Elastic Experiments

I’ve been sewing for myself for a few years now, but I’ve been lazy about finding latex-free elastic. I’ve coped using drawstrings, buttons and zips.. the latter two being not that practical when you’re a girl and your weight fluctuates!

I set out to get myself stocked up on non-latex elastic and a quick google search turned up this: http://www.sewsassy.com/Pages/Elastic.html#anchorLatexFreeElastic which is very useful if you live in the USA, but not so much if you don’t want to pay $84.50 in shipping. So, I printed out the list and took it along to my local fabric shop..

Now, the list was useful but by no means perfect, for example the elastic my local shop stocked as ‘swim elastic’ was pure latex rubber!

 The assistant was very helpful, but she didn’t know which of the elastics they stocked were latex-free and the packets were no help! So after ruling out a couple ‘cause I could tell just by touching/looking at them, she suggested that I could take a sample of each of the others home for free (:

Once I got them home, a couple more were ruled out by snipping and fraying the cotton casings and finding that oh so annoying white latex core. A couple of them had a stretchy core that I could not be sure wasn’t latex - so I got the extra-special job of sellotaping a small sample of the questionable ones onto my inner arms for a couple of hours to be certain!(Of course, I don’t actually recommend doing this if you have a latex allergy, or if you have to - have an epi-pen to hand)

Sadly I did not find a version of the ‘polyester elastic’, the only fabric-encased elastic with a polyester core was Elasticated Petersham, which will be useful but being Petersham it is much less flexible than traditional elastic.

The only elastics I know for sure from this test are latex-free were these three:

Clear Elastic

Elasticated Petersham

Clear Beading Elastic

Looking out for clear elastic is a good tip because latex is usually milky and opaque, but don’t trust that all Elasticated Petersham is going to be latex free because I can’t speak for other brands than the one I tested. Cut it open yourself and find out!

By the way, if you find an elastic which lists ‘Elastodine’ in the materials - this is another way of saying latex. Found this out after buying a pack of elastic from Lidl, which I couldn’t open to test before I bought it.

I’m going to keep looking for polyester elastic and I will write about my experiments with the elastic I do have(I’m at my parents for Christmas, so it won’t be for a few weeks). Any links to latex-free elastic for sale(in the UK or elsewhere) would be greatly appreciated, or any stories about your own quest for non-latex elastic! (:


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