Difficult Fabric Session 2: Faux Fur & Leather

The first of our fun fabrics that we're going to be tackling in this class is faux fur and faux leather. And I like to group those together because I set up my machine pretty much the same when working with either fabric. When I'm using leather or pleather, I want to be using a leather needle. So I already have that ready, I have that on hand but I'm also going to use my leather needle when I'm working with faux fur. It's equally as thick on the back as some of your faux leathers so I find that I just get a much better stitch, much nicer stitch if I go ahead and just have that already in my machine.

I've also already went ahead and put the walking foot on my machine, just because that does utilize my screwdriver and takes me a little bit more time to put it on. So I want to have that already. So if you have a separate walking foot, go ahead and put that on your machine. If you have a machine that has an integrated dual feed, go ahead and engage that and you can utilize that. If you're unfamiliar with what a walking foot is, all it does is apply pressure to the top of your fabric.

As your feeders are applying pressure from the bottom and it evenly feeds your fabric layers through your machine. So it's going to help when we're working with thicker fabrics, like our faux fur and our faux leather. So let's talk about some faux fur. Now, obviously there's real fur too. I just don't have any of that with me today.

So we're going to be focusing on the fake fur. There are different types of fake fur out there, different qualities of them. You can find what they call craft fur which is a little bit lighter in backing as well as in the actual fibers of the fur. And I find these tend to fall out more as opposed to what they call designer fur. It's a little bit thicker.

The actual fur of it is a little bit stronger, tends to not make as big of a mess when you're working with it but it does cost a little bit more. So if you are making a Halloween costume that maybe your kid is going to wear one year and then you're never gonna see it again, I would recommend a craft fur. If you are maybe making a fun pair of boots or something and you want to top them with fur and you're gonna be wearing these all the time. Definitely pay the extra money to get the step up and get some designer fur, it'll last a little bit longer. When it comes to working with this fur, whether you buy it in a sheet or you buy it on a roll, like this, it's going to have some finished edges along the top and the sides.

And then anywhere you cut from then on is going to be a problem with fur sort of falling off. And so I'll show you some ways to make less of your fur fall off while you're cutting it. So to start off with, I just have a strip here and maybe making an accent on say the top of a pocket or something and I want to just cut a small little section from it. For one, there's really no way to do my markings on the top part of my fur here. Because if I try to draw a line, my first shifts is really not gonna work.

So all of your marking for faux fur should be done on the back. You can see it has a much thicker backing to it. Super easy to draw on. Now I need to cut it. Now you could think, well maybe my rotary cutter is the best way to go.

I could simply take it and go right along here. Well, what's gonna happen is on the front, we have all these different hairs, if you will. If these are cross this way, right? And I run my rotary cutter right along here, I'm gonna have little tiny bits of this faux fur that are gonna go everywhere. So I like to avoid my rotary cutter when working with faux fur and actually use my scissors.

What I wanna do when I'm cutting is I want to find my mark on the back. Obviously, this is a simple straight line. This is going to be very easy to show and I'll explain how you do it for a much more complicated shape in a minute. But I know right where my line is on the back. Going to flip over to the front and I'm gonna start sort of brushing the hair of the fur to either side.

And I almost wanna get to where I could lightly either see the back almost mat of what the fur is attached to. And if I look really close, I can almost see my blue line through the fur. I was doing this when I was getting ready for this class and I kept thinking about the Lorax and this looks like his little mustache. But so you want to make a little part in your mustache that you're then going to cut in half. Since, see I've moved my fur away from my cutting line.

I'm gonna take my scissors and I'm gonna cut along this line. Normally, when you cut, I stress using the full blade of your scissor, you get a much nicer, cleaner cut but in this case, I'm actually going to take little snippets at a time. This way, if I need to brush or move any of the fur out of the way as I go, I can still do that. And again, I'm minimizing the mess when it comes to where I'm cutting. I can now straighten back out my fur and this piece is ready to be used on top of the pocket or wherever I wanna add this little embellishment.

Same thing goes, if your fur comes in a strip like this. So you can see this just rolls off. It can be used as a nice trim. So it would be cut in the opposite direction but the same rules apply. I would simply find where I'm going to cut, smooth my fur up and down until I start exposing some of that back matting that the fur is attached to.

And then I'm going to make a cut. Now, if you have a hard time maneuvering, finding your fur, finding the line you wanna go along. You can actually take a pin and use a pin to move small sections of the fur up like so and get yourself to where you have a nice fairly straight line that you can work with. Obviously this one, I didn't have a drawn line. I'm simply just picking a spot in the middle to cut.

And I'm gonna go ahead and cut again using my little sort of snip it at a time method. And again, I'm reducing the amount of fur that's going to fall out. Now, when you cut this way, you have a much better chance of cutting really close to all this fur along the top edge. And that's what's going to shed out. So as soon as I make that cut, I'm going to sort of use my fingers along the top edge, just like this, and just grab any of the few little furs that are readily gonna fall off anyway.

And go ahead and just set those aside. When I'm entirely done with a project, when I'm using faux fur, I just get either my vacuum or lint roller and clean up everything. If you try to stay super clean all the time, you see all these little hairs, you're gonna get really frustrated. So just know that there are gonna be some little hairs all of your table probably the entire time you're working with this. Go ahead and just worry about that at the end.

Focus on how you're putting your project together and how you're utilizing this fabric. Okay, so now we want to actually stitch our pieces. Again, I'm just going to use some smaller pieces to show you how you would go about stitching. We'll move back to our two pieces that I cut apart and maybe, oops, I messed up. I didn't want them cut apart.

Maybe I want them sewn back together. I'm gonna show you how to do that and make it to where you can't actually tell that they were cut apart in the first place. So to do that, we need to do some more maneuvering or sort of brushing of our fur. This is the edge I want to sew to this. I do not want to just layer right sides together.

And so when I open it up, I'm gonna have a definite sort of crease as to where my fur got caught in my stitching. So what I wanna do is pull all of that fur back away from the edge of where I'm going to be stitching on this side. Do the same thing over here, and pulling it away. And now I'm going to put right sides together. So I'm gonna be very careful when I'm laying this one on top, then I'm using these fingers to hold that fur back out of the way, lay the very edge of the fabric down first, and then let the rest of it fall.

That's going to really help ensure that all of my fur is tucked back as far as it can away from that same line as possible. Use my finger if I need to to secure or move any of those little thread fur pieces back in there. I can get my edges lined up and I can go ahead and stitch. Now, unlike leather, we can go ahead and use pins if we want, because I'm not worried about leaving any permanent marks in this backing part of the fur, because you're never going to see it. This is a pretty small piece.

I'm just gonna put one pin in the middle and I'm gonna take this to my machine and sew it. I already have my walking foot on, my leather needle is in, I'm ready to go. This is, I'm going to call a fun little craft project. So I'm not making a designer jacket or anything. I'm not using a five eight seam allowance.

Right now, I'm just showing you how to stitch. I'm going to eyeball and approximate quarter-inch seam allowance, and just go from there. So I have it under my machine. I've pulled all my fur back out of the way. And now I can just sew.

You can see with that leather needle and my walking foot, there's literally no resistance at all when I'm sewing. It's just going right through my machine. It's almost as easy as sewing with a cotton fabric or something much lighter weight. I'm gonna go ahead and put some back stitches in, even though this is such a small piece, and I'm not necessarily using it on a project because we have to do some manipulating to our fur to make it lay the way we want it to. And I don't want those to come undone.

I have my seam stitched and you see I opened it up right now. You can see I have a pretty definite seam line but we need to do some pressing. And then we're going to manipulate our fur a bit. So, I have my iron over here. I do want a fairly warm iron.

So I've had my iron sitting over here while I've been stitching. So I'm gonna go ahead and let it warm up a little bit. And what I'm gonna do while that's warming up is use my fingers to start pressing this seam flat. I'm pressing my seam open, as you can imagine, there's a lot of bulk when it comes to working with this fur and I don't want that to be sticking up or in any way in the way. So I use my fingers a little bit, add a little bit of steam in there.

I got it hot rather than using my hot, hot iron, pressing really hard down on my faux fur, I got it warm. Now I'm using my fingers to press and hold in place until I feel it start cooling down. Once I know it's cooling down, I know my seam is going to stay in place. So, now once I flip it back over, I can actually take, smooth it back out just like that. You can't even tell I ever cut that apart in the first place.

You have a nice seam that lays flat on the back and you have for that lays nice flat and even on the front. Now, again, this is with that craft fur. You can do the exact same thing when it comes to any other faux fur. This was that designer fur. Same thing, I cut it apart along the back, I stitched it, got it warm with my iron, use my fingers to make that lay flat.

And just like that, smooth it out with my fingers. And you can't even tell that that was ever cut apart in the first place. The same thing goes when you are sewing pieces together this way. So this was the little sample that I'd cut apart vertically. Or sorry, horizontally rather than vertically.

And I'm gonna sew it together pretty much the exact same way. The fur on this half already faces down. Flip this one up. I'm going to pull this for down in a way. Again, holding it with these fingers, lining up the edges of the fabric first, letting the rest of it drop.

Then I can go ahead and use my fingers and pull any of that for back out of the way, put a pin in, we'll take it over and stitch it. If you have your choice when cutting apart your fabric, if it works for your pattern pieces, try cutting your fur in this direction. It's a little bit easier because you really only have to worry about moving one section of the fur out of the way versus both sides out of the way. Again I put a backstitch at the beginning and the end because I don't want anything to come out while I'm sort of combing the fur of my faux fur. I could do the same thing when it comes to pressing.

Warm it up, lay it down, but you can see with this, once that lays flat, it's much easier to stitch that and have that fur layover and cover that seam than it is to go the other way. But both are possible. Both can be done to where you have a nice flat seam on the back and visible seam on the front. If you're doing a much more complicated design, say you've got a big shape that you want to cut out. You're still going to draw it on the back of your fur, and you're going to cut it almost the same way.

On the front, you're still going to find your line. You're going to move apart the sections of the fur and make your little snippets. But if you have a very intricate design, I would actually recommend getting an Exacto knife and making teeny tiny little cuts as you go all the way around your design. So you can still use the same method of moving your fur and making small cuts. But if it's really intricate an Exacto knife may work better than your scissors.

So don't be afraid of faux fur. Add it to your project the next time you want to have a fun little decorative elements around the edge or anything like that. Now, since our machine is already set up ready to go for leather and faux leather, I'm gonna go ahead and move on to that. So, first off, I wanna show you some faux leathers and some leathers. Leather is a little bit harder to find in just your everyday craft store.

A pleather can be found pretty readily and in lots of different colors and textures and fun designs on it. Mostly in the costume department. Find a lot of them there. This may sound really weird, but if you don't know the difference between the leather and pleather, and you have a small piece in your hand and you're thinking which one's leather, which one's pleather, you can actually tell by the smell. You can tell what the smell of real leather is.

It has a little bit more of a real smell to it where this smells more like plastic. So kind of a weird tip and maybe a weird thing to do if you're in the fabric store, but you definitely, that's sort of a dead giveaway on what's leather, what's pleather. We can also tell by the backing on most real leather, it has sort of a suede feel to it. This pleather, you can tell it's sort of a synthetic backing. You can also tell it was in the costume aisle 'cause it has some glitter on it.

So just sort of a giveaway that that is our faux leather. This is our real leather. When it comes to working with either one of these, they can be difficult because they're so thick and you can't use some of the same practices you want to use that you would be using with different fabrics like cotton or something like that. The first one is your iron. There's not a lot of times where you can actually directly press onto pleather at all.

Even if you have a very cool iron. Very cool iron, it's not really gonna do anything for you. It's not giving you enough heat to get rid of any wrinkles. So it's really just a heavy object you're putting on top of your pleather. Iron that's too hot is going to melt it.

So you can see I just took a little strip here and got it really close to my iron and it doesn't take much. You get it really close to a hot iron and it just shrivel up right away. So don't want to be pressing onto pleather that much. That being said, pleather comes on bolts, right? Just like this.

Sometimes you can find it on rolls but a lot of times, costume pleather comes on a bolt. So the biggest crease you're going to have to deal with is the one where the fabric is actually been folded in half. A lot of times you can work around this when you're cutting out your patterns and it's not gonna get in the way. Other times, they're going to be, you know rolling out your fabric at the fabric store you're going to buy it. And there will be big creases in it like this.

These are really hard to get out. Even if you add some heat to it and you press it. Maybe even add some heat, put something heavy on it, let it sit for days. You may never get that out. Don't be afraid to ask them to move to a different section in the bolt.

Buy the part of fabric that's going to give you a good piece of fabric that you're going to want to use in your project. Don't just think you have to take whatever they give you. If there's a big crease, something you know you're not gonna be able to work around, ask them to move to another section. They will normally do that for you. All right, that being said, how do we work with these fabrics?

So I'm always to talk about pleather first because I think you may more readily be using that in your next project than leather. So the first thing is just simply sewing two pieces together. This, we can actually just treat like any other fabric. We can put it right sides together, and we can sew it. When I'm lining my fabric up, right sides together like this, you may be tempted to put a pin into your leather or your pleather.

You don't wanna do that because it's actually going to leave a permanent hole. Even if you try and use a really thin pin it's really hard to get out. If you've used a cotton and you've gotten a pinhole in it, you can sometimes add some heat, use your fingernail and get that pin hole out. You can't do this, do that to technique with this because you can't use heat. So what you can do is either of your pieces small enough, like this one here, it almost sticks to itself.

Like I'm trying to move the top layer and it's not really moving. It's going to stay there. If I had a much larger piece, I would actually use little clips, little binder clips like so, and I could put them on there if I'm going to maybe pins and pieces and set them aside for later, I can do that. Fold them down, it stacks nicely. If I'm going to be actually sewing, I would take and put my clip sort of in the middle.

That way I can sew up to it, take it and either move it down along my project as I go or just take it and move it away entirely. So, to sew this, I'm just going to hold them together since they sort of stick naturally. I'm going to take it over to my machine, make sure everything stays lined up and I'm just going to sew a nice seam right along the edge. So again, I have my walking foot. It is just taking that fabric, gliding it right through the machine not having any difficulty or trouble with it at all.

And that's because of the walking foot and also because we are stitching this with right sides together, meaning our actual sticky pleather part is never touching the machine. But at some point it's going to have to. So I have my same stitched, like so. You could see it. If you use a thread that matches, it'll blend right in.

If you use a thread that is a different color, it'll stand out. So think about that when you're making your stitches. And what you wanna do is just finger press this open. You can actually a lot done just putting some weight on it and pressing it down. Now it's not going to stay.

I have tried adding just the tiny about amount of heat and using my fingers like I did with the faux fur, it seems like it wants to press nicely. And then as soon as you let go, it goes right back to how it was. So with any seam I'm doing, I want to finish that same to make it lie flat. Now, I can't put pins in it 'cause I don't want holes. My binder clips only work at the top and the bottom.

So if I want to actually stitch all the way along this and sort of, you know, top stitch my seams so it stays nice and flat, I'm going to use some tape. I'm gonna use some tape that's easily removable. You can use painters tape. I have masking tape. A lot of scotch tape actually will come off really easily too.

I do find that this tears a little easier when I'm trying to take it off, unintentionally tears. So that's why I lean towards the masking tape or the painters tape. So I'm gonna do, let's take off a strip big enough to cover my seam, going to fold it open and right along the edge of that seam allowance, I am taping it back. I'll deal with my extra ends in just a second but I'll get my other side folded back. Again, right along the edge.

Go ahead and put tape. Now I am trying to make it straight because I don't want to stitch through the tape if I don't have to. You can tear it away after you've stitched through it. It makes it a little bit easier though if you're right along the edge. No, I don't want my ins to get stuck to my machine, 'cause any trouble.

So I can just easily tear these off like so. And now I'm ready to top stitch or secure my seam allowance open. As with any other top stitching, I'm going to go ahead and elongate my stitch length from a 2.5 to either a three or 3.5 longer stitch length. It's easier to keep it straight. It looks nicer in the end.

What I'm gonna do is take this over to my machine and stitch right down the middle of this seam allowance. Okay, again, I have the sticky side of the pleather down on the throat of the machine as well as touching the foot. And you can see that I'm still having no problem at all. The walking foot is just taking that right through the machine. Bring it off, you can lay it down.

You can see I've stitched right along here. I take that piece of tape off and now my seam lays perfectly flat. Now, I've done this with a thread that blends in because I want it to look nice from the top as well. Here's a sample done with some contrasting thread that really stands out. What I did on this one, same thing, opened my seam, taped it in place.

And on one side stitched really, really, really close to the edge of that seam allowance 'cause I didn't want it to be caught. The other side, I stitched right down the middle. It's a personal preference as to what you like the look of on the front of your project. Very close to the same stitch or a little further away. If you like the look of the really close stitch but you want it to be stitched really close to the edge on this side, you can still do this one here, come back with your scissors and you can trim off this small amount of extra seam allowance all the way down.

So you still get that extra security of being right next to the edge of your seam allowance but you get the really nice look on the right hand side. Now, if you are making, say a reversible project, maybe it's a jacket or something but this side will be seen. It doesn't look bad to have extra seam allowance or something like this present that you can actually see but there is a way that you can completely cover it up and make it look sort of more intentional and that it's more of a decorative side than just a seam. And that would be to cover it up with another piece of leather. This could be, obviously I would trim this a little more so it entirely covered it.

This could be a piece of pleather that matches. So it blends in, or it, again, this is gonna be reversible in some way. You could find a leather or pleather that is sort of decorative. Has a really fun print, kind of stands out, make it be sort of a nice stripy element on the inside of your project. So you can see I've done that here.

I took and just laid my strip of fabric over my seam and stitched very close to the edge on both sides. On the right side, now, we will have a double line of stitching on either side of our seam allowance. Now, if you don't like the look of that, don't think that this is what yours is going to look like. Remember if you use your thread that blends right in, your two lines of stitching won't be as noticeable. Now, there may be, if you're looking really close at this sample, a couple of things that stand out to you that you're thinking, oh, maybe she missed something or she should have fixed it.

But if you look really really close, right along in this area, I actually a couple of stitches that are longer than they should be. This is what's called a skipped stitch. Now, when I was making everything for this class, I did a lot of sewing on my faux fur. I did a lot of sewing on my leather. Eventually my needle starts to get dull.

This is the first sign that I need to change that needle. It's no longer sharp enough to pierce through all my layers of leather. I'm going to start getting skip stitches. I may get my bobbin bunching up on the bottom but this means that I need to change that needle. So if you're seeing anything like that happening on your project, change out your needle and then I think you'll be just fine when it comes to sewing your project.

Now, fun little tip for if you are working with a leather, a real leather. Because you may have been wondering why I have a rolling pin sitting over here next to me the entire time. If you're working with leather, a real leather, it can actually take some heat and some steam. So you can utilize this when, and if you want to either press a seam open. If you want to make a crease in something, you can use some heat and some pressure.

If you go to a leather shop, you can actually find it's a big mallet. Sometimes there are wooden mallets, sometimes they're rubber mallets, and you actually just pound on this leather. You get hot and then you pound on it. And that can work. Now, a lot of times I'm doing sewing either early in the morning, people are still asleep in my house and I don't wanna make that much noise.

So what I do is I'm going to take and I have my iron heated up. It has a steam function. So I wanna make sure that I'm getting some steam. Make sure or just some heat. I can see a little bit of steam coming out.

I'm getting my leather nice and hot. I'm not pressing down on it. I'm just hovering. And I keep feeling it's getting warmer. There, now I get some nice steam, okay?

Getting warm. I'm gonna warm it up on both sides. You can actually almost feel it get way more flexible. It's not as rigid. While it's still warm, I'm gonna fold it.

Wherever I want that seam allowance to be, wherever I want that seam to be. And then I'm going to use my rolling pin. Now, if you had a much bigger piece or a much larger project, you could be rolling this whole thing out but I'm simply applying pressure trading that crease. And I'm gonna keep doing that until the leather cools down. So there, it's cool to the touch.

You can see now a nice crease in the leather. Here's the piece that I didn't use any heat too. Let me see if I'm just trying to press it. It's not gonna stay. A little bit of steam.

Use your rolling pin, a bottle, something to get some really nice even pressure along there. And you could easily press open a seam or make a nice crease in your leather. So those are a lot of great tips for how to tackle leather, faux leather, faux fur, how to encase seams, how to stitch nicely on all the fabrics, how to make invisible seams when it comes to working with faux furs. So next time maybe you're making a costume or you want to add some fun trim to something, don't be afraid to utilize all these fabrics in your next project. It's not as hard as it looks.

With these simple tips, I think you'll find it's really pretty easy and fun.