No Muss, No Fuss, Ease Plus!
Posted on 15. Nov, 2009 by Gail Yellen in Blog
I was helping my friend Jennifer with some muslins of her jeans pattern this afternoon and ran into a dilemma. As I approached the end of the waistband on the size 24 jeans, it wasn’t even close to the end of the body of the jeans. There was no way it would fit. It’s almost impossible to ease muslin–denim is much more “ease-able”. Then I thought about the “ease plussing” technique used to ease sleeves into an armhole.
Basically you press your left middle finger against the back of the presser foot to hold back the fabric causing it to bunch up and crowd the back of the foot as you stitch. 
When the foot can’t move forward anymore, release the fabric in back and start the process again. 
This technique causes the fabric to gather slightly. I never used it on anything but sleeve caps before, but it worked very well and the end of the waistband actually met the fly front edge!
This was a bigger victory since I discovered that I sewed the smaller top edge of the waistband to the yoke! Needless to say, the correct lower edge eased in even more easily. After “ease-plussing”, this 28″ strip of muslin was 26 1/2″. 