How to sew facing

If you’re relatively new to sewing, and you’ve not sewn much before, you will be a bit in the dark on how to sew facing and what it is.

Basically, when you cut fabric, you can’t just sew a seam around the arm holes or neck. It will end up looking funny. So for that reason, we use facing instead. The facing will make the garment you want to sew nicely rounded off without any uneven edges or ragged fraying.

The other way to avoid sewing facing is to simply make a double piece of fabric and sew it turning it inside out. But for my illustration below I will show you how to sew facing.

Most patterns will have a piece for facing along with the actual pieces of pattern. Facing can be cut from different fabric or from the same fabric. I like to use the same fabric in most of my sewing projects.

In my case, I’m going to show you how to sew the facing with the top of a recent dress that I made. The first thing I did was to place the pieces I cut out, inside out and make the outsides face each other. The facing and the top. I then sewed along the edge of the facing so that it would flap over and I’d have two outer sides on both the inside of the shirt and the outside. See the images below.

You then fold the pieces of facing over as indicated on the second image and iron them, making certain that it’s exact and the inside isn’t showing out. The following image will illustrate that.

Once you have ironed the pieces straight, the next thing to do is to sew a “stay stitch” on the outside so that the pieces of facing that you have sewed does not fold back out with the next wash in the machine. And there we go, the sewing of the facing is done.

I hope this showed you how do sew facing as it’s really simple and easy. All you require to sew the facing is a sewing machine, the pattern pieces, fabric and an iron and it can be done quickly and painlessly.

© 2019, Sewing Ideas & Swap. All rights reserved.