Unit 1: What Fabric Is Made Of

Fiber, Yarn, Cloth: The Three Steps Behind Every Bolt

Nothing Is Cloth Until Someone Makes It Cloth

Pick up any bolt in any store and you are holding the end of a three-step journey: fiber, then yarn, then fabric. Fiber is the raw stuff — the seed hair pulled off a cotton boll, the fleece shorn off a sheep, the long fiber combed out of a flax stalk, the single unbroken filament a silkworm winds around itself, or a man-made polymer pushed out through a plate of tiny holes. Yarn is what happens when those fibers are twisted together into a continuous strand. Fabric is what happens when yarn is interlaced — woven over and under on a loom, or looped into rows on a knitting machine.

Every problem you will ever have at the sewing machine traces back to one of those three steps. A fabric frays because its yarns are smooth and slick and slide apart. A fabric shrinks because its fibers were stretched during spinning and relax the first time they get wet. A fabric skips stitches because your needle is punching through loops instead of slipping between them. Once you can name the step, you can usually name the fix.

Where the Fiber Comes From

Fibers fall into three families, and the family predicts the behavior.

Natural fibers grow. Cotton and linen are plant fibers, chiefly cellulose. Wool and silk come from animals, and are protein. Plant and protein fibers do not behave alike: wool has microscopic surface scales that plant fibers simply do not have, which is why wool can felt and cotton cannot.

Semi-synthetic fibers — rayon and viscose — begin as natural cellulose, usually wood pulp or cotton linters, and are then chemically treated and re-formed into fiber. They are neither fish nor fowl, and they behave like it. Rayon drapes like silk and absorbs water like a sponge.

Synthetic fibers — polyester, nylon, spandex — are made from petrochemicals. They are plastic, in the plain sense of the word. That single fact explains nearly all of their behavior: they resist water, they resist shrinking in the wash, and they melt under a hot iron.

Staple and Filament

Cotton, linen, and wool come as staple — short lengths, an inch or a few inches, that must be twisted hard to hold together. All those cut ends poking out of the yarn are what give cotton flannel its fuzz and what make a cut edge fray and shed. Silk arrives as filament: one continuous strand, sometimes hundreds of yards long, needing almost no twist. Man-made fibers are extruded as filament too, and may be chopped into staple lengths on purpose to make them feel more like cotton.

Twist matters. A hard-twisted yarn makes a crisp, strong, wrinkle-prone cloth. A soft-twisted yarn makes a fabric that feels warm and cushiony and pills more easily.

From Yarn to Fabric, and What It Does to You

Woven fabric is two sets of yarn crossing at right angles. It has almost no give along either set of yarns, and a good deal of give on the diagonal. Knit fabric is one yarn looped through itself, and it stretches because the loops can pull open. That is why a woven seam can be sewn with a straight stitch and a knit seam usually cannot — a straight stitch has no stretch in it, and the thread snaps the first time the wearer bends.

Thread count — the number of yarns per inch — tells you how tightly the cloth is packed. Around eighty threads per inch and above, a woven cotton is firm and holds a cut edge decently. Down near sixty, the same fiber gives you a loose, weak cloth that frays as you carry it to the machine.

Try This Before You Cut Anything

Take four scraps you already own and label them. Pull a yarn out of each cut edge with a pin, lay it on a white sheet of paper, and untwist it with your fingernail. You will see whether it is many short fibers or one long smooth strand. Stretch each scrap along the cut edge, then across, then on the diagonal, and write down which direction gave. Then hold each one up to a window and count the yarns in a quarter inch. Ten minutes of this teaches your hands more than an hour of reading.

The women in Exodus who spun for the tabernacle did every one of these steps by hand — blue, purple, scarlet, and fine linen, all of it fiber before it was yarn and yarn before it was cloth. We buy the bolt finished. Knowing what happened before we got it is simply the beginning of doing the work honestly.

Cotton: The Fiber That Forgives a Beginner

Why Nearly Everyone Should Start Here

Cotton is cheap, it is everywhere, it holds a crease when you press it, it does not slither out from under the presser foot, and it takes a needle without complaint. If your first several projects are cotton, you will spend your attention on straight seams instead of on fighting the cloth. Dorcas made coats and garments for widows out of whatever plain, useful cloth she had; there is nothing second-rate about ordinary fabric well sewn.

Cotton is a plant fiber, and it is thirsty. It will hold more than a quarter of its own weight in water, which is why a wet cotton towel is heavy and why cotton takes its time on the line. That same thirst is what makes cotton comfortable in a hot kitchen and miserable in cold rain.

Preshrink First, Every Time

Untreated cotton shrinks about three percent the first time it is washed, and some untreated cottons go as far as five. Three percent sounds like nothing until you do the arithmetic on a garment: three percent of a forty-five-inch skirt length is nearly an inch and a half, and at five percent it is two and a quarter inches — a hem you cannot get back.

Wash and dry your yardage exactly the way you intend to wash and dry the finished garment. If the finished shirt will go through a warm wash and a low tumble dry, do that to the yardage. If you plan to line-dry, line-dry the yardage. Preshrinking with a method gentler than your real habits accomplishes nothing.

Before the fabric goes in, run a line of stay stitching about an eighth of an inch in from each raw edge, straight stitch at 2.5mm. Raw cut edges tangle and ravel into a matted rope in the washer, and you lose two or three inches of usable fabric untangling them. The stitching takes two minutes.

When it comes out, press it while it is still slightly damp and square it up before you lay out a pattern.

Machine Settings That Work

For medium-weight cotton, use a 90/14 universal needle, stitch length 2.5 to 3mm, and tension around 4 to 5. For lightweight cottons — voile, lawn, thin batiste — drop to a shorter stitch, 2 to 2.5mm, and ease the tension down a little if you see the seam drawing up.

If a seam puckers, the usual causes in order of likelihood are tension set too high, stitch length too long for the weight, and a needle that has gone dull. A needle that has sewn through a few hundred yards is not sharp anymore even if it looks fine, and a dull needle pushes the yarns aside instead of piercing them cleanly. Sew a test seam on a doubled scrap every single time you change fabric. It costs four inches of cloth and saves an evening of unpicking.

Not All Cotton Is the Same Cotton

This is the mistake that ruins more first garments than any other. Quilting cotton — roughly three to four ounces per square yard, eighty or more threads per inch — is woven to be sturdy and to hold its shape while you piece it. It is stiffened with sizing, and it is wonderful for quilts, bags, aprons, and pot holders. Made up into a skirt or a dress, it stands away from the body, refuses to fall in soft folds, and reads as stiff and homemade in the unhappy sense of the word.

Shirting cottons are woven for garments. Poplin is crisp. Broadcloth is lighter and finer than poplin. Oxford has a slightly basket-like weave and resists wrinkling better than plain poplin does — a real advantage in a shirt that gets worn all day.

The way to tell them apart is not the label but your hand. Gather a yard of the bolt loosely in your fist and let it fall. If it stands out in stiff angles, it is quilting cotton. If it collapses into soft vertical folds, it will make a garment.

Care, and a Word on Heat

Cotton takes machine washing and machine drying without ceremony. Two habits protect it: avoid hot water, which drives shrinkage further, and avoid high dryer heat, which sets shrinkage permanently and wears the fibers. Warm or cold water, a gentle cycle, and low heat or a clothesline will keep a cotton garment serviceable for years. Skip bleach unless the care label plainly allows it — it weakens the fiber and yellows white cotton over time.

Cotton rewards a hot iron and a little steam, and it will take a knife-sharp crease. Keep the iron and its cord well away from where a child can reach, and set it on its heel every time your hand leaves it.

Linen: Flax, Breathability, and the Edge That Ravels

The Coolest Cloth You Can Buy

Linen is spun from flax, the fiber that runs the length of the flax stalk. Its fibers are thicker and stiffer than cotton's, and the yarn they make is uneven — thick in one spot, thin the next. That unevenness is not a defect; it is why linen has the texture it has, and it is why the cloth breathes.

Linen is more breathable than cotton for two reasons working together. The thick flax fibers have microscopic gaps along their surface, and the yarns are woven with more air space between them. Air moves through linen. Linen also holds up to about twenty percent of its weight in water and gives it up quickly, so it pulls sweat off the skin and dries fast. Cotton holds more than twenty-five percent and hangs on to it, which is why a soaked cotton shirt stays clammy long after a soaked linen shirt has dried.

The woman of Proverbs 31 made fine linen and sold it. Flax was the working cloth of her household and a trade good besides — plain, honest, valuable.

Preshrink With Real Care

Linen shrinks three to ten percent on its first wash, considerably more than cotton and much less predictably. Ten percent is not a rounding error. Take five percent out of a forty-five-inch skirt and you have lost two and a quarter inches of length; take ten percent and it is four and a half.

Two consequences follow. First, buy extra yardage — plan on losing something in the neighborhood of a tenth of what you bought before you cut a single piece. Second, preshrink with the exact water temperature and drying method the finished garment will get, and consider washing it twice, because linen is not always finished shrinking after one round.

Stay-Stitch the Edges or Regret It

Linen ravels harder than almost anything else a beginner handles. Its yarns are smooth, strong, and slick, and they walk right out of a cut edge. Put raw linen yardage into a washing machine unprotected and it will come out with three inches of tangled fringe on every edge, knotted into a rope you have to cut off.

Before washing, run a straight stitch at 2.5mm, about an eighth of an inch in from every raw edge. That is it. Two minutes at the machine, and the yardage comes out of the wash with its edges intact.

The same habit pays inside a garment. Linen seam allowances fray in the wearing, not just in the washing, so finish them — a zigzag, a serged edge, a French seam, or a flat-felled seam — before the garment is worn rather than after the seam has already lost a quarter inch.

At the Machine

Use a 90/14 needle for medium-weight linen and set the stitch length at 2.5 to 3mm. Do not go shorter without reason: a very short stitch in linen crowds the needle holes together in a stiff yarn and the thread breaks. Tension around 4 to 5 is right for most linen. Heavy linen and linen canvas want a larger needle still — the same class of needle you would put in for heavy wool or duck.

Press linen hot, with steam, and press it well. Linen takes a crease beautifully and holds it, which is exactly why a badly pressed linen seam stays badly pressed. Press from the wrong side, or use a pressing cloth on the right side, because linen will take on a shine where a hot iron rubs it.

Wrinkles, Honestly

Linen wrinkles. It wrinkles the moment you sit down, and no amount of technique prevents it. This is worth saying plainly, because you can spend real money on linen and then feel cheated. You were not. The soft crumple of worn linen is what linen looks like, and it is why linen shirts and dresses read as relaxed and unfussy rather than sloppy. If you want a garment that comes out of a chair looking untouched, choose a different cloth for that project rather than fight this one.

There are blends sold as wrinkle-resistant linen. What is actually in them varies a great deal from one bolt to another, and the label will not always tell you clearly, so read the fiber content on the bolt end and judge each one on its own.

A Worthwhile Half Hour

Cut two eight-inch squares from the same linen and measure them exactly. Stay-stitch both. Wash one hot and tumble it dry on high; wash the other cold and hang it. Dry, press, and measure again. Divide the inches lost by eight to get your shrinkage as a fraction, and write it on a slip of paper pinned to the leftover yardage. You will never guess at that bolt again.

Wool: The Scales That Turn a Sweater into a Doll's Sweater

One Fact Explains Everything Wool Does

Look at a wool fiber under magnification and you will see it is not smooth. It is covered in overlapping scales, like shingles on a roof, all lying in the same direction. Cotton has nothing of the kind. Those scales are the whole story of wool.

Heat, moisture, and agitation together make the scales lift and then ratchet past one another. Once they interlock, they do not come apart. The fibers migrate closer together, the cloth thickens, and the piece gets smaller and denser. That is felting, and it is why a wool sweater can come out of a hot wash sized for a doll. Wool can lose ten to twenty percent of its size this way, and there is no recovering it.

All three conditions have to be present. That is good news, because it tells you exactly what to withhold.

Washing Wool Without Wrecking It

Temperature. Wool begins felting above about 30°C — roughly 86°F, which is not much warmer than a comfortable room. Wash in cold or lukewarm water. Never hot. Also avoid a sudden swing in temperature between wash and rinse; that shock is part of what lifts the scales.

Detergent. Use a detergent made for wool. Ordinary laundry detergent is alkaline and it works on the fiber surface, and it will promote felting even in cool water. This is the step most people skip because it seems fussy, and it is the step that ruins the most sweaters.

Agitation. This is the one you control with your hands. Let the piece soak; do not scrub it, do not twist it, do not wring it. Press the water out against the side of the basin, then roll the piece in a towel and press again.

Drying. Lay it flat and gently push it back to its measured shape while it is still damp. Never hang wet wool — the weight of the water will drag it into a shape it keeps. Never put it in a hot dryer; heat plus tumbling is felting on purpose.

Keep bleach away from wool entirely unless a care label explicitly permits it. It weakens the fiber and yellows it.

Merino, Superwash, and Felt on Purpose

Merino is a finer wool than ordinary fleece wool. It is softer against the skin, and because the fibers are finer it also felts more readily. Handle merino a step more carefully than you would a coarser wool, not less.

Superwash wool has been treated to reduce the scales that cause felting. Treated this way, it can go through a machine wash on low heat without significant shrinking. It is a genuinely useful thing to have in the house, especially for children's clothing. Treat the label's instructions as the authority for any particular piece.

Wool felt and boiled wool are what you get when someone felts wool deliberately. Because the fibers are locked together rather than merely woven, felt has no grain, does not ravel, and can be cut in any direction and left unfinished. That is why it is such a pleasure for appliqué, slippers, and small handwork.

At the Machine and the Iron

Heavy wool and wool coating want a heavy needle — sizes 100/16 to 110/18 — for the same reason canvas does. A needle too small for the cloth will deflect, skip stitches, and eventually snap. Suiting-weight wool sews comfortably at a straight stitch around 2.5mm.

Press wool with steam and a pressing cloth, and let each pressed seam sit until it is cool and dry before you move the piece. Wool sets its shape as it cools, not while it is hot. That is the whole secret behind a tailored shoulder, and it is also why lifting a wool seam off the board too soon leaves it looking half-pressed. Do not slide a hot iron back and forth on wool; lift, set, hold, lift.

Before You Cut

Buy a quarter yard of any wool you are considering. Measure a marked square on it. Wash the sample the way you actually do laundry — not the way you intend to do laundry — and measure again. If your household is honest about hand-washing, plan on hand-washing. If it is not, buy superwash or buy something else.

She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. Willing work includes the plain, unglamorous test wash that keeps a good piece of cloth from being wasted.

Silk: Momme Weight and a Cloth That Remembers Every Pin

What You Are Actually Handling

Silk is a protein filament — one continuous strand, unwound rather than spun from short pieces. That is why it is so smooth, so strong for its weight, and so slippery. Nothing in silk grips anything else. The yarns slide against each other, the cloth slides against your cutting table, and the whole piece slides out from under the presser foot if you let it.

Silk is not a beginner's fabric, and there is no shame in leaving it for later. It rewards precision, and precision is a thing you build on cotton first. But there is nothing frivolous about the material itself: the Proverbs 31 woman clothed herself in silk and purple, and she is the same woman who worked willingly with her hands and sold what she made. Good cloth used well is not vanity.

Momme: The Number That Tells You What You Have

Silk is sold by weight in momme, abbreviated mm — an unfortunate collision with millimeters, but that is the convention. The number tells you how heavy and how substantial the cloth is.

• 8 to 12 momme — lightweight. Scarves, linings, anything meant to float.
• 12 to 19 momme — medium. Blouses and dresses.
• 19 momme and above — heavy. Enough body to hold a shape.

The number matters before you buy, because the momme weight and the pattern have to agree. A pattern drafted for a fluid drape will hang beautifully in 12 momme and stand out like cardboard in 22. A pattern that needs body will collapse in 8.

Sheerness rises as momme falls, and a lightweight silk that looked opaque folded double on the bolt can be surprisingly transparent hanging on a body in daylight. Hold a single layer up against a bright window before you buy, and plan a lining or an underlining if you need one. Choosing a fabric that covers what you meant it to cover is simple kindness to the people around you, and it is far easier to decide at the store than after the garment is cut.

Needles, Pins, and Why Pins Are the Problem

Use a fine needle: size 60 to 75, which is 8 to 11 in the American numbering. For tightly woven silks like satin, a Microtex needle — very slender and very sharp — makes a smaller, cleaner hole than a universal will.

Change the needle before you start. A needle with any burr at all will pull a thread and leave a run in silk that cannot be repaired.

Pins leave permanent holes in silk. Not creases that press out — holes, in the visible body of the garment, that stay there. If you must pin, pin only within the seam allowance where the hole will be hidden. Better, use pattern weights to hold the pattern while you cut, or a temporary spray adhesive. Silk pins are finer than ordinary dressmaker pins, but the safest habit is simply to keep pins out of the finished surface.

Machine Settings and Seam Slippage

Set a short stitch: 1.8 to 2.2mm. Long stitches in a slippery cloth give the yarns room to shift. Lower the tension — around 3 to 4 rather than the 4 to 5 you use on cotton — and reduce the presser foot pressure if your machine allows it, so the foot guides the fabric instead of shoving it.

Seam slippage is the characteristic silk failure: the yarns beside the stitching pull sideways under strain and a ladder of gaps opens along the seam. It happens most in the lighter weights and on seams that take tension across the grain. Reinforce those seams with a second row of stitching, a narrow zigzag, or a hand backstitch.

Finish edges with a French seam wherever the seam is straight or gently curved. It encloses every raw edge inside the seam itself, so nothing frays, and on a sheer silk it is the only finish that does not show as a shadow.

Pressing and Washing

Press on low with a pressing cloth, and test on a scrap first — water spotting shows on some silks and a too-hot iron will glaze the surface.

If you wash silk, wash it by hand in cool water below about 30°C / 86°F, with a gentle detergent. Do not scrub and do not wring; both distort the weave and can start the very seam slippage you sewed against. Press the water out, roll in a towel, and dry flat away from direct sun.

Practice Worth Doing

Sew three identical seams on scraps of the same silk: one plain, one plain with a narrow zigzag finish, one French seam. Wash all three by hand, dry them, and look hard at the edges. Ten minutes of that will settle your seam-finish habits for years.

Polyester: Strong Thread, Low Iron

An Honest Fabric for an Honest Budget

Polyester gets sneered at, and the sneering is mostly snobbery. It is strong, it holds color, it costs little, it does not shrink in an ordinary wash, and it dries fast — every one of which is a real virtue in a household that does its own laundry and cannot replace clothes often. A garment sewn carefully out of inexpensive cloth is better work than a garment sewn carelessly out of costly cloth. Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily.

Polyester is a plastic made from petrochemicals, extruded as filament. It repels water rather than drinking it, which is why polyester dries quickly and why it feels clammy on a hot day. And because it is plastic, it has one hard limit: it melts.

The Heat Rule, Which Is Not Optional

Polyester does not have to reach its melting point — somewhere around 480°F — to be ruined; long before that it softens, glazes, and scorches, and a direct soleplate can leave visible, permanent damage from somewhere around 230°F. A cotton or linen iron setting runs at 400°F and above, far past the point where polyester begins to glaze and fuse, which is how beginners weld layers of polyester together in a single pass. That single fact governs everything at the ironing board. So:

• Set the iron no higher than about 250 to 275°F.
• Always press through a pressing cloth — a plain scrap of cotton laid between the iron and the polyester. This is not optional caution; it is the difference between a pressed seam and a shiny, permanently melted stripe.
• Lift and set the iron. Do not scrub it back and forth.

A glazed or melted patch does not press out and cannot be repaired. In bad cases the iron fuses the layers together, or picks up melted fiber onto the soleplate, which then transfers onto the next thing you press. If that happens, let the iron cool completely and clean the plate before using it again.

The same heat sensitivity shows in the dryer. Polyester does not shrink in normal washing, but under applied heat it will shrink — meaningfully between about 155 and 178°F, and it begins responding to heat at around 140°F. That is the same property that lets a manufacturer heat-set a permanent pleat, and it is why a hot dryer can quietly take a polyester garment down a size.

Machine Settings

Needle. Size 70/10 for thin polyester, 80/12 for medium weight. A universal or ballpoint needle works well; both have a slightly rounded point that eases between the yarns rather than splitting them, which is what keeps polyester from puckering along the stitch line. Do not reach for a heavy 90 or 100 needle on lightweight polyester — a big hole in a smooth filament fabric shows, and it stays.

Stitch length. For woven polyester, a straight stitch at 2.5mm. For polyester with stretch in it, switch to a narrow zigzag — length about 2.5mm, width about 2mm — so the seam can give with the fabric instead of snapping.

Tension. Start at 4 to 5. If the seam puckers, come down a little at a time and test again. Polyester puckering is nearly always tension too high, a needle too large, or a dull needle.

Thread. Use polyester thread, or a polyester-cotton blend. All-polyester thread is strong and durable and stands up to chlorine and salt water better than cotton thread does — worth knowing for swimwear, work clothes, and anything that lives outdoors.

Prewashing

Polyester will not shrink in a normal wash, so the point of prewashing it is not shrinkage — it is color. Deep and bright polyester dyes can bleed the first time. Run the yardage through a gentle or regular cycle in cold or warm water with a scrap of white cotton in the load. If the white scrap comes out tinted, you have learned something important before it was sewn into a garment beside a pale fabric.

Testing Beats Guessing

Polyester is not one fabric. Under that one word sit sheer chiffons, heavy suitings, fleeces, and slick linings, and they do not behave alike. Before every project, sew a test seam on a doubled scrap and press a corner of that scrap under a pressing cloth at your intended iron setting. Two minutes tells you whether the tension is right and whether the iron is safe.

Do the test press before you are tired and before the house is busy, because melted polyester is the one iron accident that also ruins the soleplate for everything you press afterward.

What to Take Away

Sew polyester with a small, rounded-point needle, a 2.5mm stitch, moderate tension, and polyester thread. Press it cool and always through a cloth. Wash it however you like, but keep it out of a hot dryer. Do those things and polyester will serve a family for years — which is exactly what it is for.

Rayon and Viscose: Beautiful Drape, Ruthless Shrinkage

Why Beginners Buy It and Beginners Get Burned

Rayon — sold as viscose, and much the same thing — hangs on the bolt looking like silk and costs a fraction of what silk costs. It drapes into soft vertical folds, it takes dye beautifully, it feels cool in the hand. Every new sewist eventually falls for it, and a fair number lose the first garment they make from it in a single wash.

Rayon is a semi-synthetic: it begins as natural cellulose, usually wood pulp or cotton linters, which is chemically dissolved and re-formed into fiber. Because the raw material is cellulose, rayon behaves toward water like a plant fiber — only much more so. And because the fiber has been broken down and rebuilt, it is weak when wet in a way cotton is not.

The prudent man foreseeth the evil and hideth himself. With rayon, foreseeing the evil means expecting the shrinkage and dealing with it before the fabric is cut, not after.

The Water Problem

Rayon absorbs fifty to a hundred percent more water than cotton. The fibers swell as they take it up and contract as they dry, and that swelling-and-contracting is where the damage happens.

Washed in hot water — anything above about 30°C / 86°F — on a normal machine cycle, rayon can shrink anywhere from 3 to 25 percent in the first wash alone. Twenty-five percent is a quarter of the garment. That is not a hem you shorten; that is a dress that no longer fits anyone in the house. Machine drying compounds it: heat plus tumbling can take a rayon piece down ten percent or more, permanently.

Nothing brings it back. Rayon shrinkage is not a relaxation you can steam out.

How to Wash It

For a finished rayon garment, hand wash: a thirty-minute soak in cool water with a detergent meant for delicates, then a gentle squeeze — not a wring — and lay it flat to dry. If you must use the machine, use the delicate cycle in cool water, and take it out to air dry.

For yardage you intend to sew, prewash it on a gentle cycle in warm water and dry it on medium heat. This is deliberately a little harsher than the way you will treat the finished garment, so that the fabric gives up its shrinkage now rather than later. Understand what this does and does not accomplish: it takes out the obvious, disastrous shrinkage. It is not a guarantee that the cloth will never move again, so continue to wash the finished garment gently for its whole life.

Then measure. Measure the yardage before and after and write the loss on a slip of paper pinned to the fabric. Buy generously to begin with — rayon that shrinks ten percent has taken a good bite out of a pattern layout.

Needle and Handling

Use a size 70/10 sharp needle. This matters more in rayon than in most fabrics. A large needle — a 90 or above — punches a hole the yarns cannot close over, and in rayon that shows as a visible run or pull down the seam line. A fine sharp needle leaves a small clean hole.

Rayon is slippery and it shifts on the cutting table. Cut on a single layer where the pattern allows it, use weights rather than a heap of pins, and let the whole piece rest supported on the table rather than hanging off the edge, where its own weight will stretch it off grain.

Because rayon is weak when wet, do not tug at a wet seam and do not hang a wet rayon garment to dry by the shoulders. It will grow.

Storage

Rayon draws moisture out of humid air, and in a damp basement or an unheated closet it can swell, distort, and mildew. Store finished rayon garments somewhere dry, folded loosely or hung with the weight supported. Do not seal damp rayon in plastic.

A Test Worth Doing Once

Cut a marked six-inch square from your rayon before you cut anything else. Wash it the way you plan to prewash the yardage. Dry it, press it on a moderate setting, and measure. Whatever it lost, the yardage will lose too — and now you know it in inches instead of in hope.

Spandex, Nylon, and Cloth That Comes Back to Shape

Stretch and Recovery Are Two Different Things

Spandex — also sold as Lycra or elastane — is a synthetic elastic fiber. It is almost never used alone. A few percent of it spun in among cotton, polyester, or nylon turns an ordinary cloth into one that stretches and, more importantly, comes back.

That second half is what matters. Stretch is how far the cloth will go. Recovery is whether it returns. A knit with good stretch and poor recovery makes leggings that bag at the knee by noon and a swimsuit that sags when wet. Test both at the store: stretch a length of the fabric hard between your hands, hold it a moment, let go, and watch. If it snaps back to its original length, you have recovery. If it stays a half inch longer, no amount of good sewing will fix it.

Nylon is a strong, smooth synthetic often blended with spandex for swimwear and athletic cloth. Like polyester, nylon melts under a hot iron, so give it the same treatment: low heat, a pressing cloth, and no scrubbing the iron back and forth.

The Needle Is the Whole Battle

The single most common failure in stretch fabric is skipped stitches, and the cause is nearly always the wrong needle.

Use a stretch needle in size 75/11 or 80/12. A stretch needle has a rounded tip and a special coating that reduces friction, and it is made to push between the loops of a knit rather than pierce through them. A ballpoint needle also has a rounded tip and works for many ordinary knits, but on a high-spandex fabric — swimwear, athletic wear, anything with real snap to it — only a true stretch needle reliably stops the skipping.

And skipped stitches are not a cosmetic problem here. In a knit, one skipped stitch becomes a dropped loop, and a dropped loop becomes a run travelling down the length of the garment.

If skipping starts partway through a project, change the needle before you change anything else. A needle blunted on a pin or a pattern weight will start skipping in stretch fabric long before it would cause trouble in cotton.

Handling at the Machine

Two habits prevent most of the remaining trouble.

Hold the thread tails at the start. A stretch knit is soft, and at the very beginning of a seam the needle can push the fabric edge down into the needle plate opening and chew it into the feed dogs. Hold both thread ends taut behind the foot for the first few stitches and the fabric stays on top where it belongs.

Keep the fabric slightly stretched — do not pull it hard. A light, even tension in front of the foot helps the seam keep its give. Hauling on the fabric to make it feed faster, or to force two edges to match, deflects the needle into the plate and snaps it, and it distorts the seam besides. If two edges will not meet, pin them or clip them together and let the machine do the work.

Use polyester thread. It has enough give for a knit seam and it stands up to chlorine and salt water far better than cotton thread — a real consideration in swimwear.

Stitch length is a matter of testing rather than a fixed rule; finer fabrics generally want a shorter stitch. Sew a sample seam on a doubled scrap, stretch it until you feel resistance, and see whether the thread holds. That test is worth more than any number written on a chart.

Fit, Coverage, and Kindness

Stretch fabric is worth thinking about a little harder than other cloth, because it does something no woven does: it changes as it moves. A knit that is opaque lying flat can go noticeably sheer once it is stretched over a body — pale colors especially. Stretch a piece hard and hold it up to a window; that is what it will look like in use.

Modest apparel is a warm idea, not a cold one. Choosing a fabric with enough weight and opacity to do its job, cutting it with enough ease to move in, and lining what needs lining — these are ordinary acts of care toward the people who will see you and toward the person who will wear it. A garment that its wearer never has to think about is a comfortable garment. That is the whole aim.

Reading the Bolt End Before You Reach for the Scissors

The Cheapest Information You Will Ever Get

At the end of every bolt is a printed cardboard tab. Almost nobody reads it. It carries the fiber content, the width, and often the weight and the care instructions — everything you need to predict how the cloth will behave before you spend a dollar on it. Looking well to your going costs about forty seconds.

Write down what it says. Take a photograph of it with your telephone if that is easier. Once the fabric is cut off the bolt, that information is gone and you will be guessing for the rest of the project.

Fiber Content Is the Important Line

Fiber content is given in percentages, and it tells you everything you learned in the preceding studies:

• 100% cotton — expect about three percent shrinkage, take a 90/14 needle in medium weights, and prewash.
• 100% linen — expect three to ten percent, stay-stitch the edges before washing, and buy extra.
• Wool — cold water, wool detergent, no tumble drying, unless the label says superwash.
• Silk — momme weight matters, fine needles, no pins in the finished surface.
• Polyester — no shrinking in the wash, but a low iron and a pressing cloth.
• Rayon or viscose — the big one. Prewash it, gently, and never let it near a hot cycle.
• Spandex, elastane, Lycra — even three or four percent means a stretch or ballpoint needle.

The Rule for Blends

Most modern cloth is a blend, and a blend does not average its parents' behavior in any way you can count on. The working rule that keeps you out of trouble is simple: obey the most demanding fiber in the blend.

A cotton-rayon blend gets treated as rayon — cool water, gentle cycle, air dry — even if the rayon is only a third of it. A wool blend gets wool's care. A poly-cotton blend can be washed like cotton but must be pressed like polyester, because the polyester in it will still melt. Any spandex at all changes your needle.

This rule occasionally makes you gentler than strictly necessary. That is a very cheap error compared with the alternative.

Width and Yardage

Width is on the tab too, and it changes how much you need. A pattern envelope lists yardage for common widths for exactly this reason. Narrow goods eat more yardage than wide goods for the same pattern, and directional prints, one-way naps, and plaids that must match all eat more still.

Then add for shrinkage. If you expect ten percent from a linen or a rayon, buy ten percent more than the pattern calls for, and round up. Fabric left over becomes pockets, facings, a patch three years from now, or a test scrap. Fabric two inches short becomes nothing at all.

Whatever the bolt says about being preshrunk, prewash anyway. An hour in the machine is a cheap insurance premium against a garment that fits today and not next week.

Weight, and What Your Hand Tells You

Weight is often given in ounces per square yard. Quilting cotton runs about three to four ounces per square yard, which is a useful anchor: hold a new fabric and ask whether it is lighter or heavier than the quilting cotton you already know.

Thread count, where it is given, tells you how tightly the cloth is packed. Around eighty threads per inch and up is firm and holds a cut edge; nearer sixty it is loose and prone to fraying.

But the tab cannot tell you drape, and drape decides whether a fabric suits a pattern. Unroll a yard, gather it loosely in your fist, and let it fall. Stiff angles mean structure — a bag, an apron, a fitted bodice with a shape to hold. Soft vertical folds mean flow — a gathered skirt, a loose blouse. A fluid pattern in a stiff cloth looks wrong and no sewing corrects it.

Thread, Chosen at the Same Time

Buy thread while you are standing at the bolt, not later from memory. Polyester thread or a polyester-cotton blend is the versatile default and suits nearly everything a home sewist makes. Match thread to fabric in the daylight of a window if you can; the color that matches under store lighting frequently does not.

Build a Reference

Keep a small notebook or a ring of card. For every fabric you buy, staple on a two-inch swatch and write the fiber content, the width, the price, the store, what you measured for shrinkage, and what needle and stitch length worked. In two years that ring of cards will be worth more to you than any book on the subject, because every entry in it is your own hard information.

Identifying Unlabeled Fabric from the Thrift Pile

Cloth With No Tag

Sooner or later somebody hands you a bag of fabric from an estate sale, or you find three yards of something lovely at a thrift shop with no bolt end and no tag. You cannot look up what it is. You have to find out.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. That is a sound instruction for a sewing room. Four small tests, run in order, will identify most of what comes through your door — and none of them costs anything but a snipped corner.

Test One: Hand and Drape

Handle it first. Rub a corner between your fingers and pay attention to temperature, texture, and shine.

• Crisp, a little dry, cool, with visible slubs — thick and thin places along the yarns — points toward linen.
• Soft, matte, slightly warm, with no shine at all — cotton.
• Very smooth, cool, faintly shining, and it slides against itself — silk or rayon.
• Springy, faintly slick, no real coolness — a synthetic.
• Slightly scratchy or fuzzy with a springy resistance when you crush it in your fist — wool.

Wool is the easiest to confirm: crush a handful hard for a few seconds and open your hand. Wool springs back with few creases. Almost nothing else does that.

Test Two: The Wrinkle Test

Fold a corner sharply, press it between your thumbnails, and let go.

Linen holds a hard crease and looks it. Cotton wrinkles readily but less sharply. Polyester and most synthetics shed the crease almost entirely — that resilience is what they are sold for. Rayon wrinkles, and it wrinkles softly.

Test Three: The Water Drop

Lay the fabric flat and put one drop of water on it. Watch.

• Vanishes almost at once, spreading into the cloth: rayon, which drinks more water than any of the naturals.
• Soaks in steadily: cotton or linen.
• Sits on the surface as a bead, or takes a long time to go in: polyester or nylon.

This one test separates the great majority of thrift-pile fabric into the two families that matter most for laundry, and it costs a drop of water.

Test Four: The Melt Test, Done Carefully

If the first three tests leave you unsure between a natural fiber and a synthetic, one more will settle it — and this one requires respect.

Snip a few threads, no more than an inch, from a raw edge or a seam allowance where nothing shows. Stand at the kitchen sink with the water running. Hold the threads at the far end with tweezers or a pair of pliers, well away from your fingers, and touch a lit match to the end. Drop the whole thing straight into the running water when you have seen what you need to see. Nothing loose, nothing flammable, and nobody small anywhere in the room.

Watch the residue and smell the smoke; together they tell you nearly everything.

Synthetics melt. Polyester and nylon soften, shrink back from the flame, and leave a bead at the tip that is still hard after it cools — press it and it will not give. The smell is acrid and chemical.

Cellulose fibers burn. Cotton, linen, and rayon burn steadily and smell like burning paper, leaving a fine gray ash.

Protein fibers burn too, but leave a bead. Wool and silk smell unmistakably of burning hair or feathers, and they leave a small black bead that looks very much like the synthetic one. The difference is in your fingers: the protein bead is brittle and crushes to powder between finger and thumb, while the synthetic bead stays hard. Skip that crush and you will file a good wool away as polyester, which is the one mistake this test exists to prevent.

One further caution: rayon burns like cotton, ash and paper smell alike, so the flame cannot tell them apart at all. That is precisely why the water drop in Test Three earns its place.

A blend does both — it chars and leaves bits of hard bead in the ash. That is genuinely useful information, because it tells you to press it like a synthetic even though it looks and feels like cotton.

Then Wash a Sample

Once you have a good guess, cut a marked six-inch square and wash it the way you intend to wash the finished garment. Measure before and after. This is the last and most trustworthy test, because it answers the only question that matters: what will this cloth do in my house, in my machine, with my habits?

If the square shrinks like rayon, treat it as rayon regardless of what your fingers told you. Test results beat opinions, including your own.

Keep the Record

Staple a swatch to a card with everything you determined — the tests it passed, the shrinkage you measured, the needle and stitch length that worked. Unlabeled fabric identified once and written down is as good as fabric that came with a tag. Unlabeled fabric identified and forgotten will be a mystery again in six months.