Sewing with oilcloth

As we'd already cut out the pieces of oilcloth the other day, we thought we'd just run up the bags today - famous last words! We knew already from our research trawling the net that sewing with oilcloth is an art form, a tricky one at that. But armed with all the tips on how to sew with oilcloth, we thought we were fairly well prepared for the challenges ahead and we were both looking forward to creating our tote bag. Hours and hours later, we're really pleased with our creation but are both a little worse for wear as our patience was tested to its limits!

With teflon foot and our sewing machine sleeve (see previous blog entry) attached, theory has it that the right (shiny) side couldn't stick to anything. We made the stitch length longer, so that our stitching wouldn't act as a perforator. We changed the needle for a denim needle coz at some stages we were sewing through 5 layers of oilcloth! We used bulldog clips and paperclips to temporarily hold the pieces of oilcloth together. Ready, set, GO!

Or not as the case was!! We sewed the handles together first. With right sides outermost, the sewing machine just wasn't feeding the oilcloth through. I tried pushing and pulling it but no, it wasn't going to budge! So I relented and put some masking tape on the bottom of the foot - hey presto, material feeds through. (Although this worked, I was a little frustrated as we'd bought the teflon foot especially for sewing with oilcloth! If teflon frying pans are non-stick why was my teflon foot not non-stick? Yes I know I wasn't trying to fry an egg on my teflon foot but I thought the theory would be the same. Mind you, perhaps frying an egg on it isn't a bad idea coz it wasn't much use for anything else!!

The next problem? The thread kept snapping....zillions of times (a little exaggeration but boy it felt like a zillion and if the discarded pile of cotton threads was anything to go by...a zillion is a conservative estimate!). We altered the thread tension to loosen it a bit in case that was the problem. Although this helped a bit, the thread was still snapping. Sewing slow and steady seemed to reduce the frequency of snapping further but it was still too frequent for my nerves! The stitches didn't look completely even either. Every now and again it skipped a stitch too....very testing!

Suffice to say that the handles were the most difficult to sew. Once we'd managed to sew them, the rest was a doddle. The machine was very happy to sew just two layers of oilcloth with right sides together....trouble was, by the time we came to this point, the damage was already done....my nerves were shot and my hair had virtually turned white! (Am not sure whether this was because of the stress sewing oilcloth caused me, or whether it's because it took so long to sew the oilcloth that my hair turned white with age!)

Will we be sewing with oilcloth again?   Yes because we've never been ones to give up lightly!