Capelet Sewalong : Part 4 : Hair Canvas the Cheat's Way

Now you've conquered bound button-holes (or not, depending on your choice) its time to look at something else you might not be familiar with - hair canvas.

If you've elected to use iron on interfacing, use the pattern piece included with the pattern.  If you've done the bound button-holes, just cut rectangles out and fit them over the top of the stitched in bits before you iron.

If you are going to have a crack at hair canvas, follow me.  Now I've done this the right way before and hand stitched everything, but I'm about ready to speed up the process and cheat a little bit.  I mean, hand sewing is great, but, yeah....

So we need to use a modified version of the bodice pattern piece to cut the hair canvas, so lets make the new pattern piece first.

I folded the attached facing down, and I've traced around most of the pattern.

You'll notice that there is a chunk missing.  The hair canvas is predominantly to support the shoulder and the centre of the jacket.  So its cut in around the top of the bust dart, and the inner side of the waist dart.

Its hard to see, but I hope you get the idea.

But we aren't done yet.  The hair canvas cannot be in the seam allowance, so we need to trim the pattern down by 5/8" on all the sides that have a seam allowance - slightly more than the seam allowance for safety.

There you go!  Now cut your hair canvas!

Next step is to prepare the hair canvas.  It is traditionally hand sewn in with bias, like this.

But trust me when I say it, this takes a long time.  Instead, we are going to use bias to give the hair canvas a seam allowance we can use.  I'm just using a normal packet of 1/2" binding, but I'm ironing the creases out.

Take one of your bodice pieces, and one of your hair canvas pieces, and lie the hair canvas on the bodice pieces it should go.  More than likely you will need to trim it so it fits exactly (I did!).  Also, if you've picked the piece with the bound button-holes, you will need to cut rectangles to pull the button-hole squares through.  Here is what mine looks like now its all trimmed and in place

Now take your ironed flat bias, and put it underneath the hair canvas so it lines up with the edge of the fabric, then pin it to the hair canvas. 

Don't pin through the fabric underneath, just the hair canvas and the bias.

Now we can machine sew the bias onto the hair canvas.  This is more than likely going to blunt your needle, so you may want to swap it out after this.

Repeat for the other side and hooray, you're done!

Next up we will be doing something a bit more exciting.  We'll stop doing all these annoying tasks and actually get on with making our capelet!

Beccie
xxx