One of the best hints I can share for sewing deity garments is hemming using the rolled foot!
You can buy an attachment for your sewing machine, if it hasn’t already come with one. I use it on nearly every set of deity clothes that I make – the teeny tiny seams are a dream!
There ARE tricks to using it, and a lot of my friends over the years have asked me to show them to use it, and I would LOVE to do that, but sociable as I am I rarely get out, and it’s hard to find the time – plus, how am I going to help my New York, Vrindavan, or Polish friends? So, this is how my friends, this is how.
This is the original tutorial I learnt from:
One note that I would add, is that you can hold your fabric up and slightly over. You will learn to do this naturally to solve the frustration of unpicking your seams, but hey I’d love to save you from that frustration entirely.
Now that I have just revisited that tutorial I realise that it can actually be used as a trick for curved seams, which someone asked me about today (here, this tip’s for you!)
Ok so you have an EXQUISITE fabric that is ridiculously slippery to sew. One fabric like that is this STUNNING Devore Velvet Silk with peacock pattern that I bought in a fit of enthusiasm, in 3 colors. Seriously, it was almost impossible to sew these into pretty shawls.
So after ruining half my fabric & a lot of research on how to stiffen fabrics which are prone to slide like this beautiful silk I found a LOT of information on using a gelatin bath to temporarily stiffen. Ok- so not going to happen! So While I did have ideas of using Agar-agar I still haven’t tried that. What I used was starch. I starched the fabric heavily, and ironed it dry, and THEN stitched it.
It worked pretty well! Stabilized the fabric enough to get relatively straight seams out of it.
One day I’m going to try the Agar-bath.
This is a great DIY tip on
understanding your thread tension on sewing maching. I can’t tell you how often I have been puzzled by this and just fiddled and hoped… But especially if you are trying to stitch using gold thread or switching between sewing heavy weight fabrics and light floaty fabrics, this is essential. I always wreck my tension when I sew deity turbans (because I sew right through stabilising xrays and fabric and quilt wadding!)
