Preshrinking Guidelines for Sewers

For garment sewers in particular, preshrinking is an important consideration. Preshrinking is washing your fabrics prior to cutting them and using them, so that when the garment is complete, or the project is complete, you won't have any shrinkage when wash it, or any distortion. Its particularly noticeable if you've made a dress and, cotton in particular, shrinks 3%, and all of a sudden your dress is now an inch or so shorter than what you intended, or an inch or 2 tighter than what you intended, it can be a problem. So it's very very wise to preshrink your fabrics. Most chemical fabrics, like your rayons, your nylons, the man made fabrics, the polyesters, do not need to be preshrunk. They will not shrink. They are not designed to shrink. It's the natural fabrics that we worry about. The wool, the linen, the cottons, the flannel, that's what I want to talk to you about today. Wool will definitely shrink, even though it's a washable wool, you may still want to go ahead and have it dry cleaned. Wool just doesn't look the same after it's been through a washer. So before you make that beautiful pair of wool pants, or that wool jacket, especially if you're tailoring and lining the garment, get your wool dry cleaned, it's worth every penny of it. And even though you're going to be lining it perhaps with a polyester, or a rayon, or synthetic lining, just to on the safe side, I would go ahead and preshrink it in warm water, not hot, and cold won't preshrink, but use the warm water, just to make sure that everything is going to stay nice. You don't want your lining shrinking and your jacket not. It will distort it, it will look terrible, it will just not look professional, and you'll be really sad after all the work. So take the extra time and preshrink to be sure. Cotton, definitely. Cotton shrinks 3%, like I said, so if you have a cotton print, you're going to make that cute little dress for your daughter, or granddaughter, take the time and shrink it, and press it, and then go ahead and cut it out and make it. Flannel is notorious for shrinkage. More importantly, flannel lints. So you will get a lot of lint in your sewing machine while you're sewing, even if you do preshrink. So make sure that you're constantly cleaning out your bobbin with a little brush, and getting rid of the lint. Your machine will perform much better, and you also won't get little globs of lint in your steam line, which is what happens because the top thread will pull that up from the bottom, and you'll actually get little globs of lint. The last fabric that I'm going to discuss today is linen. Linen is lovely. I love linen, but it will definitely shrink. The linen, the cotton fabric, and in particular the flannel tends to ravel a lot. You will get a lot of raveling off these, so that when you go to preshrink, you'll have little loose threads all over in your washing machine. What I recommend is, take a second, and just run a stay stitch an eighth of an inch away from the edge of the fabric, on both ends, just run a line of stitching, a simple straight stitch set at normal stitch sewing length, 2.5 or 12 stitches per inch along the edges before you throw it in the washing machine, and you won't have as much problem with the raveling. I think you'll find that once you get on to preshrinking, you'll find a big difference in your sewing, and of course, when the fabric comes out of the dryer in particular, you will want to press it right away, and make it nice and smooth, because it will wrinkle, unfortunately that's a problem with natural fibers, but they're so wonderful to wear, and work with that it's worth the extra effort. So hopefully these guidelines for preshrinking will make your life a little bit easier, and your garments and projects come out more professional looking.