Of all the skills involved in sewing home furnishings, one of the most difficult to master is pattern matching at the seams that join together widths of fabrics.
It seems obvious that all you have to do is "just" align the pattern, and sewn down the fabric length in the exact spot where the pattern motifs match up, right? However, accomplishing that quickly AND accurately is not easy.
Years ago I learned a technique from a professional sewer, as I watched her reel off width after width and join them speedily and perfectly without pinning. It takes a lot of repetition to become proficient, so I take every opportunity to practice.
The other day I faced a stack of orders all requiring widths to be joined, so I decided to cut and join all of them in one afternoon, to keep in the swing of the process.
I started with the easiest, a cotton gemetric print.
It only needs one photo to illustrate this technique. One width is laid
right sides together atop another width. The top width is folded back
1/4" and laid down along the
underneath fabric, aligning the pattern. Then before sewing the fold
is nudged over to the right about 1/8". The stitch line is about 1/16"
from the folded edge.
This is done by eye, perhaps pinning 5" ahead. Some pattern details, like the center of the V below, make good "marks" to look out for, as well as the selvedge markings.
Yeah, this can be done!
Afterward you trim the selvedges, and press from the right side.
When the fabric is opened up, voila, the pattern is joined!
The next fabric was a woven silk. I had to take into account the holes along the selvedge left from the loom and sew outside of them so they wouldn't show, which meant losing a tiny bit of the pattern.
This fabric was for drapery panels so the slight pattern loss wasn't important.
The third fabric was much more difficult. At the center of each embroidered motif was a sort of "tuffet" of thread which was bulky. You can see my purple-pen reference points because there are multiple shades out of this fabric.
Every time I got to one of those "tuffets", the needle slipped off its line. I tried different presser feet but it kept happening. I re-sewed some of them five or six times- and still I'll need to go to each one and add a few hand stitches to pull the tuffets together. This fabric is for a flat roman shade- no place to hide the seam, so it'll need tweaking.
.
The last fabric, a geometric matelassé, had me worried. Lo and behold- it turned out to be the easiest! I didn't need to use the fold-back method. Instead I chose a little diamond to follow, one set in a bit again to avoid the loom holes. I made a mental note of my marks, and the ease built into the weave allowed me to align these little shapes perfectly as I went, without pinning.
