vinyl foot

Way back in September 2010, a very tiny miracle occurred, but I didn’t realize it until Monday evening. When I sat down at my sewing machine with some fabric and a square of vinyl, I was amazed to realize that I just happened to have the absolute best tool for the job. I mean, I knew I had it, but I had no idea just how much I would need and appreciate it!

You see, one September evening, I bought a sewing machine that came with nine different presser feet. (For those of you who don’t sew, a presser foot is the part of the sewing machine that lightly clamps down and holds the fabric against the feed dogs, which pull the fabric through as you sew.) It doesn’t seem like you’d need a lot of different kinds, right? My previous machine only had two presser feet — a regular foot and a zipper foot — and I never felt like I needed more, so these seven extra presser feet seemed like an unnecessary bonus.

Then again, I had never tried to sew vinyl. A regular presser foot would tend to stick to the vinyl and grab on to it as it gets pulled through the machine, causing the seam to get all bunched up. But a non-stick glide foot? Perfection.

You can’t see it in the picture, but the bottom side of this plastic presser foot has a special coating that allows it to glide right over the vinyl. It’s designed specifically for sewing foam, vinyl, plastic, or leather, and technically it’s called a “non-stick glide foot,” but since I’ve only used it for vinyl so far, I like to call it my vinyl foot.

I never had an excuse to sew vinyl until this week, when I was making a drawstring bag to hold a game that Magen created for a school project. We wanted to have the name of the game on the outside of the bag, but instead of having her decorate the bag with fabric markers, I offered to attach a drawing to the bag by enclosing it behind a vinyl window.

Ta-da! It worked out exactly as I hoped.

Here’s the whole bag, just for perspective.

And here’s a detail shot, just because I like neat rows of stitching.

Have you ever sewn vinyl? Did you have a special presser foot for your machine, or did you just cover the bottom of your regular foot with a layer of scotch tape? Most importantly: have you ever gotten this excited about a presser foot?!