Sewing with Laminated Fabrics

I love sewing with laminated fabrics, especially the new, beautiful oilcloth reproductions that they're making these days. And this is a really nice laminated cotton, which is great for making raincoats out of. The problem that I run into when sewing with these is that it's sticky, it's kind of a sticky fabric. It has this sheen on it. And it tends to stick to both the foot and to the machine.

So I have a couple of tips for you to help out with that. So first of all, if you can get a Teflon foot, that's going to be your best bet. Not all machines come with a Teflon foot. It's something that you have to get aftermarket. So if you can't get ahold of a Teflon foot, there's a trick with Scotch Tape that you can do.

I am just going to turn this foot over and take a piece of Scotch Tape and I'm going to tape it onto the back of my foot, just like that. And it doesn't have to be perfect. We're going to take our snips and we're going to just get rid of the excess. And we're also going to just trim out the spot where the needle is going to go. And if you time it just right, you can kind of pull it right out of there and just trim out those spaces and then trim off the tape on the side, as well, like this.

And now you have a nice, smooth surface on the bottom for your fabric to run under. And then you can just pop this guy right back onto your machine. Now, we've taken care of the top part of the machine, but we still have the bottom of the machine to contend with. We've got a little bit of metal right here and right here. And also, if you have a sticky, plastic free arm right here, it also tends to stick to that, as well.

So the easiest thing to do is just to take a piece of computer paper, pull it out of your printer, and you're just going to slip it over, wrap the edges and Scotch Tape it into place. Over on this side, you can cut a little square. You can set it there, Scotch Tape that into place. And sometimes even your plastic bobbin window might cause a problem, so you can also cut a square and tape it over that. Now you have a nice smooth runway on the top and on the bottom, so that you can run your laminated fabrics through and they won't stick.