A tale of three Tees: how to pick fabrics for successful knit

By A Mystery Man Writer

Last updated 16 Jun 2024

A tale of three Tees: how to pick fabrics for successful knit

I teach sewing classes, and one of the most popular classes I teach is T-shirts, which covers the basics of sewing with knit fabrics, and some of the trickier techniques you use in T-shirts. T-shirts aren’t hard to sew: I sew them up in batches of three in under four hours for the lot. But being easy to sew, and getting a successful T-shirt, very much depends on picking the right fabric for your project, and this is something I find that a lot of people struggle with. To help, here is a guide to knit fabrics, and a bit of an experiment with how different knits result in different finishes. The first thing to look for in a knit for a T-shirt is whether it looks like a knit fabric that you have seen made up into T-shirts that you have enjoyed wearing. After that, there are four things to keep in mind when picking knit fabrics: weight/thickness, stretch, recovery, and stability. Weight & thickness aren’t actually the same thing in fabrics, as it’s …