If you look closely at the picture below, you might notice that something’s not quite right. If you have experience in sewing button-down shirt—which is what this pile of fabric will eventually be—it’s probably pretty clear to you that interfacing is not meant to be so, er, visible. It was not, however, very clear to me.

It turns out that, after avoiding interfacing in several projects by pretending that it didn’t exist, I really didn’t have a good handle on how it actually worked. It seems obvious now that I was supposed to sew the interfacing onto the (matching) pieces of fabric before I sewed them onto front pieces of the shirt. Somehow, I didn’t manage to get that from the very clear instructions in Sew U: The Built by Wendy Guide to Making Your Own Wardrobe. I must have been in serious interfacing denial, because the first instruction in the whole project reads, “1. FUSE THE PIECES.”

I have made this mistake so you don’t have to. Friends don’t let friends forget to fuse interfacing.

**If you click through a link to Amazon.com in this post, I will make a little money if you make a purchase. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.**