Two Types Of Garment Front-Opening Facings You Should Know
A front-opening combination facing is used to clean finish the garment opening and neckline edges simultaneously. Conventionally, the front neck facing is built into the garment opening facing. Conversely, the facing that finishes the back neckline is cut separately.
While the back facing is, almost always, cut separately and stitched to the shoulder seams and garment neckline, this is not always the case with the front facing layer. Here are two types of combination facings you should know:
While the back facing is, almost always, cut separately and stitched to the shoulder seams and garment neckline, this is not always the case with the front facing layer. Here are two types of combination facings you should know:
An extension front-opening facing is built into the garment patterns and simply folded down the garment's center front to expose its clean finished edges. An extension facing is quite easy to distinguish from a conventional facing style: if you take a look at the garment's opening edge, you should see a simple fold as opposed to a seam.
In this case, the front garment portions feature a built-in facing extension. The line that separates the facing portion from the garment serves as the fold line and quite often, it also corresponds to the garment's center front line. This line should be transferred to the wrong side of the garment layers thus providing a folding guide in the construction process. When folded, the facing's neckline edge should perfectly match that of the garment portion.
A separate front-opening facing is cut and stitched separately, and as opposed to the extension style, not built into the garment's patterns. In your pattern set, these facing layers will have separate pattern pieces. If you take a look at the finished garment's opening edges, you should see a clearly defined seamline running along each edge.
When sewing a separate combination facing, each front facing piece is cut separately then stitched to each corresponding garment opening edge to enclose the fabric's raw edges. The back facing piece, which is used to clean finish the garment's back neckline, connects to each front facing piece at the shoulder seams thus completing the entire neckline edge.