14-Day Learn to Sew Series - Fabric Basics Wovens

The most popular type of fabric to sew with are wovens. Now, I'm not saying we don't like to sew on other things, such as our knits, and vinyls and various other things but I would say that wovens are, by far, when go into the fabric store you're gonna see more woven fabrics than anything. Especially if you're a quilter. If you're a quilter you almost never work with anything else. So what makes a woven fabric a woven? Well let's take a quick look at how these fabrics are put together, how they're made. So it starts off with yarns. So, yarns are spun, unless it's silk, in which case it can be a filament reeled from a cocoon made by an insect, isn't that crazy? But most yarns are going to be spun yarns, not filament yarns. Certain synthetics are filaments, as well, but we won't get into the textile science too much. I tend to get a little crazy on that subject. But anyhow, so when you look at a piece of fabric, so here I have this piece of linen in front of me. And it's a little bit more kind of a nice, obvious fabric. You can kinda see the weave structure here. So when a fabric is woven, you have yarns going in two basic directions. So you have lengthwise direction, and this is what we call the warp. So when you get a loom ready to weave fabric, to create fabric, you're going to first load up the warp yarns, those lengthwise yarns. Now I know this is lengthwise, because I can see, this is called the selvage. So people talk about the selvage, this is what they mean. This is the edge of the fabric, the selvage. All right, so I know that means that this was the direction it was woven, so these are my lengthwise, or warp yarns. Now these are called weft yarns, crosswise, or filling yarns. These are the ones that go in, so on the loom you have your warp yarns, and then you have what's called a shuttle, and the shuttle goes back and forth. Now of course, back in the day, or if you do hand weaving, you're literally moving that shuttle back and forth across the fabric. But even an actual commercial loom that's all mechanical is gonna do things basically the same way. So the shuttle goes back and forth, and that fills in the spaces between those warp yarns. And basically, the yarn has to turn around in the shuttle, and basically turn around and go back the other way. So because of that, the selvage edges are usually a little bit heavier. They're a little heavier than the rest of the fabric because that's where the yarn turned around, made the corner, and went back the other direction. So this is what we call a plain woven fabric. And so we have literally just these yarns are going over, under, over, under, over, under, for each yarn. And the wovens tend to, plain woven fabric like this, tend to, especially linen, they can sometimes fray pretty easily, which can be used as a good thing sometimes, too, to go ahead and make a fringe. But if you kinda pull at the yarns, you can reveal the weave structure here at the edges. But this is a plain woven fabric. Now just a quick little piece of trivia, have you ever heard the term being on tenterhooks? When you see these little holes along the selvage of a fabric, those are created by tenterhooks. And so, a lot of fabrics, the reason why most woven fabrics will shrink at least a tiny bit is because they're actually woven, and sometimes dyed or printed, or they have different treatments put on them, or they've washed and dried them, or what have you, but it's all done under tension. And how they keep that fabric under tension, one of the ways is to use tenterhooks. And that's what leaves those little holes along the edge of your fabric. So let's look a little bit about how that weave structure, why is it important to know lengthwise, crosswise, and then you'll have another term you'll come across called bias. All right, when a fabric is hanging on your body, on the wall, wherever, when a fabric is being hung, it's always going to drape or hang more gracefully if it's hanging in the lengthwise direction. The folds will tend to drape. I'm looking around to see if any of my fabric will illustrate this better. I'm not sure that it's obvious on camera, but take my word for it, the fabric will drape in much softer, more pleasing folds, if it's hung on that lengthwise direction. In other words, you have your selvage is going north and south, or up and down. Crosswise, it will tend to be if it's hanging in folds, like let's say you make a skirt with a border print, so you cut it on the crosswise direction so that the border print is running along the bottom, right? Well, the only problem with that is that it will never hang as gracefully being cut on the crosswise grain as it would if it was cut on the lengthwise. So that's why we need to understand and we need to be careful about whether we're cutting something on the lengthwise or crosswise grains. So grain, when we talk about the word grain, we're talking about that direction, that yarn direction. So lengthwise versus crosswise, that's the grain. It's the orientation of the fabric. Now, bias. Bias is, if you look at a fabric, if you're going on a 45 degree angle, 45 degree angle, that's called bias. So to cut on the bias means that basically instead of cutting aligned with the grain, you're gonna tilt everything on its axis so that everything's being cut more aligned at a 45 degree angle instead of 90 degrees. So why this is important is that woven fabrics all have at least a little tiny bit of give in that bias direction. So on my little sample here, if I pull on it sideways or up and down, I'm not really getting anything from that. It's not stretching, but if I pull on the bias, you can see it's actually able to stretch somewhat. All right, and so we use that. We use that physical dimension of bias to be able to influence how different pattern pieces will behave. So for example, if you're cutting out a collar, and you need that collar to drape gracefully around your neck, presumably, then we usually will manipulate or potentially cut it so that that grain allows it to shape around our body in a more graceful manner. All right, so grain does matter. The direction of the fabric does matter. And we use that, that should be marked on your patterns, how they want you to set that up, but it does matter in how it's going to look and perform, and that's what's really important. So not only the weave structure matters, but also the actual fiber content matters. So example, my little sample here piece of fabric, this is a piece of linen. And linen is by nature just a fairly stiff fiber. Now compared to say this is a piece of cotton. This is a yarn dyed cotton. It has very larger, little more rustic yarns in it. This is gonna drape differently than this linen, and even this piece of wool twill is gonna drape a little bit more differently. And when I say drape, what I mean is that it's how the fabric hangs on your body. So some fabrics are going to hang very softly. Like for example, here I have this beautiful piece of silk jacquard. And if I hold it up, this is a quick test for drape. So if I take a tiny little pinch and I hold it up, you can see that this fabric wants to hang in kind of a cone shape and it hangs fairly close together, right? If I do the same thing with this wool, now this wool is reasonably drapey, but if I do the same thing with this piece of wool, you can see that it doesn't hang quite so narrowly, so it tends to wanna stick out a little bit more. If I did that with this linen, even though the linen is fairly fine, it's fairly thin, it still might stick out, the cone might be even larger. So that tells you, when you put it on your body, how far or how close it's gonna wanna hang to you. Or if it's an accessory, how it's gonna hang. If you're making a bag, do you want that bag to have structure? Do you want that bag to be very drapey? You need to think about what the fiber content is, and even the weave structure of that fabric. Is it going to perform the way you want? And that's why it's really important to have at least a basic understanding of fabrics. Now another thing to be aware of when you're working with wovens is things like what we call pile. So why does this matter? So sometimes you're going to come across when you're sewing an instruction that says something like for directional fabrics or napped fabrics, you're going to want to cut it out in a certain orientation to make sure all the pieces are facing the same way. Well, what nap means, the word nap means that the fabric has texture to it. It's not smooth like this linen is. It has texture, like this beautiful piece of velvet. So here we have a piece of velvet, and this is very typical of a pile fabric. You know, it's fuzzy, it's soft. Corduroy is another great example, or say a faux fur. That's technically a knit, but we'll throw it in here, anyway. So fabrics with texture, all right, they have a nap. Why that matters, watch what happens. I'm gonna hold up this velvet, and watch what happens as I turn it in different directions. So when you're working with velvet, if I cut the velvet out in this direction, it's going to look different than if I turn it and cut it in this direction, and even more different if I hold it in a completely opposite direction. So depending on which way this is facing, it may look like it's two or three different colors, even though it's the same fabric. And believe me, this is a mistake you only make once, hopefully. I did once cut out a stretch velvet dress and I accidentally switched my direction, so it made the front look like it was a different color than the back. So I had to go back to the fabric store, and thankfully they had more fabric. That was not good. So with pile fabrics, or nap fabrics, napped fabrics, fabrics with texture, it's really important that you remember to always have them facing in the same direction, or you can get some unfortunate affects. Now maybe you want it to look that way on purpose. You might play around with that. But you need to think about that kind of thing. But going back to some of our wovens in terms of drape, too, is remember that all of these things come together. So not only the fiber content, but also even the weave structure, like a jacquard fabric like this. Now jacquard, the way it's woven, you can see that the inside and the outside basically are kind of a mirror image. And that's because on a jacquard loom, one of the first computers was actually a loom, the Jacquard loom, and it has the ability to control each thread, each yarn in that weave structure individually. So you can do detailed pictures and all kinds of things on a Jacquard. But the way it hangs and drapes on the body is gonna be a little bit different. So think about this when you are, or just understand you may need to make little adjustments to your fabric, depending on what it's sewn from. So for example, the blouse I'm wearing and this blouse that's made, same exact blouse, but made from that fabric I showed you, the hand, I think it's hand-dyed, but it's certainly yarn-dyed, cotton fabric. They look a little different and they even actually drape differently on my body, so just be aware that even if you're using the same pattern, different wovens are gonna perform differently. And another thing to consider when you're sewing wovens is that most wovens will fray. You saw me kind of playing with the edges on that piece of linen, and they were getting fuzzy. So most wovens fray, so we must always, always consider what kind of seam finish we're going to use on our wovens to keep that fraying from basically fraying to the point where maybe the garment won't hold together anymore. So that's why those kinds of things are important. So just a quick primer on some of the performance characteristics of woven fabrics, and I hope you found that to be helpful and interesting.