tips for 3D sewing corners with XPAC

[Sarah W]

I am working on my second MYOG pack.  Here is a picture of the pattern pieces:

I have sewed the bottom panel to the curved edge of the bottom side pieces.  Here is a picture of me sewing it together:

The corner in the left side of the image is the place that gets sewn to the back panel. When I flip it right side out, these 2 pieces form a right angle in the final pack.

I now have to sew the back panel to these previous 2 pieces, creating the corner of a box.  If you imagine it in 3D, the bottom/side that I showed above gets sewn to the corner in the bottom right of the back panel image below:

When I made a mock-up of the pack with muslin fabric, sewing these types of corners is easy because you can just push/stretch/reshape the fabric.  It is a lot harder with XPAC.  The main problem is “turning” the corner on the backpanel and getting it to be smooth as I sew it to the other 2 pieces.   With test fabric I tried matching the edges together and sewing along a 45 degree angle in the seam allowance the way you would create a  “bathtub” corner.  This basically bends the seam allowance into a 3D corner so that I can line it up with the right angle turn of the bottom/side panel.

However…I still can’t do a good job sewing it to the other pieces.  The width of the presser foot makes it really hard to get into the corner with the needle, because now there is a bend and I want to sew right in the bend.  I looked at other presser feet I have to see if they let me sew closer to the edge (like the zipper foot).  But there is still the length of the foot to contend width.

Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with this?  Is it just hard?  Maybe next time I design a curved corner back panel, but too late now.

 

[Jan Rezac]

I just did that a while ago – it can be done sewing just straight lines on flat fabrics. All you need is to sew to the point where the seams meet, not all the way to the edge of the fabrics. The three steps shown in the following picture are:

a) join pieces 1 and 2, sewing just to the point where the seams meet

b) unfold 1 and 2 flat and attach part 3 to part 1, again sewing just to that point

c) align 2 and 3 for sewing them together, and fold part 1 out of way bending it on the diagonal (so that the previous two seams lie on top of each other), then sew the last seam

 

[Author]

Posts