Gathering Cotton Strips Using Specialty Sewing Feet

If you go through your fabric stash, I am sure you will find many pieces to cut into strips for gathering ruffles for skirts, blouses, home decorating, children's items, crafts and many more. Cut your strips into desired widths.

 Gather your machine hemmed strips using a straight stitch with a very long stitch length. Adjust your needle position accordingly. Tension was adjusted to 8 or 9. This is a standard sewing machine foot.

Do not push or pull on the strip of cotton. Simply let it feed under the foot along the edge of your sewing foot.

Use this for embellishment and notice that the gathering is very evenly distributed.

Finished edge of this strip has been hemmed on the Serger using a 2 thread rolled edge. Very narrow. The gathering is done on the sewing machine. There will be more to follow on this blog on serging and gathering on the serger. 

This cotton strip has been gathered using a stitch length of 6 and a tension of 9. Notice how much gathering can be accomplished. Always do a test sample first. I recommend that a 100% polyester thread be used with this high of a tension to prevent your thread from breaking part way through the gathering process. An Edge stitching foot has been used for this strip. 

Look closely at the right edge of the Edge stitching foot and you will see that as you are gathering, your fabric edge will stay straight along the edge. When your decide to incorporate this between a seam your can adjust your needle position slightly to the left so that your gathering seam does not show on the right side of your fabric

Using a Clear seam guide foot also works very well, for a strip that you would like to gather with a little more room along the raw edge. There are many options for needle position with this sewing foot. 

There is a guide running along the edge of this foot as well to keep your edge straight as you gather the strip.

The stitch length for this strip of single weight cotton is 6. The tension is 9.8 and because a good quality polyester thread is used in bobbin and needle, there is no breakage of threads. 

Practice on single weight cottons, and then experiment on double layer cotton pieces. Write down your adjustments as you go to keep them on file. Each time you need to experiment with gathering you will have the details for your own sewing machine. Have fun. You will love gathering. Try different fabric selections as well. 

Kwik Sew 3744

Kwik Sew 3631