Knowing Your Fabric

Most sewing disappointments are not sewing mistakes. The seam was straight, the pattern was the right size, and the finished garment still hangs wrong, twists at the side seam, or bags out after one wearing. Nearly always the cloth was the problem, and the cloth was chosen before a single stitch was made. This course teaches you to read fabric before you buy it: what fibers are and how each one behaves wet, hot, and under strain; the difference between a woven and a knit and why it governs everything else; grain, selvage and true bias, and how to find them on a rumpled piece off the bolt; weight and drape, and why a pattern envelope's suggested fabrics are advice worth taking seriously.

From there the course moves to the practical work of a thrifty sewing room. You will learn to buy fabric well - reading bolt ends and remnant tables, judging quality by hand and by held-up light, estimating yardage honestly, and knowing when a bargain is not one. You will learn to prepare cloth before cutting it: preshrinking by fiber, straightening a crooked grain, and pressing so that what you cut is what you sew. Then eight units in, you meet the fabrics themselves - the everyday cottons, flannels, denims and broadcloths you will use most; the difficult ones (slippery, shifty, napped, stretchy, sheer) and the specific handling each demands; interfacing and how to choose and apply it; and linings, underlinings and interlinings, the quiet layers that separate a homemade garment from a well-made one.

The course is ten units of ten lessons - one hundred lessons in all - self-paced, with each lesson a short reading followed by a ten-question quiz that grades itself. It is written for adults: for the mother sewing school clothes on a tight budget, for the man who wants to understand what he is working with, for anyone who would rather know why than be told what. Throughout, it returns to the character Scripture attaches to this work - the women in Exodus 35 who did spin with their hands and brought what they had made, Bezalel and Aholiab filled with the Spirit in all manner of workmanship, the virtuous woman who seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands, and Dorcas, whose coats and garments were held up and wept over because they had been made for somebody. Where a lesson touches on clothing the body, modesty is taught warmly and positively, as a kindness to others and a quiet adornment of a meek and quiet spirit, never as a list of rules. Skill here is stewardship: honest cloth, honest work, and doing it heartily, as to the Lord.