Using Steam-A-Seam

Steam-A-Seam is a fusible tape that's made by the Warm Company, and it has many, many uses. It's a double stick fusible web that I like to use for applying lace, trims, putting in hems, just all kinds of things. It's wonderful if you finish something and you don't have time to do your hand sewing but you want to wear your garment, you can just quick tack the steam in and you're ready to go. It's wonderful for applique, you can tack the back of the fabric, cut it out, or tack the Steam-A-Seam to the back of the fabric, and then gently press the applique piece onto the main fabric, and then you're all ready to go and it holds it in place for you. It comes in a light version, which is for sheer and lightweight fabrics, and then it comes in the Steam-A-Seam 2, which is for all other fabrics. So I would like to show you how to use this wonderful product. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to pretend we're putting in a hem, and it rolls off your roll at the bottom like that and just pulls out and you want to bring the paper with it, and so you're just going to lay it against your hem. And then gently touch it with the iron. Let it heat. Oops. And bring it down, making sure you keep that paper on there, because you don't want to get the Steam-A-Seam onto your iron. Now once it's had just a second to cool, you go ahead and you peel the paper away. You can see it's a little woven web there, and you just gently peel it away, making sure that the Steam-A-Seam stays stuck to the fabric. Sometimes you have to come at it from two different directions, if you're having a little spot where the paper doesn't want to come off. And so as you can see, we now have this webbing attached to one side of our hem, and in this case, I want to trim off the excess, 'cause I certainly don't want it getting onto my ironing board or on my iron or on my fabric where I don't want it. And then I go ahead and I've already premeasured my hem just for the sake of time here, so I turn that up, and I simply come back, whoops. Give it a little shot of steam. Make sure that it's fused and is holding and you can see that my hem is tacked down and ready to go. Now I can either sew that down by hand if I wish, or if I'm in a rush, go ahead and press my other side and my hem is in, it's not going anywhere, and I'm good to go. I used this recently on a door blocker that I used to keep air out, and because of the nature of it, this was a previous door blocker that I had with a different fabric, and I wanted to update it to match some curtains that I've made, so I had my little round piece here and I found the Steam-A-Seam going around the edge was the perfect thing to hold it, so I didn't have to deal with pins and the like until I could come here and do my stitches. Down here, I didn't even bother with stitches, I just put the Steam-A-Seam and it held it perfectly. In this case, when I folded my fabric over, if this was how I was folding it, I put it in between here and ironed it down and then I put another row of Steam-A-Seam and then pressed it down here to hold both edges so that it wasn't pulling at all. So that was a wonderful use for it. I also wanna show you another use, especially for the quilting sewers out there, it's wonderful for binding. I have this little tiny quilt that I need to get the binding on, and I can mess with a bunch of pins, or I can simply use the Steam-A-Seam and in this case, I like to just, it's a little tough to get in that corner. I just like to bring it right on the edge of the binding. Tear it off, let it cool for just a second, pull the tape back. I can either go ahead and pin it if I want, and if I know exactly where I want it, since I'd already pre-ironed this or pressed it, I know where I need to have it go. It's also repositionable, which is nice, so now I can come in here and just put that down and then it will hold it so I can come back and do my hand stitching. If it's a wall hanging, I probably don't need to, so what I do in this case is I will come along and do the next stitch, but I want to show you this little trick for the mitered corners. So I go ahead and you wanna get it as close to that edge as possible. Got that on, and then I just wanna put, after I pulled that tape back, okay, I wanna put just a little piece here, not very much, just a little bit to hold that miter, so I wanna be real careful with my iron, I have to kinda go in at an odd angle. Pull that off, and now, when I come and do this, and I've made my miter, now my miter will stay in place. And you can see I've got a perfectly mitered corner there, the Steam-A-Seam is holding the binding down, it's not coming up. For a wall hanging, this is absolutely perfect. If you wanna just have it hold it until you're ready to hand stitch or machine stitch it, that's perfect, but as you can see, this is a wonderful little product that'll save you a lot of time and frustration.