Sewing Tips To Follow When Ironing Fabric or Pressing Seams and Folds. There is a difference in pressing and ironing when you lay fabric till finish sewing your dress.
A shabby, poor sewing project can be turned into an amazing professional piece of craftsmanship by knowing this small difference.
Due to your laziness, you may skip a simple step and end up with a shabby dress.
That also when you spent a lot of time to make a beautiful dress. But it did not turn out as nice as it should have been.
Mistake #1. Not Pressing When It is Needed
We stitch – at different points of time, for different reasons. Some of us are experts and some are amateurs.
We cut and stitch but sometimes we wonder why our dress does not give that smooth finished look, we get in tailor made dresses.
I have been stitching for a very long time. My dress making is more instinctive than technically perfect because I know there are so many different methods of getting the end result of a good wearable dress of my choice.
It’s more important for me that I enjoy what I create and wear than going through a long list of formulas.
But one thing, which I knew but I did not follow for a good long time costed me a lot of fabric and time.
Till the time I opened my fashion boutique,I did not realize that PRESSING the fabric at every stage of dress making is essential for a smart and fresh appearance.
It is not that your dress can not be made without Pressing, but the appearance you will get after using this simple step is just wonderful.
Mistake #2. Pressing is not Ironing
Pressing is not at all ironing. How ridiculous! But it's true.
Ironing creases out the wrinkles of your fabric but Pressing means exactly pressing each and every stitch, dart, pleat, joint, seam, turn to set them in.
Ironing saves your time also because now you don’t have to worry about holding the joints in place. Once Pressed, it’s easier to handle the fabric.
- There are different types of fabrics – cotton, silk,wool, synthetic and a huge variety of mixed fabrics.
- In fact, the fabric you call cotton may not be 100% cotton until and unless you are buying from a good reliable shop and you have a good knowledge of textiles.
- Market is flooded with mixed fabrics. The reason is that you get benefits of different yarns and shopkeeper gets a good profit on that.
- The reason to tell all this story to you was that this ‘Mixed Fabric’ category is not given on your standard Iron, which is available with you.
Therefore, the safest bet is to use an automatic Steam Iron because any fabric can be successfully pressed by it.
- Don’t loose heart, if you don’t have an automatic steam iron.
- The solution is that you must test the heat of the iron on a spare piece of fabric, which you are going to press, to adjust the heat as per the garment requirement.
It is not that your dress can not be made without Pressing, but the appearance you will get after using this simple step is just wonderful.
Mistake #3. We don't know when to use Ironing and Pressing
- Don’t press on zipper, button, tacking threads, belts and any other fancy things because pressing on them may melt the plastic, if any.
- Secondly, it may leave snake like impressions, which are stubborn and do not go away, no matter how hard you try.
- Before you heat your Iron, please place your fabric nicely on the table with creasing out the wrinkles with your hands.
- Always press the fabric on a straight grain.
- Be very careful while ironing bias fabric, because bias fabric has a tendency to stretch and you should not stretch it at all.
- Don’t use the Iron creasing out the wrinkles. Use it with a lifting movement. You have to PRESS and LIFT and repeat, wherever required.
- Ironing may spoil your darts position, pleats alignment and seam joints. Press, don’t Iron on specific points.
- Press on the wrong side of a fabric otherwise shining or iron marking may appear on the right side, which looks bad.
- Synthetic fabrics and fabrics, which shine and iron-mark easily should be pressed using a dry cotton cloth with light pressure.
- The point of the iron should be used for pressing points, small parts, angles etc.
- The pressure should be towards the pointing side of the iron so that it does not flatten other side of the fabric.
- Don’t press beyond the stitched points of any darts, pleats etc. to avoid creasing the fabric around.
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