Cutting sewing patterns the easy way.

Believe it or not, there is an easy way to cut sewing patterns.

You know I have a love of Freezer paper and one of the reasons being, it adheres to fabric.  It's something that I've only recently discovered and now there's no turning back.

With many designers now printing multiple patterns per sheet or offer multiple sizing, we need to trace our patterns.  Freezer Paper is perfect for this as it's plastic coating to one side gives it a much better strength than normal paper.

Once you have traced your pattern pieces onto the freezer paper, cut them out and iron them to your fabric.

Care needs to be taken here.  Make sure your iron setting is low to medium and steam is turned off.  Test a piece of the freezer paper to a scrap of the fabric you are using to ensure the plastic coating doesn't leave behind any markings and does in fact remove easily.  In most cases it will be fine.

The fabric needs to be perfectly flat and not creased underneath.

Once the pattern piece is adhering to the fabric - cut!
The absence of pins, means you are less likely to pucker or pinch the fabric. I use my hand that is not cutting to hold the fabric steady in case there is movement.

Peel away pattern.

A little tip: Never allow your fabric to hand over the table or surface you are working on.  It can pull of the fabric and make it difficult to cut accurately.

I use Reynolds Freezer Paper and it is available in The Haby Goddess online store.

6 comments:

Kathy said...

Oh wow - I use freezer paper for appliqué all the time - I never thought to use it for tracing patterns. Super idea!

Maria said...

What a great idea! Thanks Jodie :-)

Melissa Antolovic said...

do you still cut two pieces at a time or cut on the fold?

Jodie @ The Haby Goddess said...

Melissa, I cut on the fold as normal. The fabric shown is a cotton drill so it was easy to do. It may be a little harder with light weight fabric that move around. In this case you may need to pin outside the pattern to keep fabric pieces together. The benefit is that it still eliminates pinching and puckering that can occur when pinning the pattern to fabric.

redmisst said...

I haven't used freezer paper before, can you you reuse the pieces? Seems like a brilliant idea.

Jodie @ The Haby Goddess said...

Yes you can re-use the pieces. I know from using it that I have been able to use it 3 times but it may be more - the coating does lessen each time it's used.