How to Cut Out Your Fabric When Sewing a Project

by Kenjah Battle

4 Materials

5 Minutes

Easy

Properly cutting out your fabric is the most important step that you can take in order to make sure your garment looks really good.

When cutting out your fabric, you want to make sure that you pay attention to the instructions that are on your pattern piece.

Here, I’m going to talk you through the key things you need to know.

Tools and materials:

Fabric scissors
Pattern piece
Fabric
Pins or pattern weights

Grain line

1. Look for the grain line

When looking at your pattern pieces, you want to find the line with arrows on either side that goes across them, known as the grain line.

The grain line shows you which direction to lay your pattern onto your fabric.

For the most part, your grain line is going to be either vertical or horizontal.

Grain line

However, The skirt I’m making is a bias-cut skirt, so the grain line is going to be diagonal.

Holding pattern down

2. Hold pattern down

To hold your pattern down, you can use pins or pattern weights.

This stops the pattern from moving about when you cut the fabric.

As you’re placing your weights down, smooth out the pattern to make sure that it’s nice and even.

Scissors

3. Use the right scissors

To cut out your fabric, you want to use really sharp scissors that are meant only for fabric.

If you use your scissors for both paper and fabric, then they will get dull a lot faster.

Markings

4. Check for markings

After you’re done cutting out the general shape of your pattern, you want to look to see if there are any markings on it.

This pattern has markings on it to help you align it with the front and back pieces.

Snipping at markings

5. Snip at the markings

I like just to snip where the triangles are, but some people mark them with a marker.