Do you know the feeling when you get some fabulous new fabric and you basically just want to wrap it as it is around you and never take it off again? Well, sometimes that’s just what you have to do.
A while back I got one yard of this beautiful chiffon fabric from Spoonflower and knew that it would be perfect to wear as a light scarf. Have you ever ordered from Spoonflower? You can choose from millions of designs (this is by Shopcabin) and have the print printed on one of the many substrates available at Spoonflower. This particular fabric is a poly chiffon, but Spoonflower has a silk chiffon, too, which I definitely want to try.
I didn’t want to lose any of this fabric and I didn’t want to make things more complicated than necessary. That’s why I decided to use my Bernina L460 serger to sew a tiny rolled hem around all four sides of the fabric.
Rolled hems look really lovely and they’re easy to sew, too. But it does require a few adjustments on your serger: First of all you have to remove your left needle and the first and third threads from the left. You have to switch the rolled hem selection lever on your machine towards the front, too, telling the serger to sew a rolled hem. Last but not least you have to add the upper looper converter (the thing with the white round “head” on the picture below) and to adjust the sting length to 1 and the differential feed to 1, too. All of this is really well described in the instruction booklet, too.
And then you’re ready to serge! As you can see, my fabric had white boarders, which I definitely wanted to cut off. This might be old news to those of you sewing with a Bernina serger for a long time, but the first mark on the presser foot really helped me to see where the fabric was going to be cut off. This way I could easily make sure not to cut too much or not enough.
As soon as I started sewing I realized that the rolled hem looks nicer and more even if you’re sewing fast and steadily. I know that it’s easy to feel more comfortable sewing slowly and stopping a lot, especially when you’re unfamiliar with a technique. But as you can see on the pictures below, the first seam, sewed slowly and with a lot of stops, looks way more uneven than the second, where I tried to sew fast and steady.
It is possible to sew around the corners, but I decided to rather stop at each edge and to deal with the thread tails after finishing. At first I tried to pull the thread tails through the rolled hem, as I do with a regular serged seam. But the rolled hem is really really tight and the chiffon fabric pretty delicate. The tightly sewn rolled hem didn’t seem to unravel easily, either. So in the end I decided to tie a little knot close to the corner of the fabric and to fold the tail to the back of my fabric, zick-zacking a few stitches on top of the thread tail with my regular sewing machine. I think it worked very well and I’m very pleased with the outcome.
Although the one yard cut of this fabric doesn’t have the perfect scarf shape, I am very happy with the result and love the idea of making a simple scarf just by sewing this tiny pretty hem around all four edges. There is more than one fabric in my stash that I’d love to turn into a scarf, a simple blanket or a coaster using this technique. The possibilities are endless!
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