Cutting clothing patterns

naschol

There are a lot of clothing patterns you can download as a larger paper format that would not print on common printers used in the home, normally.  Consequently, the pattern pieces are shown a full pieces, not those you have to cut and tape together.

I have several of those and sent them out for printing, but with the 15" and 24" Silhouettes we have now,  I have been thinking about converting the pdfs to studio3s and trying to cut pieces for sewing.  I'm thinking that you could spray glue the fabric and only cut the non-fold part by placing it against the edge of the mat.

Has anyone ever tried this?  I'm curious about any successes, failures and tips.

I have arthritis and cutting is one of the hardest thing I do in sewing, whether with scissors or rotary cutters.  :-)

Liz_A

@naschol - we have several sewers in the MTC cutting family, however I am quite sure that there are not a lot that actually use a cutter to cut out large pattern pieces. To be honest, there is a lot of work prepping the fabric, making 100% sure that every square millimeter of it is well stuck to a very sticky mat, that you have stabilized the fabric with something, either iron on or spray on, etc., etc. I think from personal experience, cutters are great for piece work such as quilting or patch work, but I would be very frustrated using that process for larger scale clothing items. Just Google cut fabric with Silhouette to see some videos on how people may be doing this. I don't use a Silhouette any more, so I am sure regulars users would lots of tips and tricks. I do know VERY sticky mat, stabilized fabric, fabric brayered to mat are 3 absolute requirements.

naschol

Thank you so much for your input.  In this year of wearing masks, I have been successful cutting many, many masks with few problems.  I do starch my fabric and haven't used the strong stick mat, but did find it important to re-stick the mats before they lost too much "stick".  The few problems I did have were from letting them go too long.  While that wasn't such a big deal on a small area of quilter's cotton, I can see where it could be a pretty expensive mistake on nice clothing fabric.

 Maybe, I'll just stick with cutting the pattern pieces.  :-)

Liz_A

@naschol - when I did A LOT of sewing, I invested in high quality roller blade cutting tools, high quality large sized self healing mats, and a large mat protector for the dining room table so I had a lot of space to layout my cuts. I would line up a few projects and just cut for a few hours, store those til I ready to assemble and sew. I did the same for mask making, stacking my fabric so I could do a few cuts at the same time.