The answer to what is ease in sewing is that it’s the room between the garment and wearer. We’ll also talk about how to calculate it and how to sew the ease stitch.
Since the ease helps ensure the perfect fitting of the garment, why not learn what is baste in sewing as well? Again, these are helpful temporary stitches to ensure that the final ones will offer the best fit to the user.
Our sewing blog is very diverse, so feel free to browse it for other sewing terms, tutorials, and tips.
What Is Ease Used For In Sewing?
Ease refers to the room between your body and the garment. You can compute it as the difference between the clothes and the body.
What is the purpose of the ease in sewing? Easing ensures that your garment will have a good shape when worn, as the Oregon State University mentioned.
But despite the space, the eased area should still not pucker. Therefore, it can be challenging to ease woven and non-stretchy knit fabrics.
Wearing ease vs designer ease
There are two types of measurements when referring to ease in sewing. First, the wearing or movement ease is the measurement you add to the bust, waist, and hips so the wearer can move comfortably while wearing the garment.
On the other hand, the designer ease or the style ease, from the name itself, is the measurement added to the clothing for fashion purposes. This means that it affects the overall silhouette of the piece of clothing, usually seen on purposely oversized garments.
How to use wearing ease
The wearing ease is often used on woven garments to allow the movement of the wearer. However, if you also didn’t consider this amount of room, the clothing can feel uncomfortable to wear.
You can add several inches to the body measurement or about two and a half inches more to the bust, an inch to the waist, and three inches to the hip area of the clothing.
How to use designer ease
The designer ease will depend on the style and how you want the garment to drape. But, again, this will vary according to how you want the clothing to fit.
Consider if the garment should be fitted, close-fitting, semi-fitting, loose-fitting, or very loose-fitting. Then, you can compute the ease or room you’ll add to the measurements of the clothing.
How Do You Calculate Ease?
- Take the body measurements of the wearer and size of the clothing itself via its pattern measurements
- Consider how you want the garment to fit in the bust, waist, and hips
- Adjust as needed or consider the following ease measurements
How to add ease when sewing
- Knitted and very fitted garments must use negative ease or 0cm of ease
- The minimum ease is 4cm for a fitted but comfortable clothing
- Use a 9cm ease if you want the clothing to have a loose fit for style or for apparel that you’ll layer with other clothes such as jackets
- The bust can have 4cm of ease, 1cm to 2.5cm on the waist, and 4 cm on the hips
How Do You Ease When Sewing?
- Align the long edge of the fabric to the short edge
- Mark a point at the ends of the area that you will ease
- Set the sewing machine stitch to a long stitch and sew a straight line between the points you marked in the previous step
- Grab the bobbin thread while still holding the fabric
- Pull the thread to gather the material and tug accordingly, so it’s evenly gathered
- Pin the fabric and begin sewing with the correct stitch length
- Manipulate the material as you sew so it won’t bunch up
- Open and press the seam
What Is Ease Stitch In Sewing?
From the name itself, the ease stitch is a type of stitch that will help you draw the fullness or room of the fabric to a specific area. This is especially useful if the pattern pieces don’t align perfectly for the seam.
With an ease stitch, you can spread the fullness and equalize the length of the fabric patterns. However, make sure to sew slowly and patiently, so you prevent fabric puckering when making ease stitches.
What Is Ease In Fullness In Sewing?
Ease is the measurement the sewer adds between the body and the garment itself. Fullness, on the other hand, is the extra fabric the designer adds to the pattern.
How to find the piece with fullness? It should be easy to identify which pattern has the fullness if you align two pattern pieces and one of them is longer than the other.
You can then control the fullness in the specific part of the clothing using gathering. This is especially useful on ruffles, cuffs, and waistlines, so read how to gather fabric with a sewing machine.
Conclusion
Was this article helpful? We just learned what is ease in sewing, which is an extra room between the clothing and body of the wearer.
There are two types, which are the wearing ease and designer ease. The wearing ease affects the garment’s comfort, while the designer ease dictates the silhouette of the clothing.
We hope you learned a lot. Leave us a question if you still have any.