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Faux Leather Session 4: Techniques for Working with Faux Leather

National Sewing Circle Editors
Duration:   6  mins

Description

Learn expert tips and tricks for working with faux leather, from cutting to pressing to stitch settings.

Share tips, start a discussion or ask other students a question. If you have a question for the instructor, please click here.

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When sewing with faux leather, since it is not a actual fabric, there are some techniques and considerations that need to come into play. So like I mentioned before, there are some varieties of faux leather where you can use your iron. Something medium weight, usually some lighter weight, faux leathers like the pleather. You probably don't want to get your iron near, but. Always test a little bit of your faux leather to see if it can withstand heat before doing it on your actual project.

Press from the backside, using low heat and no steam. And when you, like when you're pressing open seams, if the, if you're going to, the surface of the faux leather is going to come into contact with the iron, use a press cloth. So that you don't actually touch your iron to the surface of the faux leather, just in case. We don't want anything transferring to your iron. We don't want to melt anything.

So, use a press cloth in that case. Or use your roller or your rolling pin. And like I mentioned before, if you are stitching a garment, especially like a skirt, and you want make sure your seam allowances stay open, you can either top stitch those seem allowances open or use some glue to make sure that those stay open. When sewing garments or when sewing seams that intersect and you wanna make sure that those stay open. When cutting faux leather we want to make sure we cut in a single layer.

So, if you have any pattern pieces that say to cut on the fold, you'll want to flip those, trace and flip those. So you get one a large pattern piece, Simply because faux leather, if you try and fold it and get a fold to cut on, the fold isn't going to be nice and flat and the cutting's not going to be accurate. And then if you try to get the fold flat you're going to make a crease and your faux leather. So, just keep everything in one layer. And then of course, when you're cutting out your patterns do not pin your pattern to the faux leather.

Cause those holes will stay there. If you must pin. Probably medium weight faux leathers might be the most that you could pin. You're not gonna be able to pin a heavyweight faux leather anyway, because it is so thick and heavy. You'll be able to pin a lightweight, faux leather.

But if you want to do that to pin either your pattern down or pin your layers together, make sure you pin within the seam allowances so that those holes, those permanent holes, aren't going to show up on the body of your project. Um, this type of backing on this faux leather is my favorite to work with. I like these, these ribs. And whenever possible, I like to cut along the ribs, especially when cutting out handles because it's kind of like a grain. Even though faux leather does not normally have a grain, because it's not woven or not knit.

This backing kind of makes it a grain. So we want to cut along that, especially with handles because when you're folding your handles. Cutting along these ribs just helps everything to stay nice and straight and flat, and it'll minimize, twisting and bending. So I like to kind of keep this in back of my mind as a grain line. When you are stitching faux leather, some.

Some stitch settings on your machine you may need to tweak a little bit. So your tension, you may need to loosen a little bit since faux leather is generally going to be a little bit thicker than say a regular quilting cotton. And when we're sewing thicker fabrics our tension will generally need to be a little bit looser to allow the needle in the bottom thread to, to form the stitch and allow enough room between those threads, for that thicker fabric. And you'll also want to probably bump up your stitch length setting. Even when sewing construction seems within the project, you'll want to bump it up.

My machine defaults to a 2.5 millimeters stitch length. I usually bump that up to three. And then when top stitching, I may even bump it up to 3.5. And a longer stitch length for top stitching just looks nicer. And also when stitching faux leather you want a longer stitch length, because if you have a short stitch length the more the needle pierces the faux leather the more holes are going to be made in it.

And it's going to weaken the seam and be kind of like a perforation. And we don't want that. We don't want our seams to tear at all. So you want to bump your stitch length up a little bit. And don't back stitch when you're sewing your seams.

Some people say it's fine, but every time the needle pierces the faux leather, in my mind, it's going to weaken it a little bit. So whenever I can avoid that, I will. So I don't backstitch. I simply pull the needle thread to the wrong side of the fabric and tie, tie it off. When you are putting your faux leather away, after you're done cutting all of your pieces out, you want to store it in a roll.

Because whenever you fold faux leather, it's going to be really hard to get those creases out. So when you buy faux leather from the store, it comes off a bolt, and it's going to be folded. So you can see, I still have a crease from when I bought this. When you bring it home from the store, open it up and lay it out to let it relax. And try and let these creases try and relax out.

And then when you're storing it, roll it up so that you don't have any creases in it at all. So those are some techniques for working with faux leather. I'm going to be demonstrating all of those in action in our next sections where we're going to be stitching ourselves a purse.

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