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Picking a Fabric for your First Sewing Project

For any beginner sewer that is considering starting a new project, going to the fabric store to pick out fabrics and accessories for your project can be an exciting experience.   If you’ve never been to a fabric store before then the sheer choices of different types of fabrics, patterns, styles and designs will be staggering and there are more and more new choices every day.  

It can become challenging to pick out a great fabric for your new project.  The best thing to do is do your research beforehand and go to into the store prepared. However, apart from that a sewing machine plays important role. 


Some sewing machines are not good with sewing a particular fabric, though some sewing machine such as Brother xm1010, Singer SE400, Brother CS6000i are some of the sewing machines that do well with almost all type of fabrics.

Choices of Fabrics

For your first few sewing projects, I would recommend using cotton fabrics as it is easier to work with when you are using your 
sewing machine.  Other fabrics such as silk, satin and sheers can be difficult to control on your machine as they are very slick and tend to move around a lot.  You can also use cotton blends as long as the cotton content is more than 50% of the total fabric.

Here are some other fabric suggestions for your first sewing projects:

100% Cotton

Cotton is the most easily obtainable fabric in any fabric store.  Cotton comes in an endless variety of styles and prints and is usually very inexpensive to purchase, so it makes a great fabric to practice with and for many projects.   You can usually find a lot of cotton fabric in the quilters section of your local fabric store.  You should find any design your heart could desire. 

Woven Fabrics

The next choice for fabric for a beginner sewer is woven fabrics.  This is a big step up over sewing with cotton.  You will want to have plenty of practice with cotton fabrics before you move up to knits and elastic type fabrics.  You should be comfortable stitching and how your sewing machine feeds that fabric and have a few projects under your belt.   If you jump into woven fabrics too soon, you may be disappointed when your seams don’t come out the way they should.

Polar fleece is another good fabric to practice your sewing skills.  It also comes in a variety of colors and patterns.  With fleece you don’t need to worry about seam finishing since fleece doesn’t fray.

Satins, Sheers and Silk

After you’ve been sewing a while, your sewing skills have developed, you feel comfortable with the operation of your sewing machine and you’ve created a few successful projects, you might want to consider a project using fabrics such as satins, silk and lyrca.  All of these fabrics are very slick and delicate and can be difficult to control.   You might consider getting some remnant fabrics so you can practice sewing with these fabrics before you purchase a large piece of fabric.  The fabric will also be expensive, so you will not want to make mistakes. 

Final Advice

As a beginner sewer, it’s best to start out with small projects such as doll clothes.  These can have the same features as clothes you would make for yourself, such as patterns, darts, gathers and other features of normal clothing, but of course much smaller.  These small projects will build your confidence as a sewer so you can tackle larger projects.

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