hi I'm Wendy from shiny happy world and today I'm going to show you a couple of tips and tricks for working with fleece or polar fleece it's a really nice fabric for making softies with but there's a couple of things you might want to know about it and that's what I'm going to show you today the first thing you need to know is that polar fleece is stretchy and you need to take that into account because it's not stretchy the same in all directions this is the factory edge and you can tell it's called the selvage and you can always see it very easily this is the cut edge there's no curl to it if you pull this perpendicular to that selvage there is a lot of stretch there if you pull it parallel to the selvage there's almost no stretch so some patterns will have a grain line marked on them I've talked about that in another video and I'll link to that in a pop-up in this one but if there's a grain line marked on there you want to run that parallel to the selvage edge and I show you in that other video how to do that that'll change how the stretch works in your pattern and if it's a pattern that has very precise shapes like if somebody's doing a realistically shaped dog or bear and they want the head to be a very specific shape the designer will take into account the way the fabric stretches and they'll put a line on the pattern piece that tells you which way you need to lay the pattern piece so that the stretch works right with the shape of the softie that you're making most of my patterns are kind of blobby shapes and so it doesn't really matter so I don't put a grain line on there besides the stretch and worrying about the grain line the other thing that you need to worry about with fleece is that it's very fluffy so I've talked before I have another video about napped fabrics like corduroys and Velvets where the fluff tends to affect the way when they sew together it shifts sideways and you end up with one piece usually quite a bit longer than the other the problem with fleece is not a long way shift but a sideways shift and you can see it if you look at where one of these pins is the edge of the bottom piece of fabric is right here the edge of the top piece of fabric is right here and that's a good sixteenth of an inch difference so the alt that happens just because of the distortion of putting the pan in but it also happens with the distortion of putting it under your presser foot one way to fix that is lots of pins you can see here where I've pinned a lot of pins in there it tends to just even everything out and so the edges of your fabric end up kind of lined up again and these pins are about a quarter of an inch apart sometimes a little bit more but it would probably be even better if it was even less so that will often fix any of that sideways shift the problem with it if you don't put a lot of pins in there is when you so you end up with exactly the right seam allowance on the top where you've where it's been going under your presser foot but the bottom will tend to shift and so your seam allowance will be less on the bottom so lots of pins will help that but it doesn't always do the trick and that's what I'm going to show you here so this is going to be a nice fat cat and it's got pausing here and ears up in here and it's where we put those extra things in that we run into some problems so here's where one of the paws goes in sewing through two layers of fleece is fat you stick a pala in there and in the middle of the paul now you've got two more layered layers of fleece so right in here in the middle of the paw you were flowing sewing through four layers of fleece that's very thick but it gets worse because over on the sides of the paws where you have the seam allowance of the paws you have two more layers of fleece so on these sides you're actually sewing through six layers of fleece and that gets kind of crazy and that's where mistakes sometimes happen and you just have problems with that sideways shift no matter how much you pin it so what I'm going to show you right now is a cheater pants way to fix that when it happens so I saw this I had a ton of pins in here and you can see this is the side I had up when I was sewing you can see as you work your way around it's not bad it's about a quarter of an inch all the way around now we're going to flip it and see what it ended up like what was facing down so it's looking great where we've got the two layers of fleece and oh no here's the paw and all of a sudden this top layer the edge of the fabric is right where my stitching line is that's going to be a problem that's a weak spot especially kids who like to hold their stuffed animals by the paws that's a weak spot right there so I'm going to fix that carry it around this year it's not too bad come over this year and we have another problem the edge of that top piece of fabric is really really close to that stitching line we go down here the other Paula ended up not too bad so I have two weak spots that I want to fix we're going to do that by going to the sewing machine and turn this around so this would be feeding through the sewing machine here instead of following this edge for my quarter of an inch seam allowance I'm going to follow the shortest fabric edge that I have it's going to distort the side seams a little bit so like I said this is definitely a cheater way to fix things this is not going to be recommended in any home at class but this is a big big fat puffy cat knot with a very precise shape to him so if we lose an extra quarter of an inch off of this side where the where the paw is it's not going to distort the look of the finished softie at all so we're going to take it over to the sewing machine and do a little bit of extra stitching there and on this ear so what I've done is started back here where my stitching is good I'm going to back stitch and now I'm going to start sewing forward when I hit that thick pull I'm going to go really slowly and I'm now holding the shortest edge of the fabric along the edge of my presser foot so that's what I'm working my seam allowance from and it'll gradually work back into where my seam allowance was good I'm going to back stitch just to secure that take it out and now you can see that that edge is safely far away from my stitching line so nothing is going to break loose there so that's it a couple of things to remember fleece look at that stretch line and make sure that if your pattern has grain lines marked on it that you're running those grain lines parallel to the selvage or in the direction that has very little if any stretch the other thing is to pin like crazy so you avoid that sideways shift on your seams and you get nice accurate seams and if you go back and look at what you've done after you sew yours flip it over and look at the back and make sure you didn't have that sideways creep and if you did go in now sewing it the other direction and catch those extra seam allowances give it a little bit of extra room there to catch those seams and make them nice and strong that's usually going to happen where you have arms and legs and tails and ears attached and those are stress points for kids that are actually going to play with those stuffed animals they like to pull on those parts I'm Wendy from shiny happy world I'll see you next time