If your silk gets stuck inside your machine, try using a straight stitch throat plate, holding both top and bobbin threads taut behind the foot as you start sewing, and decreasing your needle size. Most machines come standard with a zig-zag throat plate, and the opening for the needle is much larger which means the fabric is more easily “eaten”. Cambridge Crops is optimistic about silk’s potential to mitigate many of the challenges facing complex food networks. During the Plague, old women woere employed to diagnose the Plague from the buboes and count the dead to enable the compilation of Bills of Mortality, for which they were paid from 3 to 4 pence per corpse. This is a great trick for leather because it can stick to the bottom of your machine’s foot, but silk doesn’t have this problem, and it’ll obstruct your view.

Our blades come with an expected usage life of 18 months, so it might be time to start thinking about swapping yours with one of Braun's electric shaver head replacements, available with all Series on site. In most silk projects, I use french seams everywhere I can, and bias bind the rest, but my wedding dress was a bit different. The company aims to iterate and expand on the initial discovery, using silk as its core ingredient to develop products that extend the shelf life of all sorts of perishable foods.I'm pretty sure I cut more than the average sewing blogger (I probably cut 2-3 silk wedding dresses a week, most through paper, plus whatever I'm sewing in my studio) so you may not need to do it as often.

This is the technique I used to hem the silk gauze in my wedding dress (I machine rolled the lining fabric though). When you cut your silk between paper the silk behaves just like the paper and is really easy to cut. The resulting seam behaved well on the bias, and was nearly invisible which was important for my sheer fabric!A very skilled job as the tips had to withstand being hammered to make the shuttles fly through the yarns from one side of the loom to the other and had to have aerodynamic properties. If your fabric is particularly drapey (or your skirt is full) you may wish to take extra steps: you can steam the skirt to help the fabric settle, or bring the garment – dress form and all – into your bathroom while you have a hot shower to let the steam do its work there. I wouldn’t recommend this hem for circle skirts and bias garments, as the fabric becomes difficult to feed on the bias. If you find your fabric is getting sucked down into the machine – especially at the beginning of a seam – switch to a straight stitch throat plate, if one is available with your machine.