Spreading and cutting: cutting many garments at once

What you take from this lesson: Go from cutting one garment at a time to cutting a whole run in a single pass.

What a spread is

It is fabric stacked in several layers, one on top of another, so you can cut them all at once. If you spread ten layers and cut the sewing pattern on top, you get ten garments for the work of one.

By far, it is the change that saves the most time when you move from made-to-order sewing to production, and you do not need to buy any machine to get started: with a long table and a good pair of shears you can already spread four or five layers.

How to spread

• The table has to be longer than the longest piece of the pattern. A short table forces you to cut in batches, and that is where you lose the advantage.
• Lay the layers down without stretching them. If you pull on the fabric while spreading it, the layer is cut stretched and the piece ends up smaller once it relaxes.
• All layers go with the right side facing the same way if the fabric is directional; if it is not, you can spread it in a zigzag and save time.
• The edges of the spread have to be even: if the layers are offset, the pieces at the bottom come out incomplete.

Arranging the pattern pieces: the marker

Arranging all the pieces across the width of the fabric so that as little as possible is left over is what is called the marker. It is not a minor detail: fabric is the largest line in your variable costs, and between a careless marker and a well-planned one there can be a 10 or 15% difference in fabric consumption.

Three practical rules: nest the large pieces first and fill the gaps with the small ones; always respect the grainline, even when it is tempting to rotate a piece; and arrange the pieces of all sizes together, not size by size, because the curves of a small size fit into the gaps of a large one.

Cutting without shifting

The enemy of multi-layer cutting is shifting: if the layers slide while you cut, the bottom piece comes out different from the top one.

Hold the layers down with weights on the pieces — not with pins, which lift the fabric — and cut with the blade perfectly perpendicular to the table. If the blade tilts, the bottom piece comes out larger or smaller than the top one.

It also helps to cut the general outline first and the interior details afterward, so the spread stays as stable as possible for as long as possible.

Notches are cut in the spread

Notches are marked while the spread is still laid up, with a cut two or three millimeters deep, perpendicular to the edge. That way all the layers are marked at once and in the same place.

Marking them afterward, piece by piece, wastes half the time you saved by spreading.

Common mistakes

• Stretching the fabric while spreading it.
• Cutting with the blade tilted: the bottom layers come out different.
• Arranging the pieces size by size instead of all together: fabric gets wasted.
• Holding the layers with pins instead of weights.

In short

Spreading several layers and cutting them all together is what turns sewing into production. The marker determines how much fabric you use, and a perpendicular cut determines whether all the layers come out identical.