This week's episode continues the MARKING TOOLS series. The first installment was on Frixion products in episode 19. (A link to that episode is in the Episode Notes.) This episode focuses on wax transfer papers, wax-free transfer papers and the tracing wheels used to transfer markings from the pattern onto the fabric.
Previous installment on Frixion products
Products mentioned in the episode. These are from Amazon. If you buy using this link, a portion of the proceeds come to the Stitch Please podcast and Black Women Stitch.
Heat Resistant Tape (preserves tissue patterns when tracing, won't melt when ironed/pressed)
Support the Stitch Please podcast and Black Women Stitch
$15 to the Paypal account for a Black Women Stitch lapel pin! DM or email your mailing to address for free shipping.
Support also appreciated here:
[00:14 S1: Hello, Stitchers. Welcome to Stitch Please, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. I'm your host, Lisa Woolfork. I'm a fourth generation sewing enthusiast with more than 20 years of sewing experience. I am looking forward to today's conversation, so sit back, relax and get ready to get your stitch together.
00:55 S2: Hello and welcome to the Stitch Please podcast. Today's topic, we're gonna be talking about marking tools. This is part of a series that we've been doing. Back on episode 19, we talked about marking tools, and I talked about Frixion pens. I believe that was the last episode of February 2020. You can go back and listen to that episode as well as check out links to the pens themselves, the pens, the markers, the stamps that I was talking about in the show notes. If you're interested in those, today's topic is about marking tools, and the theme is wheels and wax. Wheels and wax, and I'm talking about wax transfer paper, I'm talking about wax-free papers, tracing wheels and just some general how-to’s to use these things. And I'll be talking about the good and the bad, and this disjunct did not work for me ever of marking tools that are wax-based. So one of the things I wanna begin with is why I use wax and one of the first experiences that I had with it, and this was a not great experience, and it was 100% operator error. Maybe about 15 years ago, maybe earlier, maybe longer, I was in the Garment District at maybe one of the trim shops, Specific Trimming or something like that, and they had a bunch of paper that was wax on one side and white translucent on the other side, and they said that this was for pattern transfers.
02:31 S2: Now, I believe what they meant was this was to transfer a pattern that one had designed and drafted into another shape to then be cut out. What I thought it was for was to draw darts and marks and those kind of things on fabric, and I proceeded to do that and use that for years, even though it was a terrible idea, because wax does not come out of your clothing, and I ruin some pretty nice garments by putting bright red, dark marks on the inside thinking that it wasn't gonna be seen and it was totally absolutely seen. And so I still have some of those pages still to this day, I still have some of those sheets of the wax that I could use for the intended purpose and not for the very badly decided modified purpose that I chose, but what I found to be better after I had that fiasco was the wax trace wax-free tracing papers, and these are double-sided papers, and the purpose of using them, the things that I really enjoy using them for is to mark darts and to mark pleats. I also use them to mark dots in fabric, like if a dot is a large dot or
03:50 S2: a large circle or small circle. And so I wanna talk today about these wax transfer papers, the wax-free papers that I have been using, and one with great success and one with terrible success, and so the first one was the Dritz, double-sided wax-free paper, and I would buy that for what felt like for almost every sewing project, because I know people enjoy using Tailor's tacks to mark their dots, I’m sorry to mark their darts, and that's when you draw a basting stitch through the different points of the darts, of the legs of the darts, and you can measure and create your dark that way, and that doesn't require any tools. No, it doesn't require wax, it doesn't require chalk, which is the next installation in this marking tool series will be about chalk. It doesn't require chalk, it just requires you to use some basic hand sewing and to be able to follow, I suppose a line that is that is drawn between the points that have been stitched out with the tailors tacks. It's difficult for me to explain how tailor’s tacks work because I find them impossible to use. Again, this does not mean that they are bad.
05:13 S2: This means that I have a limitation in my own sewing that prevents me from using tailor’s tacks with great effectiveness. I need to draw my darts, I need to trace them, and I need to stitch on the line as they are drawn on the pattern or stitch on the line after I modified the dart or moved it or done whatever that needs to happen, and the line, I really need to sew on the dotted line, that's the kind of sewist I guess I am, I can't wing it. And to me, without having a line that I can see and follow, that feels like winging it to me. Now, again, other folks have had great experiences, tailors, I'm telling you, tailor’s tacks have been around far longer than wax-free tracing paper. So this is a very old, not old’s the wrong word, but it's a couture, I would say a couture technique. I believe that if you are a very skilled at sewing, that's something that you will do is use tailor’s tacks. And so I think that that's just an important consideration to keep in mind that there's another way to do it, but for me, the wax free paper was the way that I had chosen to go because I needed to follow the lines, and so one of the challenges for me with the Dritz paper that I found was that I found it very difficult for the marks to actually transfer to the fabrics that I was using for the garment, it would get,
06:51 S2: It would make something that they came with about maybe four or five different colors in the pack, but I couldn't get any of them to show up on any fabrics, I would say, Oh, well, I guess this one's no good or it's too old, let me go buy another one. Oh, I guess this one's no good or too old, and I throw that one out or I leave it in the bag or I'd say, well, maybe I can only use this red one, but the yellow one isn't gonna work. And so that was pretty frustrating. And so eventually I came to find another way of using that, not another way of using that paper, I had to stop using it entirely, and I found a different method and I found a different brand of paper to use, and that is the Saral brand paper, S-A-R-A-L. I went to The 5440 African-American Guild retreat back in 2018, and I had taken a class and one of the requirements for transferring some of the materials was using that paper. I had never heard of it before, I'd never seen it. I know, I saw that it came on rolls, that came in a pack, and I had never used it before, and when I did, it was like a light bulb turned on over my head and I was like, Ahhh, like who knew that this could be so easy? You put the marks down.
08:18 S2: The marks are not permanent, but they're bright, they brush out, if they don't brush out, they wash out and they show up for me, which is useful on dark fabrics. I sew with a lot of dark fabrics, and especially a lot of fabrics that have multiple prints on them, and so it'll be a bunch of different colors in the pattern of the fabric, which makes it difficult for me to draw a line that I can see when I move, for example, from region to region in different parts of the exact same material, so that Saral paper worked so well and it still works well, and so I have been using that ever since. It really has completely revolutionized how I use wax or the wax-free tracing paper, and then when you partner that with these tracing wheels that I have, you get a really fun result that for me generates a kind of precise sewing that I really appreciate. So when, we're gonna take a quick quick break and when I come back, I'm gonna talk about the two different types of tracing wheels that I'm using, as well as give some detailed instruction on how to use wax-free tracing paper in your own sewing. Stay Tuned.
09:34 S2: Here at Stitch Please, the official Podcast of Black Women Stitch, we talk a lot about sewing, but if you want to see and not just hear about some of the things we've been discussing, feel free to join us on the socials: You can find us at Stitch Please on Facebook, and you can also find us on Instagram @blackwomenstitch. You can find photos of projects that we've been working on, really interesting social commentary, and on Thursdays at 3 pm Eastern Standard Time, you can join Black Women Stitch for a live Instagram chat. Again, that's every Thursday at 3 PM. So find us on the socials, follow up with us. We are happy to hear your direct messages, you can reach out to us at the Black Womens Stitch page on Instagram, and we’ll help you get your stitch together.
10:50 S2: Hello, we are back. You are listening to the Stitch Please podcast with a special episode on marking tools, and the subject is wax and wheels, or wheels and wax, I guess we could say wax and wheels, because I started talking about the wax first, and now I'm gonna transition to the wheels. Tracing wheels are an important feature of working with wax-free or even wax papers. It creates, the wheel, if you imagine like a pizza wheel or a rotary cutter that does not have a sharp blade but has a very, very dull one, the purpose of a tracing wheel is that you can roll your wheel along whatever line you see in the pattern that you're trying to transfer in the purpose of using the wax or the wax-free tracing elements are to transfer the markings from the pattern to your fabric, and I'm gonna talk in good detail about how to do this effectively with the tracing wheels. The thing that I think is important to note that is that I have at least three different types of tracing wheels, but the distinctions between them are that one is a solid wheel, like imagine a nickel, for example, a US nickel or a coin wherever you are a coin that is smooth all the way around the edges, right? That is one tracing wheel. They also make another kind of tracing wheel that's serrated, so instead of the wheel being smooth, the wheel is jagged with spikes, and sometimes the spikes are really, really sharp, which you don't wanna use.
12:32 S2: I have one that I can't use. This thing looks lethal. It looks like a Shuriken, real-life actual weapon. The things on it, the spikes on it are incredibly sharp, and I know it would perforate whatever paper and perforate whatever fabric I was using, and it would certainly perforate the tissue pattern, which is something which is what I normally use when I'm sewing with like a Big Four pattern. It would perforate actually printer paper and blueprint paper as well for your printed out PDFs, so there is a tracing wheel, I got this one at the Garment District, maybe I got this one at an Estate sale or something, but you can find, you wanna get two tracing wheels, and let me tell you why. So the great thing about the solid tracing wheel, the tracing wheel that looks like a coin, is that when you roll that along the wax paper of your transfer paper, it will create a solid line. A solid wheel creates a solid line. Then if you use the serrated one, the one that has the little spikes around it, like a cartoon drawing of a sun, that will create a dotted line. Now, why does that matter? Why do you care? The reason you care is because sometimes you'll see printed on pattern pieces, it'll ask you when you're making pleats to bring the dotted line to the solid line, and so now you'll be able to mark what is a dotted line and what is a solid line, and you can hold that up.
14:14 S2: So when you're going through your pattern instructions and it says, bring the solid line to the dotted line, you have both lines trace there, and if you're using Saral or another brand of wax-free paper that is eraseable and washable, then you will have those marks right there in front of you. And I absolutely love that. In addition, I wanted to let you know that if you are using, using the Big Four patterns or a tissue pattern, I know, for example, Sew House Seven prints on tissue, at a lot of other independent patterns also print on tissue, if you are using a pattern that prints on tissue and you need to mark darts and pleats and you're gonna be using a wheel, I highly recommend that you invest in high heat tape, high heat tape. I will put a link to it, to the stuff that I use in the show notes, and high heat tape is important because what it does is when you tape over your darts, when you tape over your circles or your X’s and triangles and stuff like that, when you tape over these things, you can then run your wheel, the perforated wheel or the serrated wheel, or the solid wheel, and I guess perforated wheel and serrated wheel are the same thing, but you can run those wheels over that pattern and it will not tear it up. That is one of the disadvantages people don't seem to like about a tissue paper pattern is that it seems really,
15:54 S2: I'm trying to think of words that don't seem so punitive. That it seems like impermanent, it seems weak, it seems like it tears easily, they rip easily, and that's really frustrating, but the high heat tape will really help in the sense, I know since, if you all have been listening to the Stitch Please podcast since the beginning, you know that I iron all my pattern pieces, and that's the secret to get them back in the pattern envelope, after you've used a Big Four pattern instead of just getting so frustrated that you just wad it all up and throw it all in the trash. You can take an iron and iron your pattern piece and all the pieces. While I'm doing a garment and take all the pieces, I put them all in a stack, I iron them and fold them, and put it and press the folds and put them back in the envelope which just basically makes new folds for your pattern. You could, of course, cover your darts and markings with regular tape, except that it would totally get ruined when you ironed it. And I think it's a good idea to iron any pattern before you start sewing, and so especially for me, I have a lot of tried and true patterns that have darts and marks and you know, all these different elements that need to be marked, and so I basically stabilize them and reinforce them with the high heat tape.
17:18 S2: And that's just a recommendation I'd like to make right now. If you want to start using tracing wheels on your patterns, invest in some good wax-free erasable, washable paper, like the Saral that I mentioned. I don’t know why I keep saying it like it's a sponsored post, but y’all know I ain’t got no sponsors, but it's just something that I like and that I use and it's been very effective. And so invest in that and the high heat tape, because the high heat tape will, something you can iron again and again and again. High heat tape is used in sublimation printing and in vinyl work, and like so when you have to put your substrate under the heat press for at 400 degrees for two minutes, you can put the high heat tape on there and clamp it down and it won't leave any marks or residue and it won't melt, so this is why it'll be totally fine for your iron. I wanna talk next about the procedures for using the wax-free paper, and there's two ways I'm going to discuss this. I'm gonna discuss this how you use this on the inside of your garment and how you can use this on the outside.
18:35 S2: So let's start with the inside, you'll notice when you get the paper, if you buy a sample pack, which was what I did, I had started with the sample pack because I wasn't sure if I was gonna like it, and so it came in a sheet that was pretty small. I believe it's smaller than an 8 and a half by 11 sheet of paper, and so if you have the paper and you need to do something that's, what you wanna do the paper first y’all, before I start to tell you about the other aspects of using the paper in a reinforced way, is that you're going to wanna fold of the paper, so the wax side is facing out. Then you put the paper that you just folded between the layers of the pattern and the fabric. And to do this, what I do is I take a piece of it, cut out my shirt for example, then I take off the pattern piece and move it aside. I then slide the outside facing wax papers or the wax-free tracing papers and put it between both layers of the garment, so that I have them on the wrong side of the garments, 'cause the wrong side is facing in and the right side is facing out. So what you end up with, for lack of a better phrase, is a sandwich. Kind of like before you make a grilled cheese sandwich, before you put the grill cheese sandwich in the pan to grill it, you have two pieces of bread on the outside and a piece of cheese or two on the inside, that's exactly what you will have when you start to use the wax paper or the wax-free tracing paper in the ways that I've described. And this is where the magic happens, friends. You then put your pattern piece back on top of your little sandwich and you take your tracing wheel and applying even pressure, you roll right along the line of one leg of the dart, and then roll right along the other side, the other leg of that dart. And what will happen when you peel away your pattern paper, you can peel back the top layer of your garment fabric, and on the inside, you will see that you have a perfectly traced dart that you can then pin together and sew. Because I really am a stickler about dart precision, that there's you know, when you sew your darts, you start with the longer stitch length, you end with the tiny stitch length, you pull it back into the nose tip of the dart to tie it off, all of this helps make for very smooth and clean and rather invisible looking darts and so for me, the start of that is essential. You wanna start in a good position with your darts in order for them to look nice, and the first step is, for me, is tracing them accurately.
21:25 S2: That's something that is really an important part of my practice. Whenever I'm making darts for pants, for shirts, for blouses, for whatever. Because they provide the structure, they are pretty important, and so for me, tracing them properly is key to that. Everybody is different, and this is not to say that the tailor tack way or other ways to do it is wrong. For me, I found it easier to trace the dart as it appears on the pattern, rather than, rather than not. Another thing that you can do, which might be a bit difficult because this tool is like, it's really old, and I've never seen anybody--I saw one other person, we had an episode last year where I talked about pressing versus ironing, and we talked with Designer Fresh Custom Tailoring, and she had the same tool that I have, and it prompted us to talk about vintage notions, like doing an episode on vintage sewing notions, which I might actually do because that sounds like it's fun. But this thing that I have is called a Tack-It. It's a pretty vintage tool, I believe, from the 1940s or 50s, and it looks like if you've ever seen the kind of stapler that they use in libraries. A library stapler is, instead of having a 6-inch throat, kind of like a standard staple would have
23:00 S2: you put your papers right at the tip and then you do press it. This one, a library stapler will have maybe like a one foot throat, so it can get, rr maybe even 18, so it can get to the middle of books or the middle of a page or whatever to help repair the book, it looks like that, but instead of having a clamp to kind of bend over the edges of the staple, it just has this dull point that you tap it down, almost like if you've ever seen an image, I've never seen this in real life, but an image of a teletype, you know the thing to go beep beep beep beep when they press the button down to send a message--morse code? I forgot, anyway, my point is, if you have that kind of tool, which is one of the things that I have, you can also mark dots on the inside of your garment, and the reasons that you wanna do this is similar for the darts. I like to do this double-fold method that I just described to you, because it lets me trace both darts at the same time, and to get a perfect symmetry between both halves of the garment. That's one of the reasons why you put...
24:19 S2 your tracing paper between both layers of your cut garment. Now, this of course is gonna depend how you cut. I cut my garments out so that the right side faces me, the right side faces out instead of right sides together. Sometimes I think it'll be great to cut out a garment, wrong sides together, because then it's ready to go, all you do is pick it up off the cutting table and bring it to the sewing machine, but that's not very helpful if you have anything you need to mark on it, because you're not gonna mark your darts on the outside, you're not gonna mark your dots and pleat marks on the outside, unless it says so. So for the most part, I've marked my materials or the structural changes that come from darts and pleats on the inside, so that's why I chose to do that, but the Tack-It lets you mark your dots both at the same time on the inside, in the same way that using a tracing wheel does. So I just wanted to mention that because the key to remember for this wax-free paper is that it works with pressure. That's how it works. And so if you don't, even if you don't have a Tack-It, if you happen to have a bone folder or a Point Turner or a stylus, or even a Purple Fang, you know that Purple Fang?
25:35 S2: I'll try to include notes to all these things in the show notes, but a purple fang is like a plastic stylus-type tool that's used to help feed recalcitrant materials under your presser foot. It's also good for turning collars and stuff like that. I don't have one, but people that have one like, they love it. I have enough other things that I can use instead of the purple fang, but the purple fang also is a multi-use tool, so you can use that by just rubbing it on top of the first top layer of your fabric. The pressure will go through both layers of the wax-free tracing paper and give you a dot in the same spot on both sides of your garment, and that again, is important because I think precision is key for me, at least, for that kind of sewing. I also wanted to share a bit of information about, so if you wanted to add marks to just one side of your garment. If there are times when you want to just add your marks on the outside, sometimes pleats and gathers and stitching and stitching lines, all of these things, pockets for example, pocket as if you do in a patch pocket, they will have the description of that pocket or the outline of that pocket on the pattern, and you wanna transfer that and you want it, of course, to be even 'cause you don't wanna have like a Gordon Gartrell with, you know, one pocket up this way and one pocket down the other way on both sides, so that's another way that you can do that.
27:16 S2: And so what I do in that case is the reverse. I will take the right sides of my garment, I will put the right sides together, those cut pieces, then put the two layers of tracing paper in between and just do the reverse of what I just described. I will trace over it so that, and I don't usually do the entire U or outline shape of a pocket when I'm tracing or marking it. I'll just try to do the top two sides, and so that just gives me a guideline without having to worry about getting rid of marks on the outside or whatever. But sometimes a lot of pleats require that, and one of the things that I like about this tracing wheel, the one that's a solid as well as a perforated or serrated, is that you can, again, trace the dotted lines to the solid lines. So when they say I've sewn some patterns that I felt like had 15 freaking pleats at the neck line, and it's like, Okay, move the solid line to your dotted line, move your solid line to--and it’s like, Oh my gosh. I know there's probably other ways to do this of course. You can mark, you know, two and a half inch increments, you could use dots, you could use your marking pens or whatever, but for me, I do like having the Saral or the wax-free tracing paper because I can see it.
28:44 S2: And for me, since I sew with a lot of bright, bright colors, it's nice to be able to see the marks that I've made, even through the bright colors of the fabrics that I'm siewn. We're gonna take another quick quick break, and when we come back, I'm gonna talk about how you can use your tracing wheel without any wax-free paper at all. Stay tuned.
29:11 S1: Hello, Stitchers. I wanted to share with you that we have recently hit 30,000 downloads on the Stitch Please podcast. We are excited and have a lot of enthusiasm behind the project, and I wanna thank each and every one of you for making that happen. We would never have reached 30,000 downloads if it were not for you, so thank you so much for listening, thank you for being here, and thank you for sharing the Stitch Please podcast among your sewing friends. Coming up later this month we've
29:40 S2: got some pretty exciting episodes about pattern organization and bra-making. So stay tuned, continue to listen to the podcast, follow us @blackwomenstitch on Instagram, and we will continue to help you get your stitch together. Thank you. Welcome back, everybody. Thank you. You are listening to the Stitch Please podcast, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, and we are talking today about wax and wheels. And in this final segment of the program, I wanted to discuss how you could use wax and wheels, which is the subject of this episode, to improve your sewing overall, to help you get your stitch together, as we like to say. But there's also a way to use it without any tracing paper at all, and I think that this was very exciting to me because it allowed me to stretch and extend my own boundaries about how I practice my sewing. So I made this dress, I was inspired by Sew Sew Stacy, who is a sewist on Instagram. I believe she's part of Atlanta Sewing Style--hey Stacy. She was the first person that I saw who sewed Cynthia Rawley’s Simplicity dress 9012.
30:54 S2: I'm gonna describe the dress: it is a loose-fitting, A-shaped, puffy sleeves with ruffle around the neck line, double ruffle at the sleeve or a single ruffle, it has two views, one view is a blouse view and one view is a dress view. And you can taper in the waist with a sash or not. I think that I did not do the sash for mine, I don't recall, but I saw Stacy and her’s and I thought it was really beautiful, I had, I already own the pattern because I have a problem and cannot stop buying patterns, so I was really sad that I couldn't go get this pattern because, just so many different things going on, and I was like, Oh, boohoo. I was like, Wait a minute. You already got 5011 million patterns. What are you crying about? That was a quick digression--but I did have this pattern, I saw someone whose work I admire had made it and I was like, Uh-huh, I'm going to make it. I had the perfect patt--the perfect fabric already picked out, I was gonna make it for the spring because this fabric that I found was from Fabric Mart, and I know a lot of people know and like Fabric Mart, a lot of people blog for Fabric Mart.
32:11 S2: This is a shop in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania. They have a very strong online presence and a sewing friend and I actually happened to go there in-person last summer. And so, the restraint was not with your girl y'all, I was not restrained in any way when I was at the shop. And to see it in person after, you know, shopping online and reading so much about it, people were very friendly. It was a nice visit. And during the visit, I bought several yards of this white, it feels like a cotton sateen, but it's also embroidered with lemon and lemon slices on it. I believe it's by the designer Milly, M-I-L-L-Y, because I think her name was written somewhere on the salvage, but this, it was so nice. It felt like a pretty stable or hardy batiste. You know batiste is this really light, sheer, see-through cotton fabric. This felt lightweight, but it also was very smooth and the embroidery was so nice, I was like, Oh, it's just gonna be my lemonade dress. Oh my gosh, this is gonna be so nice, and so I cut it out. And of course, it is a very simple pattern. It's really just, I'm just going from my imagination, trying to remember, I think it's one piece for the front, one piece for the back, one sleeve, that's almost like a raglan, and then there's an embellishment that goes at the bottom, the lower third of the sleeve where you make a ruffle and stitch that on top of the sleeve before you do your seam. And so this is one of those occasions that requires that you mark your fabric on the outside. I think one of the most interesting or pretty design features of this dress is that slightly, that really cute, slight ruffle around the neck line. I think it's just really pretty, and I think it's not like,
34:18 S2: it's not huge, it's not too much, it's not overpowering, it's very balanced with the dress overall, but in order to get it right, you are gonna have to follow a certain line on the outside, and so I knew I had to mark that on the outside, and I knew I had to mark the sleeve on the outside as well. And so to do that, I needed to mark it. So my first thought, my first thought was to use the Frixion pens that I love. I mentioned this in a previous episode about the Frixion pens, and something I say to people when I'm giving this advice, and this holds true for this wax-free tracing paper as well, always test it. You know when we cut out fabrics, you know when we cut out patterns, we always end up with scraps. I always save those scraps in case something goes sideways in the sewing process and I need to recut something, so you don't throw it out, you don't throw it out until you're done with the garment. And so I use some of those cutting pieces to--those “off cuts” as I call them--I use those to do my testing. So I tested the Frixion pens on this white fabric. I think I might have used yellow, a yellow marker, the colors marker, and again, these are my favorite.
35:33 S2: This is like my go-to. I love Frixion pens, I have them in a bunch of different varieties, I have at least 30, at least, 'cause I think I bought two 18-pack bundles. I like them that much. However, I went to write, I actually wrote the word “test” on the fabric, on the white fabric, and I took my hot iron and I put it down, and yes, the word test did disappear. However, it left a trace, a residue of the word “test” right there on the fabric. I was really surprised by this, and I know that many people, not many people, I know that some people have said that the markers do, they come back in the cold. I've never had that experience, but I have had the experience of what they call “ghosting.” So you use your Frixion marker, you iron it, you take it away, and there's a trace element of whatever you marked that’s still left behind from the heat. And so this is why, this doesn't mean that I'm not gonna use Frixion pens, I obviously will and continue to do so to this day, it's just important that you test everything, and so in this test, the Frixion failed. And I knew I did not want to risk using a--
37:01 S2: I didn't wanna risk using the wax-free paper because it's white fabric. I mean, just the thought of rolling that wax even in a light way--in a light pink or and in yellow--I did not want to, I wanted to make sure it would go, you know what I'm saying? I do believe this wax-free stuff disappears, I believe all that to be true, but I also didn't have the time to, like--what I would do, what I would recommend, this is of those “do as I say, not as I do” kinda moments. I would recommend taking your wax paper, your wax-free tracing paper, putting it on your garment in the way, or on your scraps or your off cuts in the way that you would plan to do normally, then wash it in the washing machine or clean it in whatever way you plan to normally clean your fabrics. Then you could see if it would really go away or not. I did not have time to do that very sensible thing. I did not have time to--well, I guess I had the time, I just didn't want to. You know how you get really excited about making something and you're like, Oh, I just wanna go ahead and get it done? And so I was like, I'm gonna find another way to mark this fabric on the outside. I'm gonna find another way to mark this white fabric on the outside. And I did.
38:18 S2: This is what I did. I laid my pattern pieces down on top of the garments, on top of the components that have been cut already. So for example, usually when I have to do markings, I do them after I've cut out all the pattern pieces. So for this one that you had to attach the ruffle on the outside of the sleeve, and so what I did was I took, I took my wheel, my serrated wheel, and I took the two pieces for the sleeve, they were wrong sides together, right sides out, 'cause that tends to be how I work with my fabric, and I put the pattern piece down. And then put some heat transfer tape or the heat-resistant tape that I mentioned earlier, again I’ll throw it in the show notes, the heat-resistant tape on top of that line, because again, when working with tissue paper patterns, they do tear easily, and so if you run a perforated disk alongside or on top of tissue paper, what's gonna happen? It is going to rip or it's gonna become weaker in integrity. So I take a piece of heat transfer tape, I ran it, I put it on top of that stitching line, and so all I had to do then was smooth everything out, take my serrated tracing wheel and roll it right on top of that stitching line. When I peeled that tissue paper pattern back,
39:44 S2: what did I have? I had two dotted lines that were simply made with the pressure of the wheel. The result was a slightly dotted indentation along the fabric. I don't know why this made me so happy, but I was so chuffed. Chuffed was a word that some of my British folks and friends have taught me. It means really happy. I was pretty chuffed that I have figured out how to make this dotted line on this white, again, white fabric. The reason I'm stressing this white fabric-thing is because I have long had this--ever since I used to watch Scandal on ABC with Kerry Washington, I have had this desire to make and wear a white coat, 'cause she wears white coats and she wears white tops, and she wears white garments and she wears white slacks. And I am not about that white garment life. I would like to be, that's aspirational for me, but I'm really messy? Well, maybe not really messy. I'm really human. How about that? I'm really human, and part of my human takes the form of drinking coffee and then being startled and then spilling said coffee along the sleeve of my brand new white shirt or
41:06 S2: I remember once, I did actually have a pair of ivory-striped pants that I got from the Banana Republic, and I went to pick up my child, my youngest from preschool, and I picked him up and was swinging him and giving him so much love and he took his two muddy shoe prints and put them on either one of my thighs, on both of my thighs, like standing up, so my white pants had two little tiny red footprints on them. And that is pretty much the story of my life with white garments. And so I'm trying again, because my youngest child is now 16-years old and way too big to pick up and put footprints on my legs, so I'm like, Okay, this is my time, it is my time to wear this dress, and so I was very happy to be able to use the wheel to perforate the fabric in a way or not to perforate it 'cause it didn't leave holes, now there were no holes, it was just a faint dotted line. The holes were not raised on the reverse side, it was just this impression, and I had to then, and then it was so faint that I could hardly see it until I needed to.
42:11 S2: And that is what I believe you want in your fabric and pattern markings. You don't want to see them from the outside, you don't want to see them when you're putting your pocket on it, you can still see where that mark was. You want it to be completely concealed, and for me, this was almost like that great feeling of when you put in an invisible zipper really well, you know? How when you zip it up and it looks good, and you can't even tell there's a zipper in there? That's what this kind of felt like to me, it was very, very satisfying. And of course, this is something that I recommend for white fabrics or very, very, very light colored fabrics, and they should be stable wovens: batiste, cotton lawn perhaps, shirtings, things that are tightly, tightly woven that will, once you're done, you can press out the marks and it's no harm, no fowl. And so I just wanted to end on that note, that there is so many ways that we can use tracing wheels in our sewing, and we can use wax-free tracing paper in ways that are really creative. And I was also, again, very happy to be able to find out a way to use this tracing wheel that did not involve any tracing medium at all.
43:30 S2: So that's today's episode on wax and wheels. You've been listening to the Stitch Please podcast, and we're grateful for that. Stay tuned and check us out on all our socials, and we will be back next week.
43:44 S1: Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of the Stitch Please podcast, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black Lives Matter. There are a variety of ways that you can support the program, and you're doing it right now. By listening to the podcast, it does help us grow. Another way to do that is to rate the podcast, review it, subscribe to it. All of these things are ways that you can support the podcast without having to spend any money at all. If you would like to spend some money to support us, there are ways to do that as well. You can make direct donations to our Patreon site for monthly contributions as well as one-time contributions to PayPal, Cash App or Venmo. And finally, we have another cute, very adorable way for you to support the Black Women Switch project. It's a pin, a P-I-N, an enamel lapel pin, that's very cute. It's about two inches wide and one and a half inch tall, and it's of the Black Women Stitch logo, and that is $15 with free shipping to the US, and so if you drop $15 in the PayPal, Venmo or Cash App accounts, and then send me your email, not you’re email, if you send me your mailing address to my email, either at blackwomenstitch@gmail.com, or if you send me a direct message on the Black Women Stitch Instagram page, we will put the pin in the mail to you.
45:17 S1: Again, free shipping, $15 for the pin, and all of this goes to support the Black Women Stitch project. Thank you again for joining us this week. Come back next week and we will help you get your stitch together.