Sewing fancy dress fabrics - some tips

Three of the fabrics I was using for my grand-daughter's Wonder Woman costume were really difficult to sew, so I thought I'd share how I managed them. One was a gold lamé type of fabric, which comprised very thin gold plastic over a thin white backing, one was a similar fabric in white plastic, and the other was shiny red leotard material, which, when I looked at it closely, seemed to be made of millions of tiny tiny sequins or scales. The gold fabric was to be used for the waistband / belt of the skirt, and for the arm gauntlets; the red was for the cape and leg protectors, and the white for the flashes on the leg protectors. With fabrics like these, I always try out on a spare bit first. And I could see these would be trouble!

None of these could be sewn easily on the machine, even with a travelling foot and stretch needle. The thin gold and white plastics just tore, or the needle made big holes; and the little red scales seemed to be too slippery for the needle, which slithered off sideways and stopped the feed-dogs moving the fabric at all. 

For ways of getting round this, read on!

The solutions I found were four.

1) A loose zig zag worked reasonably well on the red fabric, so long as I went very slowly, and didn't attempt to go back and forth at the beginning or end of each line of stitching.  I tied the ends of the thread off instead. (If this hadn't worked, I would have gone to method 4 below.)

2) Sewing the fabrics right sides together with a long stitch worked fine on the gold fabric. Somehow the lining protected the plastic when it was on the inside. So I was able to make the ends of the belt this way, sewing the edges with the belt inside out, and then turning it through. I could also attach the belt to the skirt on the wrong side.

3) I did a lot of hand-sewing. I hand-sewed on the gold when I wanted to use thin gold metallic embroidery thread, which I found too thin and too slippery to work well in the machine. You may be able to make out hand-stitching on the inside of the waistband above, and you can certainly see it on the arm gauntlets. Some of the Velcro went on by hand too.

4) If you have never tried this, here's a tip that can work well when you need to stitch fragile fabrics like these on the right side. I did have to do some sewing on the right side of plastics, when it came to edge-stitching the waistband / belt, sewing through the waistband and the elastic to fix the elastic, and over-sewing the white flashes onto the red leg protectors. That would have been a lot of hand-sewing, and you can probably see I'm not that neat at visible hand-sewing. So here's how.

a) Sandwich the layers of material that needed to be stitched together between two pieces of tissue paper, one below amd one above. Sew  right through the sandwich, again, using a long stitch. 

Here's the stitching through the gold waistband and the elastic, with the top tissue visble, and the threads knotted off.  

b) Carefully start pulling the tissue away from one edge of the stitching. It will tear quite easily because of the needle holes in it. Repeat on the other side of the sandwich.

c) Gently pull out any little pieces of tissue trapped between lines of stitching. I had done two rows of stitching to secure the elastic in the waistband, and also between the rows of stitching down each side of the leg flashes. If there are any little bits  left (as seen below), pull them out using fine tweezers, or a pin (carefully so you don't stab the fabric).

The tissue is so thin, that there's no sign afterwards that you did it this way. 

You can see the end results in my post on the Wonder Woman costume.