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Hi, I'm Cynthia Mann and we're here today at Birch Fabrics in Paso Robles, California.
This is also the home of Fabricworm.com. Hi, I'm Melissa Lunden; I'm the resident seamstress
here at Birch Fabrics. I teach sewing lessons here, prepare blog tutorials and sew samples
of Birch's line of organic cotton. And I am here today to talk to you about sewing. Hi,
now we're going to talk about preparing and marking your fabric. The first thing you want
to do when you get some fabric is wash it especially if you're using the fabric for
garment sewing. You want to make sure that any preshrinking gets done way before you've
sewn your garmet. So once your fabric is washed and ironed, then you can get ready to start
marking your fabric. If you're using a commercial pattern you're going to notice that the pattern
pieces have an arrow on them and you want to make sure that that arrow lines up with
the grain of your fabric. The fabric has a grain line that's created from the vertical
and horizontal yarns that are woven together and you want to make sure that your arrow
is lined up with the vertical yarns which are going to be parallel to the side of the
fabric. So here are a couple different tools you can use to mark your fabric when you're
using a commercial sewing pattern. You can use your scissors, if your pattern calls for
a notch like here you can use your scissors to make a tiny little cut right like that.
There's also an error erasing pen makes purple mark and it will evaporate into the air over
a day or so. You have tailor's chalk, you have a dress maker's pencil, and a tracing
wheel. You can also use pens instead. It's temporary. It's better to use pens with a
quilting weight cotton or something thicker to use it on a if you use pens on a delicate
fabric the pen holes can show and you don't really want that. So that's how you mark your
fabric.