How to Keep Fabric from Puckering

One of the most frustrating and heartbreaking things when we're sewing is to be working on a garment in particular and find that our threads and our seams are puckering, especially if you're using something like a satin. It tends to really pucker and if you get this kind of action going and then when you have it open, it just, the seam doesn't lay right. It doesn't look good and it feels very non-professional and that's not what we want with our sewing. We know that the specialty fabrics like satin tends to pucker, but even regular cotton can pucker, which is frustrating for my quilters out there. It's not a good thing, even when you lengthen your stitches, it's puckering.

Even if it's a heavy decorative fabric, it's puckering. Even when I'm doing a fancy stitch, such as this blanket stitch, it's puckering, and we're very frustrated. What do we do? Let me give you a few tips here. First of all, always, always, always have a test sample before you start working on the project.

Just take a few inches of fabric, like I've done here. Three to six inches will do just fine and run the stitch with the thread and the stitch length that you're planning on using and evaluate it. If it's not right, you need to probably, number one, loosen the tension. Number two, lengthen the stitch slightly. You may even need to slow down your sewing.

Sometimes if we sow too fast, it can cause puckering. You wanna make sure you're guiding the fabric through the machine, not pulling it, because when it comes out, the fabric has a memory and it'll stretch back to where it was and we get puckering. You also need to make sure that you're using the correct thread. You may need to have a lighter weight thread or a heavier thread, depending on what you're doing. So check your thread weight.

Most important, have a sharp needle. A new needle makes all the difference in the world. You want to make sure you're changing it often, at least every eight hours of sewing. More often, if you're using specialty fabrics, if you're embroidering, if you're quilting. Make sure you're changing that neat more frequently.

You can tell when a needle needs changing, for sure, if you start seeing pulled threads on your fabric or if you start hearing kind of a thwack, thwack thwack, when you're putting your fabric through the machine. So all things to look for. Make sure it's also the right type of needle. You don't wanna be using a ballpoint needle on your specialty fabrics. That should be a sharp so that it's making a nice sharp point and going through and not bunching the fabric or anything, or piercing it with a hole larger than what you want.

There's some tips that you can do if you're finding the puckering at the beginning or rather puckering overall. Let's put some interfacing in there. Look at the difference between these two. Same fabric, same stitch length. This is just folded over and I stitched it and you see the puckering.

These are not pressed. This is with a piece of stabilizer or interfacing in the middle and then I stitched. I remember very clearly when I went and bought a brand new machine, my first embroidery machine. I was so excited. I came home and my husband gasped at the price, even though he had agreed that I could purchase it.

He was a little shocked when I came home and he said, "Okay, fine." And I'd agonized for nine months before I bought this machine, just like a baby. And he said, let's see what this beast can do. So I put my fabric in and I put on one of these giant stitches that it was supposed to do, this little dinosaur and he came out just as crunched and ugly as could be. I was in tears. I'm like, "Oh my God, it didn't do that at the store." So I went back and they said, "Oh, that's because you didn't use stabilizer." We put the stabilizer in and it worked perfectly.

So that may be part of your difficulty with your puckering. Put some stabilizer or interfacing in. Very critical when you're using the decorative stitches or embroidery. Also buttonholes, makes a big difference on your button holes. Handle your fabric gently.

Fabric has three grain lines. The first is the traditional one that we all think of, the straight of grain. It runs parallel with the selvage, that has the least amount of stretch. The cross grain is perpendicular. It stretches a little more.

You can see all that stretching more, but the bias is the 45 degree line, imaginary line, between these two points and when you pull on the bias, you can see how much that is stretching compared to the other two. So my tip for you to help avoid puckering is anytime you've got a bias, handle it very gently. My quilters use a lot of bias when they're piecing and they're using triangles. This is going to stretch. So be very careful with it.

For sewers, you're going to have bias where the neck line is. This is going to really stretch a lot and have puckering, all right, on different parts of that circle. Same thing with like a pocket. It's, or a sleeve. If this was the sleeve, your sleeve cap is going to stretch a lot and it can pucker.

So run a stay stitch one eighth of an inch away, just a straight 2.0 or 12 stitches per inch line of stitching on the curves and you'll find that will help with the puckering. The other thing I want you to try doing is pin more frequently. Pinning actually helps with puckering. I want you to pin the ends first and then the middle and then if you need to pin some more in between, go ahead and do that. This is critical for quilt borders for my quilters.

And I want you to just sew and hack because you do get puckers in there and it also pulls and distorts the fabric. Pinning will help a lot. The last thing you can do with puckering is to press everything. As soon as you sew it, get over to the sewing machine and press. I don't want you to ironing.

I want you to press up and down motion and first we're gonna press it, just as it came out of the machine, that sets the seam. If you're a quilter, then you will be typically pressing to one side or the other. If you are a garment sewer, you'll probably have a five-eighths inch seam instead of quarter inch and now is when I want you to open it up and press that seam. You need to press seams open before you cross them with another seam. And that will get out a lot of the puckering that you've been having, but don't rely on that as the only way to get it out.

Look back to the cause of the puckering first and let's try and fix it before we get to the pressing stage.