Sewing with Non-Stretch Vinyl

Before I dared to start sewing a vinyl jacket, I tried to research the do's & don'ts & "quick tips" for working with it. All the SEO-bait articles looked identical and said the same things: use a leather needle, use a walking foot or teflon foot, use clips instead of pins, use a hairdryer or hammer instead of an iron.

These aren't wrong, but here's what else I discovered first-hand

Do not cut your notches. Vinyl will continue tearing along a cut line like a hangnail. This happens just by trying to move the piece.

Instead I marked the notches with tiny slivers of masking tape within the seam allowance that I would peel off after sewing.

Vinyl does not stretch in any direction. When sewing with normal fabric, its bias lets you sew together two pieces of moderately different lengths of fabric. But that's impossible for vinyl! So, remove any ease from your pattern pieces, e.g. make the sleeve arm curve match the armscye length at the seamlines.

On the plus side, vinyl not having a grainline is what makes it so fun to cut as you get to really maximize your fabric usage since you can rotate pattern pieces freely.

Everything online warns you about how vinyl sticks to itself in the context of needing to use a walking foot or teflon foot. What they don't tell you is that the stickiness also works against you when turning the garment out.

The normal cycle of "turn inside out to sew right sides together, then turn right-side-out to check your progress" will make you fight this fact every time once the garment is close to completion. It's just a minor annoyance for most parts, but for narrow long sleeves turning them right side out can be nearly impossible!

The only solution I devised for this was to cover one side entirely with tissue paper, so that as you turn it out the vinyl doesn't touch itself directly. It's still difficult though. If I had anticipated this, I would have added more width to the long sleeves to make this easier.

I found that vinyl's stickiness also made it too difficult to use my home machine's open arm. Covering all 360 degrees of it in tissue paper also helps, but it is prone to tearing when you're halfway through sewing in the round. After this happened a couple times, I abandoned the open arm altogether for this project.

Vinyl doesn't fray. Hooray! But this doesn't mean you don't have to finish your seams. The edges of vinyl feel scratchy against the skin.

If your vinyl is opaque, or if you wouldn't mind the look for your translucent vinyl project, you should use bias-binding to wrap the seams.

Otherwise, you're stuck with having to do french seams. French seams mean you have to do twice the amount of fighting the fabric to turn it inside out. If you're making outerwear you can perhaps skip this if absolutely necessary as long as you're sure thick clothing will always be worn underneath it. Still, french seam your sleeves, and prioritize any other sensitive areas.

When sewing with opaque vinyl you can use basting tape before the project hits the machine. And as mentioned above, you can avoid french seams without compromising your design.

I don't have anything else to say for this heading, but I wanted to highlight this fact because somehow every article I found was exclusively about sewing opaque nontranslucent vinyl like for PVC clothing. Not a single article mentioned french seams or the particular pains they cause with vinyl.

If you've been in a sewing rut, working with vinyl is a fun way to break yourself out of the normal flow. Working with it is totally alien every step of the way.

It's fun to be able to rotate your pattern pieces before cutting to maximize your fabric usage. It's hilarious to have to use an iron or hammer to get it to lay how you want, and how even then it will usually defy you.

Keep a light attitude towards it and dial back the standards you expect of yourself when making normal clothes with normal fabric. It's not like this material was ever meant to become clothing. You're bending the laws of the natural universe to make it happen against all odds. Relish in your power

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