Stitchery Blog
I purchased the book Bare Essentials: Underwear by Jennifer Lynne Matthews-Fairbanks a few weeks ago because I was interested in the section on pattern drafting and grading. The surprise bonus is how much I love the traceable brief included in the beginner’s section. It’s really comfy!
Something about having to prewash fabric or trims makes me waaaay less motivated to start a project. Anybody else have that problem? I get most of my sewing goodies in the mail so I try to run everything through the wash as soon as I open the package and it mostly works. . . except for long pieces of trim and elastic.
Tossing 10 yards of FOE in the washer and dryer seemed like a terrible idea so I’ve been pretreating shorter pieces, one project’s worth at a time. It works, but it slows me down when I want to be sewing. Since I had a free afternoon today, I played around with some solutions for preventing tangling. I found one I like!
Yep. I’ve learned the hard way to prewash my foldover elastic (FOE). On my first introduction to FOE I briefly wondered if it needed to be pre-shrunk, but that seemed like overkill. Besides, most elastics are aren’t made from fibers you’d expect to shrink, right?