SEWING MESH?

Stretch mesh can be a major pain to sew.

Using tissue paper or Swedish tracing paper between the mesh and the presser foot can keep the mesh from stretching out and puckering as the fabric is fed through your machine.

Good luck!

Does that work when sewing noseeum as well??? I have some – and an old cuben groundsheet and I was thinking of marrying the two for an attempt at an inner net. But it scares me…..

No see um is easy to sew, thankfully. Nanoseeum is more of a pain.

Got it. I actually think this is nanoseeum tho……it was a gift from someone and it looks AWFULLY light and airy.

Nothing like a newbie project to sew cuben AND nanoseeum together, eh???!! HA!

I confer with K. Noseum you can just sew like regular fabric.

I made several "vacco-style" head nets for my Tilley hat out of tulle the past couple of months. For tulle netting (not sure how this is related to "nanoseum" but this is about as light and stretchy as it comes) I recently went through a whole phase of looking for ways to get the seams neat, with no stretches and crinkles, and finally settled on easiest and cheapest – scotch tape. Amazing what a grown man can learn from sites about how to sew tutus!

Place it where you want the seam (on top), sew through the tape with machine, then remove the scotch tape. Helps both the feed and the elasticity issues. Use a straight stitch – a zig zag, as I should have figured out before hand, is of course a nightmare for removing the tape. And with tulle the zig zag will just collapse to a line after, which may or may not be what you were going for. With a straight stitch the tape more or less rips off on the dotted line in two pieces if you are careful. Comes out perfect almost every time. Works great sewing tulle to itself (hardest issue), and to other materials.

Edit: out of curiosity I looked up the weights. Looks like tulle is not the same thing – it is less than half the weight (0.3 oz/sqy) of nanoseum (0.7 oz/sqy). So I assume if this works for tulle it should work for nanoseeum just fine. At any rate sounds like they both have the same issues, including the static.

The static charge can be removed with anti-static spray beforehand. So far the static has not returned. Might be a new-material and/or packaging issue initially. Once the netting get a bit "dirty" that issue might be minimized. YMMV

For the kind of "netting" used for pack pockets you might be able to do something similar but I don't have any experience with that yet. I suspect the way to go is to use in place of the tape some permanent bias tape (if the holes in the mesh are further apart than your typical stitch length) or something like that. Basically the over arching idea of that is to sew a material fringe to the netting and then us that to sew it.