Tip for Sewing with White Tone-on-Tone Fabrics

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Do you like to sew with tone-on-tone fabrics, or more specifically, with white-on-white fabrics? Do you ever have trouble determining which side is the right side when sitting at your sewing machine? If so, you're not alone! Keep reading to discover my tip for making this a problem of the past!

Not sure what I mean by tone-on-tone fabrics? These are fabrics that have a design on them, but the design is usually the same or close to the same as the background color. They often can appear to be a solid fabric from a distance. 

This post is going to focus on white-on-white fabrics, which can also include off-white and cream fabrics. These are the fabrics that tend to be the hardest to distinguish between front and back because the base fabric is usually like a solid where there is no difference between the front and back and then the design is printed onto the solid. I recently used a navy tone-on-tone that must have had the navy background printed onto the fabric along with the design because the back side was very obvious.

These tone-on-tone fabrics can be a great choice for background fabrics in your quilts if you don't want something busy and distracting but you want something with a little more interest and texture than a plain solid. You can even shop specifically for tone-on-tone fabrics at Fat Quarter Shop. They have a whole section specifically for tone-on-tones. You can also filter by color to find the white tone-on-tone fabrics.

Now let's get to the reason for this post - how to make using these fabrics a little easier!

If you've sewn with white-on-white fabrics before you probably have noticed that it can be very hard to tell which side is which when sitting at your sewing machine. Or maybe you have better lighting than I do! 

To give you an idea of what it looks like for me, take a look at the two pictures below. I took these recently while working with an off-white tone-on-tone print from the Lil collection from Ruby Star Society. In one photo, the off-white fabric is facing right side up and in the other, that same fabric is facing right side down. Both photos look the same to me and they look the same in person too. In fact, I'm not even sure now which photo is which.

As you can imagine, it's easy to accidentally get a piece sewn the wrong way. I'll never forget the time I realized I had a piece of background fabric in a quilt backwards (I was using Riley Blake's Swiss dot) while I was in the middle of quilting it on my longarm and the light happened to hit it just right. It was too late to fix it at that point, and I don't think it was that noticeable, but it was still frustrating. 

I used to try to mentally keep track of which direction my fabrics were facing as I was sewing. For example, if I had a stack of cut pieces that I had cut from yardage and I had cut my pieces with the width of fabric still folded at the center, the fabrics would be alternating between right side up and wrong side up. It was easy to lose track of that though.

I'm not exactly sure when or how I realized that holding the fabrics up to a light made it easier to tell which side was the right side, but once I did, I started using that trick to double check my fabrics every time I pick up a new piece to sew.

Holding the fabric up to the light makes the white printed design look much brighter and contrast much better with the background, to the point that it's suddenly obvious which side is the the right side.

Luckily, I'm pretty sure all sewing machines have a little light near the needle that comes on when you turn the machine on. It helps you see while sewing, but it also provides a convenient light source for checking your white-on-white fabrics.

Take a look a the photo below. Can you see how easily you can see the little flowers when I hold the fabric up to the light?

Now take a look at this next photo. This is the same fabric, but with the wrong side facing up. See how much more muted the flowers are now, compared to the previous picture?

Here's another piece. You can see the same thing. In the first picture, the flowers show up easily. In the second picture, they're much harder to see. This lets you confidently know which way to place your fabric for sewing.

That's all there is to it! I hope you'll find this tip useful in your own sewing. I know it has saved me so many times! And I love how easy it is since I'm already sitting at my sewing machine and it only takes a second to hold the fabric up to the light before placing it on whatever fabric I'm sewing it to. 

Let me know in the comments if you plan to try this tip out the next you sew with a white tone-on-tone fabric!

 

Until next time,

Amanda