Crocus Needle Arts School

Sewing Tips for Not Enough Fabric

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This page updated Oct 22, 2009.

This web page contains some ideas for what to do when you realize that you have insufficient fabric to complete the desired project. Usually the problem of not enough fabric happens long after you bought it, so you can't go to the fabric store and get a bit more. Sometimes, though, you just decide that you are going to make do with what you have. And this exercises your creativity cells.

Here are some ideas.

Table of Contents:

Use different colours of lining
Piece the small leftovers

Use different colours of lining
I have an assortment of lining fabrics in my stash. But it seems like when I want a particular colour, there might not be any of that colour, or else not quite enough.

Recently, I was cutting the lining for a jacket I wanted to make, and found myself in this situation yet again.

The jacket fabric is black with some white. I had no black lining. I felt that white lining would look just too weird.

Now, really, there is no law that says that the lining has to match. In fact, sometimes it makes the garment look kind of classy. I once bought a really nice dark blue blazer with red lining, and if the ready-to-wear designers say that something is acceptable, who am I to argue?

I did have some dark blue lining. It was dark enough that I felt that it would work. And I had two different pieces of dark blue lining, although they were slightly different shades of dark blue.

But they were each insufficient for the task.

My first thought was that I could line the sleeves with a different colour from the front and back. But that was not to be. It turned out that one of the lining pieces was big enough for either a front or a sleeve or a half back (I use a center back seam to accommodate a curved back), but not two of them.

I then thought of making the sleeve linings two different colours, but I rejected that idea. This particular jacket is designed with exposed facings on the outside hem of the sleeves. This means that the sleeve lining might be more visible than if there was just a normal hem on the sleeve (see the article on Lining a Sleeve, for example).

Another thought was to have the two back pieces of different colours, but I rejected that idea too. The back lining of a jacket is usually the most visible part of the lining, especially if you take the jacket off and hang it on a chair.

In the end, I decided that the two fronts would have different colours of lining. This jacket has an exposed zipper in the center front, so there is little likelihood that anyone will see the front lining at all.

Here is a photo of the two different linings. Yes, they are quite close in colour, and perhaps I thought about this too much. But it is the solution that I went with.

Piece the small leftovers
My mother made this jacket for me. I like to wear jackets like this to work.

She had acquired some fabric that she felt would look gorgeous on me. But when she laid out the pattern pieces, she found that she had enough to make the back and sleeves, but not the fronts. But if she put on her quilter's hat, she could see opportunities, because the scraps were large enough to provide opportunities.

So she started to piece the scraps together. She completely ignored the grain - and grain was pretty prominent with this fabric - there is a subtle stripe about an inch wide throughout the fabric.

But she also did something that made the garment ART instead of MAKE-DO: all of the piecing seams were trimmed with lace.

Putting the creativity cells to work solved the problem.

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Copyright 2009 Judith Obee.