Hudson
I love working with sweatshirt fabric. The first garment I ever made, I made out of sweatshirt fabric. It was a hoodie for my nephew. It was December 2013. Wow! Time really does fly …. The first time I used my serger was on a sweatshirt fabric. I made the Burda Pants #135 and they turned out weird leggings with pockets. It was April 2014 and I knew nothing about fabrics. In fact I thought I was working with cotton jersey because that’s what the lady who sold it to me said it was (in Italian most industrially knitted fabrics are referred to as jerseys).
But what exactly is sweatshirt fabric. You can make a sweatshirt out of many types of fabric and there’s no sweatshirt fabric entry in the Fairchild’s Dictionary of Textiles. What is most often referred to as sweatshirt fabric is actually knitted terry or French terry – a plated fabric knitted with two different yarns: the first the looped or effect yarn appears on one side; the second the ground yarn, appears on the other. The ground yarn is knitted on a jersey stitch while the effect yarn is pulled out on the back to make a looped or piled texture. Unlike the woven terry cloth, French terry has loops only on one side of the fabric. The knitted fleece is a knitted terry variant in which the loops are napped by passing the fabric through a special machine, to make a soft fleecy effect.