Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Bridging or Faggoting Tips


Here is an up close and personal look at Bridging (Faggoting) along with a few tips. I first fell in love with this technique 32 years ago when I recieved a Feltman Brothers outfit as a baby gift for my oldest. (32 years ago......that actually hurt to write!) Anyway, it wasn't until I started working at our local Heirloom Sewing store that I found good instructions and could give it a try! It is a very old technique used to attach lace or a tiny bias band to fabric.


I discovered that the biggest secret is basting the fabric and lace to piece of light weight interfacing. This keeps the two pieces the correct distance apart. Try not to stitch into the interfacing. My thread of choice at the moment is a polyester/cotton blend sewing machine thread. I find that the thread tangles less if I use Bee's Wax on the thread.


This is not a complicated stitch. It just takes a little practice getting the spacing or the stitches correct and remembering to keep the thread under the needles for each stitch. The instructions for the Bridging (Faggoting) are included in many of my patterns and the "Heirloom Embroidery" book.

I would love to hear if you are giving this technique a try!
Michie'

11 comments:

  1. This is one of my favorite stitches. And it's so easy and fun! I've made several things using this technique. My favorite was a little lace bonnet that was all put together with faggoting. It was so sweet! Thanks for the good instructions.

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  2. I love to see faggotting - it always looks so distinctive. Yours is lovely (no surprise!) I have a question for you about the bias binding around the collar. How wide did you cut the strips and what is the finished width? I've only worked faggotting with ribbon or insertion, where the edges are already finished.

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  3. I love the faggotting stitch too! One trick I learned from Cindy Foose is to use Tiger Tape for evenly spaced stitches.

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  4. How gorgeous this is! I learned to baste everything to paper, but I think the interfacing would be much easier to handle. I think the tiger tape would be great to use, too!

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  5. Beautiful! Thanks for the tip on the interfacing.

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  6. I haven't done faggoting on anything special yet...only practice and I got sooo frustrated at how slow I was. I know.....practice is a wonderful thing. Love all your tutorials!
    Hugs,
    Gwen

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  7. Another site suggests tacking both sides to paper. This is great because even if you stitch into the paper somewhat...that error will be erased when it is ripped away!

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  8. I forgot to say...your is lovely work, neat, attractive and totally professional! Thanx for a great post.

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  9. My toddler is wearing the sailor dress right now - my first attempt at faggoting turned out quite well! What a lovely touch.

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  10. I found your page through Pinterest. I've been wondering if people still use fagoting. If so, where, your post answered my question.

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  11. soo nice! this was really helpful.

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