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.