I took my first home economics class when I was in 7th grade. It was mandatory for all FEMALES. Boys couldn’t even take the class. (Yes, back in the Dark Ages!) Eventually, I would earn a degree in Human Ecology from Michigan State University, but back in 7th grade, I got my first exposure to many domestic skills from this exceedingly old and old fashioned teacher… she was probably, oh, 50. Here name was Mrs. Milliche. Mrs. Milliche was a stickler for details. Before we could touch fabric, we spent a week (a full week… 5 hours, count them!!!) sewing the lines on loose-leaf paper, without thread, just to make sure we perfected the straight line.
Then, before we could start our first sewing project, we had to learn how to straighten the grain of our fabric. What? You’ve never heard of straightening the grain of your fabric. Well, it’s high time you learned grasshopper! On woven fabrics, the warp threads in the lengthwise grain are stretched on a loom. The weft threads in the crosswise grain are then woven back and forth the length of the warp threads. In a perfect world, these should be perpendicular to one another. This is called on-grain. If they are not perpendicular to one another, it is called off-grain, and it can cause completed projects to stretch out of shape or natural fringed edges to be uneven.
So, like it or not, I need to send Mrs. Milliche a belated “thank you”. Knowing how to straighten grain has proved useful over the years. I needed to straighten the grain of the Rip and Tear Napkins I made last week. And I have a project I will be sharing in a couple days, which will require a true straight edge which you will learn to do in the Straightening the Grain tutorial found HERE. Enjoy… or at least appreciate it for what it is!!!