Last week my class worked up an armscye princess manipulation, then worked it farther into a vest with facing. I’m breaking this down into two…
1 CommentArchives: Demos
Once again, this is intended for my Flat Pattern students. If you are someone else’s student, do whatever your teacher tells you. This sample problem…
Leave a Comment
Once again, this is mostly for my students. If you are someone else’s student, do this however your teacher says. ;)
Leave a Comment
This is really meant as support material for my Flat Pattern I students, to help them with their sample problems. The rest of the world might find this completely boring. ;)
Leave a Comment
So here’s the trouble with tutus… They are made of many, many layers of tulle*. And tulle, these days, is made of hate. I don’t want to sound all judgey-pants, but it’s true. Your average fabric store tulle is made of nylon, a fiber which suffers from a constant string of cheap, tragic affairs with single electrons. By the time you have 6 layers of nylon tulle mounted on the basque (that’s the shaped waist-band bit), you’ve actually sewn yourself a fluffy little Van de Graaff generator. A tutu-in-progress is amazing – you can actually watch threads fly from the floor towards the tutu where they permanently bond with with tulle. Effective for cleaning, perhaps, but not so good for the tutu which should ideally not look like some sort of worm-farm. Just in case you, dear reader, ever find yourself herding tulle through a sewing machine, here are a few tricks I’ve picked up from a couple years of sewing dance concerts at the shop…
17 Comments
No, not grade like what I do when my students turn in patterns! Grading a pattern is the process of sizing it up (or down). It sounds fairly intimidating, especially if you’ve ever seen any of the mysterious old-school tools for “assisting” in the process. (They’re a strange array of bars and levers, and I have absolutely no mortal clue what they’re meant to do or how they’re meant to do it.) Fortunately, there’s a quick and dirty way to grade a pattern…
4 Comments
Sometimes, bad things happen to good costumers. Like, your sister is throwing an 80’s party the next evening and you bomb out finding anything that can be mangled into some reasonable approximation of Cyndi Lauper so-unusual-excellence, and every bit of vintage you can find is a size 4. Now, that’s maybe not to traumatic if you actually are a size 4. I wouldn’t know, because as it turns out, my left thigh is a size 4. But I found the jacket of my dreams, and it was merely 4 or 5 sizes to small. What’s a girl to do? Gussets. Gussets will save you here.
6 Comments
I love covered buttons. They just make a design look so pulled-together. The problem is that that directions on the back of the covered button kits are a little bit less than useful. They’re actually kinda bad. So for anyone who has ever wondered, here’s the sitch….
2 Comments
So you spent a jillion dollars a yard on some fancy-dancy ribbon for your costume? Bad news – it will only ever look like ribbon… Unless you layer it.
4 Comments
Actually, most things are easier than making shirts. Shirts are seriously annoying creatures. However, the point of this little demo is that every sewing room needs good lighting, and good lighting is something you can make with far less skill than you need for most of sew-land. Curious yet?
5 Comments