Preparing fabric before cutting

What you take from this lesson: Avoid the three fabric problems that only show up once the garment is already sewn.

Shrinkage: the problem that shows up at the customer's home

Many fabrics shrink the first time they are washed, especially cotton. If you cut the fabric without accounting for that, the garment leaves the workshop looking perfect and ends up too small for the customer after washing. It is the hardest complaint to explain and the one that does the most damage to a new brand.

There are two ways to handle it. The first is to wash and dry the fabric before cutting, which is the safest option but takes time and is not always practical at volume. The second is to measure how much the fabric shrinks and compensate for it in the sewing pattern: cut a 50 × 50 cm square, wash it, dry it, and measure it again. The percentage difference is what you need to add to the pattern.

Inspect the roll before spreading

Rolls come with flaws: stains, pulled threads, shade differences. They are supposed to be flagged with a small thread tied into the selvage, but not always.

Inspecting before spreading lets you arrange the pieces so they avoid the flaws. Finding them after cutting means losing cut pieces, which is fabric that is no longer good for anything.

You also need to check the shade: if the production uses more than one roll, make sure they come from the same dye lot. Two rolls of the same color from different lots can show a visible difference, and a garment with the sleeve in one shade and the body in another does not sell.

Right side, wrong side and direction

Some fabrics have an obvious right and wrong side; others do not. And some are directional: napped and pile fabrics (brushed fleece, corduroy, polar fleece) look like a different color depending on which way you view them.

On a directional fabric, every piece has to be placed facing the same direction, even if that uses more fabric. If one sleeve ends up upside down, it shows up as a patch of a different color.

The selvage and the grain

The selvage is the finished edge of the roll, and it marks the direction of the warp threads. The grainline arrow on each pattern piece has to sit parallel to the selvage.

Before spreading, it is also worth making sure the fabric is straight: if the roll comes with the weave skewed, the cut pieces will come out skewed even if the pattern is laid down correctly.

Common mistakes

• Cutting cotton fabric without accounting for shrinkage.
• Mixing rolls from different lots in the same production run.
• Laying pieces in different directions on a napped fabric.

In short

Before cutting: deal with shrinkage, inspect the roll for flaws and for dye lot, and check direction and selvage. All three problems are cheap to fix before cutting and very expensive after.