Cosplay Skills with Silk, Taffeta, and Satin fabrics

Leveling up your sewing skill IRL is a series of short articles with tips, tricks, and things you should know before working with different types of fabric. We hope these help level up your skill and save you some tears as well as time. Please refer to the XP requirement bar for the difficulty rating of each fabric.



Sewing with satin, silk, and taffeta can be very challenging. They are such beautiful fabrics and perfect for so many cosplays. There are a few things you should know before working with them that will save you some heartache, tears and most importantly time.

One of the first things is to make sure you are using the proper sized needle. Satin doesn’t “heal” around needle holes, so if your needle is too large you will have very visible needle holes as well as possible puckering from the fabric giving way. We wouldn’t recommend using very many pins on this fabric as it spreads apart the threads and can sometimes still be visible after the sewing is complete.

Secondly,you should use a short stitch while keeping your fabric taut and smooth. The last thing you want is puckering on your seam. If you are getting pucker on the underside of your seams you may need to switch to a smooth presser foot to keep it from grabbing the fabric too harshly.

When working with fabrics like these you want the least amount of seams possible, since the grain on the vertical seams can pucker over time no matter how perfectly you sew them. To help with this you can add a little interfacing to your seams, but experiment with it to see what works best for your machine.

If you found this article helpful, have questions, or have an article you’d like to see be sure to let us know in the comments below.