NLS #10, Pressing Matters

Pressing matters, that subject head has certainly been used before in the sew blogging community but it's true. Pressing really matters a lot. It is probably the most important thing you will do to contribute to a professionally sewn garment. And notice, the word is "pressing", not ironing.

Ironing is moving the iron horizontally back and forth over your garment or fabric to smooth out the wrinkles. Pressing action consists of pressing your iron down on the garment, hopefully with a press cloth in  between, then lifting directly up. There is NO horizontal movement.

June Tailor Press Board from sews.com

The more you sew, the more aware you will be of proper pressing. Your new habit will spur you to do it better each time and to help you get the best "evidence of effort", to quote Roberta Carr, there are tools out there to help you gain quality results. These tools pretty much have been around for generations and are time tested and worth the investment. If you see yourself getting into any tailoring efforts, they are necessary. They make the process easier. 

Above is the June Tailor Press Board,aka, tailoring board. It is available at smaller vendors like  Heirlooms Forever as well as places like Nancy's Notions and Amazon. Most of what I will mention is available from these vendors so won't link further on. 

OK, this press board is quite impressive with all it's points,  angles and curves. Why would you press a seam on a board like this? For one, the edges of the seam allowances hang off the edge you are using on the board and thus prevent show through ridges on the public side of the garment. Look at this thing and imagine pressing open hip curves, princess seams, tiny sleeves on heirloom children's garments, etc. An the point  is priceless. A point presser  like this can allow you to press open graded seams on collars to give you a beautiful point when turned. I also like to trim down my points while the collar, cuff, whatever is on the point of the board. It makes it much easier and less prone to accidental cutting. I know Santa's coming but if you don't want to spring the fifty-sixty dollars for this sweet toy, use what I use:

This tool is a point presser/clapper. I like how it has a really sharp point. The larger bottom is used to literally clap/slap/pound your garment details into submission. It is great for taming welt pockets and bound buttonholes and other details with various thicknesses. Over pounding can make your seams transmit to the public side of the garment. You can get around that by having a very well padded surface underneath like a doubled up towel. Other times you want that clapper to bang the fabric into total flatness and submission like on the edge of an edgestitched  blouseweight. With practice you will learn what to have underneath your fabric before you pound. To prevent shine, always use a press cloth between the clapper and the garment. I use this a LOT. It's indispensable for collar making, IMO. 

Then there is the lowly ham and the not so lowly ham:

Courtery stitchnerdcustomshop.com

courtesy bblackandsons.com

Hams are absolutely essential to sewing. All those curved seams, ie, princess seams, are pressed to perfection on a ham. It is probably  best known for setting the shape into a collar which you wrap around the ham like a neck. The collar is securely pinned and heavily steamed while on the ham, no touching. I mean heavy steam. Then you can leave it overnight to dry before installing in your jacket or coat.  I use the basic plaid ham but would I ever love one of those custom hams from Stitch Nerd. Wowsa!

( google hassling me on photo, I'll try later.)

Complimenting the ham is the seam roll, something I love but did without for a long time. My sub was a rolled up thick magazine which worked fairly well. Seam rolls are great for getting into pant legs and sleeves that are already stitched up. 

There are items around the home or that you can DIY that will help your pressing a lot. There are wooden dowels for pressing long seams without ridges. Porch railings work the best as they have the curved surface on top and a flat area below preventing rolling. I use my dowel quite a bit. 

Above is my treasured dawber, made from a tight roll of cashmere, and a cheap paintbrush. These are great for dipping in water and placing the water drops in the well of the seam on the wrong side to press open. This is done on fabrics that you don't want to overpress like cashmere or fine heavy wool coatings, suitings too. A word about cashmere: it is very sensitive to pressing, scorching and getting overpressed and damaged quite easily. I like to iron it as little as possible and use my daubers a lot to tame the details. An iron with a good point helps a lot here as well. You just place that iron tip in the well of the seam after it has been daubed with water. Once again, over a presscloth. 

And speaking of press cloths, favorites are silk organza as it allows you to see the garment underneath and takes high heat.  Poly organza will melt in this situation. I also have handy some old well worn men's handkerchiefs. You can buy them by the pack  at the box stores and they make great press cloths. 

My favorite pressing tool of all, partly because June Tailor doesn't make them anymore:

You can see my June Tailor Pressing Mitt is well worn. I literally place it inside an installed sleeve and steam from the outside. It does a great job of getting rid of any puckers in the sleeve head. I also like to use it to shape sleeves in tailoring like you see here:

For more on how I use this tool to mold sleeves you can check out this link.    Stitch Nerd does make these but I think with a little creativity you can probably make your own. 

I haven't gotten into technique much here  and that is because others have done it all so much better than me. Ann Steeves of Gorgeous Fabrics ( and they are  gorgeous) was so moved by the lack of pressing seen in the sewing community that she did a very funny and educational video on how and why to press. Check out her Pressinatrix Video.  It truly is the best out there.  (Scroll down.) And when she says to iron the seam as sewn to meld the seams, BELIEVE HER. There is a well known sewing instructor out there who says it is not necessary. Ann will show you the proof why she is wrong. Check out this blogpost of hers for proof. Another great pressing video is from Nancy Zieman and can be found here. 

As Roberta Carr said, "Sewing is Pressing". Quality results are not achieved without pressing. I think my new motto is "effort in, evidence shown", to paraphrase Roberta once again. Please share you tips and techniques to help others with their learning curve on pressing skills. I greatly appreciate all your experiences, no matter how unique. What works for you?

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Next Level Sewing will take a break over the holidays and will return on January 5th. Hope you have a glorious and wonderful holiday with your families. Maybe Santa will see this post and get a few hints for your sewing basket!..........Bunny

Happy days are here again!

Out with the old:

In with the new:

This is one heavy iron. I like that. It also pushes out some killer steam, more than any I've had before. I think we will be good friends.......Bunny

The Ironing Chronicles

Recently Barb, of Sewing on the Edge, had a fabulous post about ironing. With her usual pithiness and humor she explained her family conversation regarding this domestic duty and it brought a big smile to my face. I am sure she brought that smile to many others as well. But more than anything she brought back memories, lots of crazy memories. So many that I couldn't wait to hijack her subject matter and spill it all out in a blogpost. How can one have such dear memories of ironing?

Once upon a time:

* I'll get out of the way the family history. It was a time in the South of "the Help" and we had a housekeeper who did our ironing as well as many other chores, including making the best peanut butter cookies ever. My mom took care of the wash and hung it all out. Hanging out laundry was a moment of respite from paying attention to her brood of eight kids, the oldest being twelve.  Then she would bring it in and dear Eva would sprinkle the basket of laundry with a pop bottle with a punched hole top. In the South they don't have soda. They have pop, at least they did back then. Then the laundry was twisted into knots and put in a laundry basket and put into the fridge. Eva would then iron it as time allowed, not necessarily at one big "standing".  I sure missed  Eva when we moved out of the country. My mom did too. When we came back to the U.S. she would always go visit Eva on our family visits. They became much closer over the years as they both dealt with first born sons skirting the fine edge of the law, an awful commonality. It  later became a very special relationship into their elder years which I think they both cherished. It was a different time back then.

* My baby sister learned pretty quickly that a house full of 6 teenaged boys was an incredible business opportunity. She was a liberated business woman before the concept even existed. Her business plan? Ironing on demand for her many brothers. They had begun to date, were basically slobs, and in need of her skills. My mom did not iron at that time, another whole story....One dollar would get a hot as a firecracker sixteen year old boy a crisply ironed shirt to wear out on his date with his latest heart throb. But dates cost money and one particular brother's line of credit had reached it's limit. BIG date comes along. Passive Agressive Sis says "sure I'll have your shirt ironed by the time you get out of the shower."  And she did. What dating brother didn't know was that she went into the sock drawer and took out every matching sock in the house belonging to any of the boys. Dad wore different  nylon-y  socks as did us girls. She left one of each pair, cut up the remainder and threw them in the garbage. She kept one pair. No male son in this family would have matching socks for days. She said if he paid up he'd get a sock. He didn't. She was also sending a message to all her other male sibs.Get it, brothers?  The fight that ensued in our home that night is legendary. He went out on his date, socks mismatched, and with all his cash dedicated to his evening with his teen sweety. Hey, nothing stops a horny 16 year old boy.  But two days later he paid up sis when he got paid for shoveling manure at a neighbor's farm.  None of the boys messed with Passive Aggressive Sis again.

* My sainted Mom had 8 kids, six boys and two girls. At this point we were long back in the US, living in the Northeast and the concept of any sort of "Help" ceased to exist. You need to know here that my mom had an incredible childhood. Think beyond Cinderella. Let's just say my widowed grandmother, her mom, would be in jail today for a long time for what went on when my mom was a little girl. That made a lasting influence on my Mom's life and had a major influence on ours. Us eight kids had NO, and I mean NO responsibilities. We never had to clean our rooms, help with the dishes, shovel the snow, cut the lawn. My mom's goal in life was for her children to have the most wonderful childhood ever, something she never had. She succeeded. It was special and I will always appreciate that she did this. I did not do much different with my own kids. So Mom took on the whole challenge of running the house and keeping things going for a family of ten while we played and ran and enjoyed our childhood. Can you see this being an impossibility?  Well, hell, yeh. So ironing was not her "forte" shall we say. No housework really was.  We had a hall closet where she stuffed all the ironing. If we needed a shirt for school uniforms or anything else to wear, it was stuffed in that closet. I can't tell you how many times I sat on the floor at the end of the hallway going through all that tumbled out out of the Ironing Closet. Our family actually called it "the Ironing Closet". Eventually I would find it and iron on the ironing board set up in my bedroom. Yup, all the sibs came to iron in my bedroom.  My mom didn't want to touch that thing! At one point the closet was really getting out of control. Eight kids made a lot of laundry to be ironed back then. Every time you opened the Ironing Closet the contents, which were piled to the ceiling, flowed out on to the floor like an avalanche in Tuckerman's Ravine. Then you had to find your target garment and stuff the whole mess back in. It was awful. One day I came home from school and went to dig out the next day's clothing from the Ironing Closet. I opened the door and nothing, a big NOTHING was in the closet. Seems Momma couldn't handle all that was in there and called  the Salvation Army to pick it all up. They showed up and hauled it all away while we were at school. It was devastating and clearly I still have the scars. Things I desperately needed for my dating life, things I had made with my own two hands, things I had to wear to school the next day, they were all gone. But my mom felt good when she saw her empty Ironing Closet. So much pressure raising six boys....if emptying the Ironing Closet helped her I totally understand. Looking back on what she had to deal with , I so totally understand.

* My MIL is the exact opposite of my Mom when it comes to domestic abilities and priorities. Many have heard me say she could teach Martha Stewart a thing or two  and I ain't kidding. You cannot imagine the perfection of domesticity in my husband's family home. I have to honestly say she taught me, albeit indirectly, everything I know about housekeeping. I was totally intimidated by her skills.  She is one of 7 girls  and 14 children. Their mother taught them to run their homes like a boot camp and they did. I have never seen anything like it before or since. Every Monday was laundry day. All available sisters would arrive bright and early at MIL's home. One would man the washer/dryer/clothesline. Another would pull out the three ironing boards and three irons. One would be in charge of emptying ash trays, making tea, and preparing lunch. And then the action would start, ironing boards manned and these sisters would iron their brains out.  The gossip would fly like barbed arrows in the Amazon. You did NOT want to be their object of discussion.I know I often was. That was when the conversation turned to speaking in French. EVERYTHING got ironed, socks, dish towels, you name it. And they had a hell of a time doing it. It was all very impressive, very intimidating and glorious female fun.  Arguments would ensue over how to properly iron a shirt, do you fold your sheets in quarters or thirds and most importantly who, in their opinion, did not know how to properly run a clean organized home. Well, you know I was on that crap list! I could write a book about what I saw and learned from these women. But watching those three ironing boards imposing order on their lives while the smoke from their Marlboro cigarettes wafted into the ceiling of their 200 year old colonial was an image I will always hold dear.......... never seen before, never since....

So, thanks, Barb, for inspiring this post and bringing both smiles and memories back. I imagine more than one of you has an ironing story to tell as well. Thanks for listening..........Bunny