4 Advice to Choose a microsuede fabric for sale

Synthetic microsuede aka faux suede is a fun way to add texture and that natural suede look at a more affordable price. Given the fuzzy nature of faux suede, it may seem intimidating at first but let&#;s take a look at how to work with suede and what it can do.

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Link cosplay made with chocolate brown faux suede with painted monster spot details

Skill level: intermediate

Cost: moderate

For the most part, you&#;ll find this listed as an upholstery fabric! You can buy it by the yard wholesale for around $10-15 a yard.

Common supplies for working with this fabric:

• Sewing machine. It does not need to be heavy duty as even budget machines can sew this with the right needle
• Leather, heavy-duty sharp, or microtex needle
• Walking, teflon, or nonstick foot (we&#;ll talk more about that in a bit)
• Sewing clips or very sharp stick pins
• Fabric scissors, a sharp rotary cutter, the usual fabric cutter types

Let&#;s talk faux suede!

Fabric rundown

Time to start with the basics, fabric statistics!

• Common names: synthetic suede, faux suede, synthetic microsuede, upholstery suede
• Fabric type: synthetic
• Fabric weight: medium (on the heavier side)
• Material content: synthetic polymer (basically the fabric equivalent of thinly woven plastic that is safe to wear)
• Opacity: opaque
• Stretch type: none
• Pile: low
• Grainline: up and down, standard grainline for fabric
• Drape and flow: not good
• Strength: strong and durable
• Does it fray: yes
• Original use: furniture upholstery, handbags, shoes
• Other notes: It takes light rain like a champ. I got rained on as Link, shook the rain off, and was fine the rest of the day.

Microsuede is a pile fabric. This means that if you run your hand over the right side of the fabric, it feels fuzzy like a bunch of little hairs on the fabric. And it has those! Just synthetic fibers instead of actual hair. It&#;s similar to faux fur, velvet, and even your carpet. Little hairs! This gives it a naturally fuzzy look and makes it particularly soft. The wrong side of microsuede fabric is much more coarse and does not have a pile.

Folding suede into a strip for buckles. The right side of microsuede has a fuzzy look while the wrong side has a coarser, woven look

Microsuede tends to lean towards the heavier side of medium-weight fabrics. It has some weight to it and will feel a little heavy when picking up a few yards of it. It has a decent amount of body to it so you can feasibly use this for jackets and coats. This fabric is synthetic, so it doesn&#;t really breathe, so always make sure to wear wicking clothing and take breaks as needed.

Given the stiffness, this probably isn&#;t good for pants since it probably will chafe when you wear it and inevitably sweat. You could use it for chaps though. Just make sure to stay cool, much like with jackets and coats.

Storage and cleaning

Microsuede can be a bit of a touchy fabric due to its pile. It doesn&#;t iron well so you&#;ll want to hang up your finished garments if possible or store them flat in a box. When packing into a suitcase, try to keep the suede flat and unwrinkled. I fly with mine and as long as I pack it flat enough, it generally ends up fine at the other end.

Cleaning is also touchy due to the pile. You can&#;t just throw it into the washer and expect it to come out fine. Instead, spot cleaning works best. Rubbing alcohol or a touch of vodka is amazing for pulling out spots acquired at the con. You can also dilute vinegar with water, 1:1, though the vinegar smell will stick to the fabric.

Rub against the pile, from bottom to top, to release any stains then dry flat. Be gentle when rubbing since you don&#;t want to crush the pile.

Sewing

Let&#;s talk about how to sew microsuede:

• Machine needle: heavy-duty, microtex, or leather needle
• Machine foot: walking, teflon, or non-stick foot
• Foot pressure: low to medium
• Thread type: polyester
• Hand sewing: standard sharp with a thimble
• Edge finishes: raw edges will fray. Finishes that work with other medium-weight fabrics will work here.

Microsuede is a medium-weight fabric, as heavy as it feels, and is still woven. This means that you can sew it on a regular sewing machine with a heavy-duty needle. You need the heavier needle to be able to pierce through the thickness of the material without causing your needle to bend or get angry and not punch through the fabric.

Most machines will get upset at you if you sew a lot of suede layers together, and may refuse to punch through the fabric. If you have a heavy-duty machine, you can turn the wheel and carefully punch through the more layered sections, but I do not recommend that with a regular machine.

Probably due to the pile of the fabric, suede sometimes does not like to move along the feed dogs of your machine and seemingly gets stuck. This is generally due to the foot getting stuck to the top of the fabric. To help prevent this, you either need one of a few non-stick feet that will glide across the top of the fabric or a walking foot. My preference is a walking foot.

Sewing fur to suede using a leather needle and a walking foot

The walking foot for modern home machines is a bulbous sort of little foot that has a little arm that attaches to your needle screw. This little arm makes the feeder dogs on the walking foot move up and down and this in turn feeds the fabric through the machine evenly.

Now while sewing, you might need to hold that fabric in place. You can use clips or you can use straight pins. I find that very sharp quilting pins work best with microsuede, but really any sharp pin will do.

edge of a suede boot

The pins need to be sharp to pierce through the thick fibers. Dull pins will simply refuse to go through and you don&#;t want to damage your fabric by trying to force it. Fortunately with the sharp pins, even though you&#;re punching through thicker fibers, the pin holes aren&#;t even noticeable so pin away.

You&#;ll likely need pins for flattening seams and sewing them down since clips generally cannot reach them. Microsuede is stiff and cannot be reliably ironed, so to make flat seams, you&#;ll want to sew the seam allowance down. Make sure the seams are in the correct position to do this as picking seams in suede can be challenging due to the pile.

Seam pinned down and sewn with a straight stitch

When sewing your seams, you can sew the seam allowance to only one side of the seam like the image above, or open the seam and sew up both sides for a double-stitched look.

Seam opened and sewn on both sides of the seam line on the back of a boot

You can finish microsuede a few ways, though the easiest is to hem it, fold the edges over, and sew it down as you would with cotton or similar fabrics. Microsuede does fray like crazy so you want to tuck that seam inside and not leave it raw.

Folded hem sewn down with the edges beginning to fray. The suede is sewn over duck canvas

You can finish your suede edges in a number of other ways including wrapping the raw edges in bias tape or ribbons. Folded seams like double-fold or French seams may be too bulky, and the suede may be too stiff to run through your serger. I haven&#;t tried, but I&#;m sure my serger would cry at me.

In addition to edge finishes, you can line suede with cotton or other soft material, sewing the outer edge down much like you would a seam mentioned above. This keeps the two layers from puckering and spreading apart.

Patterning

Microsuede is a medium-weight fabric so you don&#;t need any crazy supplies or methods to work with it. You will want your scissors or rotary cutter to be sharp else it&#;ll just gum at the fibers. Otherwise, you can use what you probably already have for other fabrics.

• Scissors: regular fabric scissors, make sure they&#;re sharp
• Rotary cutter: regular rotary cutter for medium-weight fabrics.
• Can trace the pattern on the wrong side of the fabric with pen, pencil, or chalk
• Can pin patterns down normally as pinholes are close to invisible

Muslin pattern pieces laid out on brown suede

Microsuede errs on the heavier side of medium-weight fabrics. For the most part, it handles pattern laying and cutting much like any other medium-weight fabric. Folds do not stay particularly flat, but you can pin them near the edge to get them to lay a little flatter.

If you are making your own patterns, you can flip the fabric wrong-side out and make any markings you need with a pen or chalk. Don&#;t use a marker as that bleeds through the fabric.

As mentioned in the sewing section, you can use pins normally with microsuede. The pinholes are nearly invisible so you don&#;t have to worry about pinning only in the seam allowances to avoid pinholes

Heat

Microsuede doesn&#;t take to heat well, especially any sort of pressed heat. Its heat problems all stem from the pile. The heat flattens the fabric&#;s pile and causes the fibers to go flat against the backing. The fabric loses fuzzy appearance and there&#;s not exactly a good way to put it back, even with more steaming or washing. So it&#;s best to avoid pressed heat if possible.

• Ironing: avoid if possible
• Steaming: technically can work but test on a swatch to see how the pile reacts.
• Fusible interfacing: Use sew-in instead. Stick to heavier interfacing. Duck canvas is really good for reinforcing suede.
• HTV: Unlikely

I have seen articles mentioning how to steam a microsuede coat but steam also has the same problem as other forms of heat. It can press the pile flat. If you absolutely must iron out creases and have a steamer, test on a swatch to see how it reacts to the heat before using it on your cosplay. You&#;ll want to apply heat to the back of the fabric and not the pile directly.

Painting

A lot of microsuede&#;s problem stems from the pile. Painting may push down that pile and create a flat section of your fabric. However, that doesn&#;t mean you can&#;t paint anyway.

• Painting: yes
• Dye: questionable

You can paint using fabric paint or acrylics thinned with fabric medium. The painting process does push the pile down, but with the details of the paint, you can generally get away with it. You&#;ll want to avoid painting large sections so it&#;s not as noticeable, but for smaller sections, you can absolutely do it.

Suede arm guard painted with dark brown monster cheetah spots

If you want a whole tutorial on how to paint microsuede, check out Painting faux suede with acrylics.

For dyeing the fabric, I have yet to find a definitive answer. There are suede dyes that you can paint on, and you might be able to use synthetic disperse dye though the heat required for synthetic dye can be a problem. It is honestly better to find a close enough fabric predyed, and with so many options, there&#;s a good chance you can find something that works!

Embellishments

Microsuede really takes well to embellishments. This can be anything from twine and beads to large pieces of armor and random bones.

You can sew embellishments onto microsuede pretty easily with a sharp hand needle. If you&#;re using multiple layers of suede, you may need a thimble to protect your fingers when pushing the needle through the fabric.

Sewing suede cord onto suede using a whip stitch to make a wrapped look

You can also sew beads and bobbles onto suede much the same weight, though be mindful of heavier stones as they can cause fabric to sag if it&#;s not reinforced with some kind of backing.

Now despite microsuede&#;s heat issues, it can take to heat in terms of glue relatively well. You can glue larger embellishments such as paper mache armor to the suede to secure it. When gluing, make sure to use a large helping of glue behind the embellishment and let it fully cool before moving it. If you move it while the glue is still hot, it will bond only to the pile and pop off later.

Gluing a large paper mache armor piece to suede with a healthy helping of glue

Feasibly you could also use other types of heat and glue such as hotfixing rhinestones or using super glue to attach accents (please use adequate ventilation with super glue), so if you need some glitter rhinestone Barbie boots, go forth and be your shiny Barbie self. Make sure to always test on a fabric scrap before applying anything to your final cosplay!

Fasteners and closures

At some point, you&#;ll want to close your suede. And for the most part, microsuede takes pretty well to most closures. Heavier closures may require reinforcement.

• Zipper: yes
• Velcro: yes
• Snaps: yes. Use large 1&#; or 3/4&#; snaps for anything that might bear weight
• Hook & eye: yes, though given the weight of the fabric, you may want to stick to other closures
• Eyelets: absolutely. Use canvas or boning to reinforce load-bearing laces. Decorative eyelets and laces do not need reinforcement though pulling the laces tight will cause the fabric to sag slightly
• Buttons: yes. Can add buttonholes too. Stick with larger buttons.
• Belt buckle: yes. No reinforcement is needed for slider buckles. Larger buckles may need canvas or heavier reinforcement to hold up the weight.

As suede can err toward the heavier side, you&#;ll want to use fasteners that can handle the weight. Lightweight buckles are one of my favorites and I use them quite a bit in my boots and gauntlets.

Suede leg guard with multiple slider buckle closures

With smaller fasteners like snaps and hooks and eyes, you&#;ll want to use larger ones or heavier-duty ones as the weight of the fabric could pull them open. If you&#;re making bags or pouches, magnetic snaps and clasps are also an option to keep your bag closed.

Original Link cosplay with suede buckle boots and lace-up gauntlets

I hope you enjoyed this rundown of working with synthetic microsuede. It&#;s a fun material to add a more natural texture to your cosplays. It&#;s a great material for everything from bags to boots to a full barbarian or adventurer look. It comes in so many colors, you&#;re sure to find the one you need for your next project.

Show me how you use microsuede in your next project. @ me on social media so I can admire your work!

If you want to learn more, please visit our website microsuede fabric for sale.

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Colorfastness

A fabric&#;s resistance to fading from light is measured on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the most fade resistant. ACT recommends a minimum of 4 for contract spaces.

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A fabric&#;s ability to resist burning. All our fabrics pass the California Technical Bulletin 117- Section 1 standards without using flame-retardant chemicals.

Physical Properties

A fabric&#;s overall durability and tendency to pill is measured on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the most pill resistant. For contract spaces, ACT recommends a minimum of 3.

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