How to gather fabric: The express technique

Greetings fellow stitchers! A lightning quick post today bringing you a super quick and fuss-free technique for gathering fabric. If you find yourself put off sewing full skirted numbers because the thought of painstakingly hand gathering metres of cotton makes you want to sew your eyelids shut, then we highly recommend you give this method a whirl. Better yet, all you need is a zigzag stitch and some string (or dental floss...)!

Step 1

Select the widest zigzag stitch your machine has to offer. Place your length of string or floss (which needs to be as long as the length you are gathering) about a centimetre and a half from the raw edge of your fabric - this needs to be the edge that you want to gather, for example, a skirt's waistline.

Start to zigzag over the string/floss. Keep going until you reach the end. You'll see that the zigzag stitches form a sort of casing for the string:

*In case you were wondering, the reason we recommend dental floss is that it is very strong and also kinda slippery, making the gathering process an absolute breeze!

Step 2

Keeping ahold of one end of the string/floss, gently gather your fabric by moving it along the length of string. Keep going until you're done gathering and your gathers are nice and evenly spaced.

Ta da! Now that wasn't so painful, was it....?