Ashley Hough

Sewing with Texture Session 2: How to Sew Wave Tucks

Ashley Hough
Duration:   15  mins

Description

In this session you will learn how to sew wave tucks. Ashley will show you how to cut, stitch and press your fabric so tucks can be made. She will then demonstrate how the tucks can be made in different areas across a project to make different looks.

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So the first way that we're gonna create texture is by doing some tucks. And if you've done any kind of sewing in the past, where you have some garment sewing, you may be familiar with creating tucks but maybe in a different fashion. If you've made, say like a dress shirt or something and you've done something around the sleeve and you've made a pleat, that's essentially like a half of a tuck. For this, we're making pleats, but we're gonna secure both ends forming a tuck. And then we're going to full back a section to reveal a different colored fabric underneath.

And this is creating what we're calling a wave tuck. So in this section, we're gonna learn how to make wave tucks. So this is just a fun table runner. You could use it as a wall hanging, really whatever you want it to be. And I'm gonna show you how to create the look of the wave tuck.

And then if you want to make this exact table runner or whatever you want to use it as, this pattern is provided as a download with this class. So it'll give you all the measurements you need for everything, as well as how much fabric and all of that you need. But in general, you want to have two colors. In this case, I really wanted a high contrast. I really liked batik fabrics but they're a little bit too bright and bold for my taste.

So I really wanted to tone it down by essentially covering most of it with some black fabric and exposing just a little bit. So let me show you how this is done. We're gonna start by simply sewing some strips of fabric together. Now these are one and a half inch wide strips. By however long you want them to be however long your project is that you're working on or whatever you're gonna put this in and you just, again, one and a half inches wide, however long you want, and we're just gonna sew them together.

So you can see here that rather than having just one color then I'm going to expose, I've decided to add two. So I'm alternating them. I have my polka dots and my solid alternating. So I have white here. So my next one is that I need to stich on my light pink.

Now it's up to you whether you want to pin your fabric at all. I like to do a couple pins at the very beginning just to make sure things are held in place while I'm taking over to my sewing machine. And then from there I can make sure that stuff is lined up as we go. Now when I mentioned talking about the supplies, I mentioned that I like to use a quarter inch foot when sewing this section, because I prefer to stitch this with a quarter inch seam allowance. I could use a much larger seam allowance but then I'm just going to go back and trim it to eliminate some of the bulk so I might as well just start with that smaller seam allowance.

If you don't have a quarter inch foot you can always use your regular presser foot and adjust your needle position to give you that quarter inch. Just going to stitch all along this. And I went ahead and did do one little back stitch at the beginning just because I have to do some manipulating to this fabric and pressing and folding and I really don't want anything coming undone on me. So I went ahead and just did a quick little back stitch. Again I'm just making sure that everything is lined up as I go.

Stitch all the way to the end. Again just do one tiny little backstage there. We're done with that. Take this off. Take out my pins.

And you can see, we just keep adding our strips. So I'm gonna add just my last strip on here. This is my final background color strip. And so on this sample, obviously I've gone the exact opposite of what I did on the table runner. I had a dark batik fabric and a dark background and here I have some, you know, real light pale pinks and a off-white.

So really it can be any colors you want, just make sure you're alternating them as you're stitching together your strips. Okay, again a little back stitch and then we'll attach our final piece on there. I like to go just a little bit and make sure everything is lined up. Stitch to where my finger was holding the fabric in place. Move it down and then continue to the end.

Okay, now this is this is just where we're stopping because this is enough stitch together to give you an idea of how to create this technique. The pattern will tell you how many you need to stitch together in order to create the same look I did for the table runner. But if you're going to add this to another project, you can have a whole big, long strip of these before you actually stop and do the pressing. So that part is up to you how big you actually want your overall wave tucks to be. So now that we have them all stitched together we need to press.

First off, I want to press all of my seam allowances in one direction. So what I like to do, make sure my iron is turned on, nice and warm, is I'm going to hold one side with this hand put the iron down to hold it in place and then kind of pull my seams open and run the iron along. I'm gonna do that a couple places making sure I'm getting everything pressed over like so. Then once I've got that on the wrong side, I like to turn it back to the right side. And I am going to do the same thing here but I want to make sure that I didn't distort any of my strips when I pulled them.

So they are a little bit wavy from the way I pull them. All of that will get fixed when we do our folding. But while the fabric is still a little bit warm, you can pull them, straighten them back out. It makes it much easier to make sure that everything is nice and pressed. And now we're going to do some more folding and pressing.

And what I want to do is cover up all my background fabric. In this case, my background is the pink and the polka dots. So I want to cover all that up. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take and I am going to fold my fabric like so so my two edges of the white are matched up. Press as I go.

And once you start folding it and you get a few of them pressed, you can go back and give it another really good press to make sure everything stays in place. So don't worry if things are not looking like they're lining up perfect right off the bat, it takes a little bit, a little bit tedious to get everything lined up but it makes it look really cool in the end. So I'm gonna go along, press, cover up all of our background fabric like this. Okay. Just like that.

And I would continue doing that all the way along. I'm going to fold up the next one, fold up the next one pressing as I go until all I see is the white fabric. I have one here that I've already done that to. So you can see I've folded over, covered up all of my background fabric and I've given it a press. Everything is nice and flat.

Now that we have everything pressed, we need to secure it down. So you can see, I have one side that I've pinned and one side that I've stitched. So once it's all pressed, you want to pin it and then stitch it. So now that I have one side already stitched, I'll go ahead and stitch my remaining side so we can get all the pins out and we can start actually forming our tucks in this fabric. Again, I'm just going to go ahead and leave my quarter-inch foot on there.

And I'm going to stitch these using a quarter inch seam allowance. And essentially I'm just basting these in place. Because of how our table runner is constructed or how this is going to be added into whatever project you're adding it to, these ends will both be stitched into something or onto something. And whether that's a garment or maybe a home deck, odds are you're using at least a half inch or a five eighth inch seam allowance, so both of those seam allowances are plenty wide enough that this gets caught in there. So it's not a basting stitch that you have to take out.

So I didn't worry about adjusting my stitch length. It's something that I'm just going to leave in place so I know everything is nice and secure. Now I can take my pins out and now it's time to start forming our waves. And there's a lot of fun different ways that you can do this. In the one that I created, I just took and I made the wave in the very middle of my piece.

So I measured in, or actually in my case, I didn't measure. I folded in half. And then I had an idea of where I needed to fold at right in the center, folded them up, and then I stitched along that line. If you didn't want your waves to all be the same or maybe you didn't want them in the center, you could do them off centered. You could have the waves slowly working their way over as you go across the work, you can see it really, it doesn't matter how you decide to fold them back.

All you want to do is expose the fabric underneath. So I'm going to do the ones right in the middle just because that's what I have on my project. So I want you to see how that's done. So again, you can kind of still see it, my line where I folded it in the center. I'm going to open up that wave exposing the fabric underneath and then I'm gonna put a pin right along that center right along my fold line that I can see.

I'm gonna do that all the way down. So when I'm opening these, as you can see this first one here should be approximately a quarter inch from the edge of the fabric. And that's because these strips were sewn using a quarter inch seam allowance, which means if you were to envision that another piece of fabric was stitched right here then it would just be another seam. And that's what you're folding up to. So as you work your way down, you can see that the next one should fold right open to that seam.

So, whereas before we were folding our background fabric to completely cover our, in this case, polka dot and pink solid. Now we're unfolding the pink solid to completely cover the background fabric. Again I can open the next one, put another pin in place. I'm just gonna do this all the way down. So when you're just starting out and you're folding them and you're just putting your pins in, you can see what your finished product is gonna look like.

And this is the time to decide whether or not you like it. So if you do all of your pins down the center and you decide that maybe you do want them off centered, or you want your waves working their way from one corner to another, this is when you would need to change that. And wherever you put your pins is where we're gonna do some stitching. One last one to open up, right like that. Put our last pin in and we're ready to make these wave tucks permanent.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this to my machine. I'm actually going to switch my foot. So I no longer need my quarter inch foot. I can go back to my regular presser foot because I want to be able to clearly see where it is I'm going because I want to stitch right down the middle. Now I can't really see my fold line anymore because I've covered it up with a bunch of pins.

But I do know that I can stitch right up to a pin, take it out, move up to my next pin and work my way in small little increments to stitch all the way across the middle of this. So going to do that now, and you can see the way the pins are and the way it's going into the machine your presser foot is actually helping you move your waves out of the way, keep them laying flat, just how you want them. So you can go ahead and start with a little backstage 'cause I don't want these coming out at all. And I'm gonna stitch right up to about the middle of that pin, to where I know I can still take it out and then stitch up to my next one. And just keep going.

Now, if you wanted to make sure your line is exactly straight, you can absolutely put a ruler down and you can draw a line and then stitch over that line. Since my wave tucks are really so close together, it's only about an inch or so, I feel pretty comfortable just stitching from pin to pin. Also, I just have a gray thread in my machine so you can see what I'm doing, but I would probably normally stitch this using a pink thread of some kind that would better blend into our pink that we're exposing. Take this off. And you can see we have our fun little wave tucks.

So this, once it gets stitched into a project you can see how it just has a nice little pop of color. And I have one other, you know, smaller sample here that I've also done. So you can see that you could have a long row of wave tucks going. You can decide that you want maybe half going this way half going this way. In our table runner project, we have some going up, you have some going down so you can really make a bunch of different small segments like we did here.

We have four in our project. And make them all going in different directions. So again, here we have them going up, down, up, down but you can make four different sections going this way. And you could really slowly but surely have your waves going up across the entire piece. So now that you see how easy it really is to create the tucks you can have a lot of fun playing around with the positioning of them, maybe the colors you have underneath and do a lot of fun things with this and really incorporate it into a bunch of different projects.

So I really hope you give wave tucks a try.

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