Tips for Sewing Darts into Lightweight Fabric

When it comes to sewing garments, darts are something that are used often. If you are sewing darts on a lightweight fabric I have a couple of tips for making them look a little bit more professional. So this is what a dart on a very lightweight fabric. Maybe something that's going to be used for a the bodice of a dress, or maybe even on a shirt, and this is what you want it to look like. You don't want to have any extra book at the top of your dart and you want it to be nice and smooth. You also don't want to see your marks from when you had to mark your dart from your pattern. So the first tip I'm going to share with you is to use pins to mark your darts. So if you have your piece of fabric and maybe you have your pattern piece that you're marking from, or you're following a pattern and it tells you the dimensions or areas where you need to make your marks for your dart rather than using a removable marking pen or pencil whether that's a wash away or one that is heat soluble or air soluble, you want to use pins. So if our dart say on the bottom needs to be two inches apart, I'm going to make those marks using a pin. I'm going to place a pin and one mark, I'm going to place a pin on the other mark. If our dart then needs to be five inches tall, I can obviously see through my fabric so I can use the marks on my cutting mat or you can bring in a ruler and measure up your five inches and you will place another pin mark there. Now, you want to use your pins to fold your fabric to create your dart. So this is the wrong side of my fabric, I have the right side down, so I'm just going to pivot it and I'm going to fold my fabric, matching my pin marks. So these two pin marks down at the bottom they need to line up perfectly. Right like so I can go ahead and remove one, reposition the other to hold both layers together and then our top pin marking the top of our dart needs to be right along that folded edge. So if you need to lay it down and then use your finger to reposition it so it's along the edge, do that. You can then use an additional pin to hold those two layers together and you're going to place it right at where that pin is coming out. That way when you remove this one, you still have this marker as to where your dart needs to end. Now, when you're stitching your darts especially on the lightweight fabric, you don't want to do any back stitching. So this lower edge, especially if this is going to be the bodice of a dress is going to get caught into the next seam allowance of when you attach the bodice to the lower skirt part of the dress and up here, you don't want to do any back stitching either but you need a way to secure it. So we're going to do that by tying it, hand tying it rather than doing back stitching which means we need to end our stitching here. So we're going to start stitching at this end and end here. Now, if you're making a fairly long dart it may be hard to eyeball the line you need to go along your dart and make sure that you're stitching it straight. If it's a fairly short dart, say we're going in like 2, 2 1/2 inches It would be easier to eyeball that line. This is a much longer line. Again, we want to avoid using marking pens or pencils because it may not come out, it may become permanent and you don't want to ruin it. So we're again, going to use pins to mark our line. So again I can see through my fabric so I'm using the lines on my cutting mat. You may need to pull in a ruler but I can see my line that goes straight from this pin down to this pin here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to place pins along what is going to become my stitching line and I want to make sure that I am placing them in a direction that allows me to remove them as I stitch up close to them. So since I'm starting at this end here, you can see I'm placing my pins. So that as I stitch from here to about here I can easily grab the head of that pin and pull it out. So I'm gonna take this over to the machine and stitch it. Again, I'm starting at the end so as soon as I lower my presser foot, I can grab that pin out of the way, right like so so I don't stitch over it and now I'm going to follow my pin mark guideline that I've provided myself, Again I'm not back stitching. I'm going to stitch up to the end of this pin and as I get close to it, I can remove it. Once this one's out of the way. I know I am stitching from where I stopped to my next pin. Right like so go ahead and remove it when I get there and then same thing from where I stopped to my last pin which my last pin mark happens to be the end of my dart. So I'm stitching up to it. I want to slow down as I approach this end because I want to make sure that I don't accidentally stitch off too early and again I want to end my dart right at that pin. Now, we are at the end of our dart and rather than doing back stitching, we want to hand tie those ends. If your machine has an automatic thread cutter option, don't use it at this point because we want to have longer thread tail so we can actually tie those in a knot. So you're going to raise the presser foot going to raise your needle and pull it off of the machine. Give yourself a generous amount of thread to be able to tie your knot and then clip it using a pair of scissors. Once you have your two ends you can simply tie this into a knot. In order to do that you're going to take your needle and your bob and thread, just wrap them together like so to create one knot and I'm going to tie at least two, most likely three knots. Do one more and I'm pulling it fairly tight. I want to make sure this is nice and secure and now I'm going to clip these threads very very close to that knot that I just tied. Once you've clipped your threads, if you're worried that your knot's going to come undone you can use a fray check or something like that to extra secure that knot but if you do at least two or three it should not come undone. You can then give this a press and then you're going to have a nice professional looking dart. You have no extra book of a knot of back stitching up here at the top. You haven't backed stitched at the bottom but of course this is going to get caught in the same allowance when you attach that into a garment and you don't have any marking lines that you need to worry about trying to remove because we've done all of our markings using pins. So use pins and tie knots for professional darts.