, y’know, my carpet. My biggest hesitation is, due to the stretching, I’m not sure that the actual size of the pieces was particularly true, nor am I sure how consistent the stretching was. Ah well. I guess we’ll see how it all sews up, won’t we?

“Gonna finish my shirt today?” says the boy as he leaves for work this morning.

I may have created a monster. I need to get some “u owe me” labels like the Selfish Seamstress has. Ones that come with an itemized list.