Alignment Matters

They (whoever they is, and they have a lot to answer for) say that matching patterns is a sign of good quality clothing. They might be right. For this sewist it’s been both a pain in the arse and a complete victory. I’m going to discuss three examples in this post and offer some advice.

Just Say No

The way to take a simple pattern and turn it into a complete nightmare is to try to match the pattern on a fabric. As an example I give you the Helen’s Closet Blackwood. This is a cardigan I’ve made many times and it’s a lovely pattern. The instructions are a joy to work with. After making several in my favourite colour, black, I decided that I would make one from some check fabric. Here is the final result.

Instead of it taking a couple of hours, it took the better part of two days. What’s a bit hard to see from this picture is how many things have to be cut to match. There’s the back and front (side seams). But at the bottom and around the top there’s a band. See below, there are also cuffs on the arms. It’s a lot of matching let me tell you.

From the outset I decided to cut the pieces as I needed them so that I could match them with what I had already sewn. Cutting is the most stressful part of the process for me, and so drawing it out like that wasn’t ideal. BUT… it was far simpler than trying to cut them all out and hope that they went together as expected. So about a million stressful hours later I had a cardigan that I’m very proud of, but weirdly I don’t wear a lot. It’s something to reflect on.

Also for my environmentally minded friends, this is not the most fabric efficient way to cut anything out. But for a fabric print pattern of this complexity I think not matching would be quite jarring, so I wonder whether it’s just best to avoid these sorts of fabrics if you want to be fabric conscious. Also, one other thing to know about fabric is that the print is not always even. I noticed that towards the selvedge edges the pattern had a slight warp in direction, it was no longer quite square. That also makes for challenges in alignment which I solved by not using that part of the fabric.

Here’s a somewhat simpler but still challenging version of the Helen’s Closet Blackwood. Stretch lace with a pattern and a border. I made the border of the front match the pattern of the front and back panels, but I used the flowers to trim the part of the border around the neck (so instead of a border made of two parts that meets in the back middle of the neck, its three pieces. Then I cut the sleeves so that there was no hem at the bottom but the border of the lace itself.

A Match that led to a Happy Ending

I love the Assembly Line V-Neck Dress, which I make as a tunic length. The original pattern has seams at the centre front and centre back. If you look at the image on the right you can see the centre back one clearly through the v-neck. The centre front one embodies what is wrong with centre seams, while ground and the sky were aligned, we see the same Frida appearing twice. The image on the left is the same fabric, same top, but I removed the centre front and back seams and thus the pattern continued uninterrupted, the easiest way to make a patterned fabric line up.

So how did I do this. Instead of cutting out two front pieces and two back pieces, I cut a front and a back on the fold of the fabric. The Assembly Line really makes this simple because their cutting outlines include the seam allowance, so what I did was carefully fold back the seam and made the seam line the centre fold line. Woot. Here’s a picture of the front piece.

The back was simple to do, and so was the front. But the front has a V-Neck and what going down to one front piece means is that instead of making the V by sewing two pieces together, you have a V shape cut into the single piece of fabric. The first implication of this is that you need to adjust the facing… or maybe you could still make two pieces and sew them together but I decided to make the facing into a single piece.

Probably the hardest part of doing all of this is trying to sew the V neckline with a sharp point. The best advice I’ve read (and I can’t find it publicly online, so I suspect it was in one of the sewing Facebook groups I’m in) is to sew towards the point and then rather than making a V in the stitching make something like this \ _ / with stitches. That and some comprehensive clipping to make the fabric lie flat. Here’s a picture of the backside of the front to give you a feel for how the centre seam removed works from the backside.

Placket Woes

At some point I decided that would make shirts for the hubby. Perhaps I was getting a bit embarrassed about the amount of clothing I had me made for me. It took a while though because shirts were dead to me as things to sew after I failed my O-Level in sewing. (Yes I failed and yes there’s such a thing to fail). Anyway, at some point I decided that I could make shirts. And now I feel a lot less guilty when I suggest a trip to a fabric store because there’s usually a good opportunity to find shirt fabric.

So Liberty of London makes some lovely fabrics and some of them, like Nouveau Peacock below have a very strong geometric pattern. Not only did it feel necessary to have a go at matching the side seams it seemed especially crucial to match the front. For the shirt pattern I used Wardrobe By Me, Jensen shirt.

This was another case of cut one front piece out and then cut the other in response to it. What makes this hard is that shirts have plackets. That’s the name for the piece of the shirt where the buttonholes sit on one side and the buttons on the other. It’s made, in this case, by folding the centre seam over twice. So, fold each centre seam over twice. BUT, you don’t match the two together, because the left (left when worn) sits over the right, so the actual match takes the left folded over + the width of the placket on the right side. I drew the width of the placket onto the pattern piece so that I could know where I needed to align the left side piece too.

Here’s what that looks like on the pattern piece. You can see the two dotted lines down the side of the front, those are the first two folds of the placket. The third line, my blue annotation is where the pattern on the right side has to match on the left. Now since you cut the right and the left sides from the same piece, what I typically do is cut the left first, fold and iron it and then cut the right. Its fiddly but it works for me (I suspect projector cutting would be particularly good for this).

Here’s the final result and I have to say Im pretty pleased with it.

Sewing for Computer Scientists (and Swimmers)

I use computers. I also swim. Both of these have probably changed the shape of my back. Other people blame computers for the Forward Shoulder adjustment and I am happy join the chorus of people throwing machinery under the bus for their contributions to poor posture. At the same time I would like to take credit for those muscles that come from swimming (beyond the actual work of exercise there’s a whole post that could be written about what it means to swim with 20-somethings many of whom have swum competitively…).

Anyhow, back to my back. I knew there was something wrong with my version of the Assembly Line V-Neck Dress (which I make in a shorter tunic length). The neckline features a collar that stands at the back. I loved my tunics but I often felt that they were slipping backwards, so the neck collar wasn’t standing at the back of my neck rather there was a gap between my back neck and the collar. I also noticed that the shoulder seams weren’t sitting on my shoulders but slightly behind them. I was curious whether this could be fixed. This picture illustrates both problems.

Turns out it can, once you know the name for it. High Round (Full) Back, High Round Back and Forward Shoulder are the terms you want to look at. I found Sew Essential’s guide to be particularly helpful. It gave me the courage to try both adjustments out on the pattern. Although I have not tried the Assembly Line Tutorial, I appreciate the details covered in it.

Let’s begin with the back. The trick to the full back is to open up the centre of the back while leaving the arms and neckline the same as before (so that they match the other pattern pieces — sleeves and the front). Below is what I did to my Assembly Line V-Neck Dress pattern. You can see that there’s a white triangle with the widest part being at the centre back of the pattern. That’s me creating extra fabric to accommodate those swimming muscles. I think I put about 1.5 inches in there and that’s done the trick. The collar stands up right behind my neck.

The second thing that’s going on in the picture is to the top left of the back piece, another small triangle of paper. This triangle reaches its point where the shoulder meets the neckline. This triangle has moved the shoulder seam forward, again providing more “back” so that the shoulder seam sits at the top of my shoulder (as opposed to about an inch behind the top of my shoulder.

Since I added an inch to the back seam I was also required to take it off the front seam. And this is the front of the same pattern. Instead of cutting it off I just folded it over. In both cases the triangle is the same size so what I’ve done is move a part of the front fabric to the back.

The first time I sewed with this adjusted pattern I was quite nervous. At the time this was one of the most intensive modifications I’d done.

How did it turn out? Here’s before (left) and after (right). On the left the gap between the neck and the collar that was problematic. The Full Back adjustment gave me more fabric over my back and closed the distance between my neck and the collar. The Forward Shoulder is harder to see from left to right but it’s also made a difference. The seam is definitely closer to the top of my shoulder in the right picture which is where it should sit. Most importantly from my perspective, when I wear the tunic Im not constantly tugging at the front to make it sit where I want, the garment no longer slides backwards.

So there it is, full back and forward shoulder adjustment.

It was a Pants Weekend

Last weekend I spent the entire weekend making pants (trousers). Surprisingly, given the summer here, Atlanta also has a winter season. This winter was marked by my beloved Athleta Metro pants giving up the ghost (after what 10 years) with the elastic going and more piling emerging. So I decided to make some pants.

I started with two patterns: Almost Long Trousers by the Assembly Line and Pandemic Pants by See Kate Sew. I know the Assembly Line patterns well so I knew my size and so I cut and made it. I’m familiar with pants making, so it didn’t take long, probably about an hour and a half with cutting in total.

The result was a pair of pants that were enormous around the waist area and a little short in the leg. It was then that I noticed that this pattern was actually for woven fabric and I’d made it in a knit. So the drape was all wrong and there was stretch! I made some major adjustments to the center seams of the back and front of the pants (which were easier to take in than the side seams due to the pockets. I redid the cuffs making them slightly longer. These pants became a set of pajama pants. One other take away, I really liked the slash pockets on this pattern.

Next up the Pandemic Pants. These turned out much better. First, I looked at my adjusted Almost Long template to help with the shaping that I wanted in the leg. Turns out that I like a loose leg but not too baggy, particularly below the knee, so I tapered the seams a bit. The pants turned out quite well but once again I felt that they were pajama pants (fortunately I’ve been super frustrated with the actual pocket-less pajamas I own and so having two pairs of new pajamas was just fine.)

I now had two pairs of pants and ideas to merge them. I wanted the slash pocket style of the Almost Long Trousers, and the fit of the Pandemic Pants with one change. I wanted the waistband to sit slightly higher. Surprisingly I decided to pause here and read about fitting pants around the waist (I say surprisingly because I can be a bit impatient to get on with things). I wondered whether I needed to adjust the crotch seams any or whether I could do something simpler. So I actually retrieved a lot of my pants and measured the front and back crotch seams. Ultimately I decided that I could probably just raise the entire waist area by 1 inch and that would work. I used my beloved French Curve ruler to do this because the waistband of pants patterns is not straight but angled and I wanted to preserve that appropriately.

One other thing I wanted to do was not to have cuffs at the bottom of my trouser. For some reason I decided that trousers with cuffs at the bottom might be a bit casual for work. Particularly on days when am Associate Dean-ing (we are looking for a new Dean so you know I’m thinking about being tidy). So I took the cuff pattern piece from the Pandemic Pants, measured it and divided by 2 and then added a bit just because you can always remove more.

At this point, perhaps I should apologize for not having pictures. I should also explain how I do these things. I buy my patterns online and have them printed out by the fabulous PDF Plotting on A0 paper. I have two ways to make pattern adjustments. One way is to cut into the paper pattern and move things around, which can and does involve taping more bits of paper onto the pattern. Another is to trace the pattern onto tracing paper. In this case I decided to trace the adjustments on tracing paper and so starting with the Pandemic Pant pattern pieces for the front and back legs and pockets I traced four sets of adjustments. First, I raised the waistline by an 1inch. Second, I tapered the legs at the bottom. Third I added the length of the bottom cuff and change to the bottom of the leg. Fourth, I turned the side seam pockets into slash pockets (here’s a great tutorial, H/T Lorrie), necessitating angling off the front leg pattern and the front pocket insert.

Pant 3. Fantastic. I couldn’t have been happier. So happy I made them again in a thicker more wintery fabric. I wish, wish, wish I could tell you what these fabrics were (other than knits), but Fabric Joint is a rather eccentric local fabric operation here in Atlanta. The fabrics are good quality and ridiculously cheap, most coming in at between $4 and $5 per yard.