#preliminary instruction

[ten-and-his]

Some really precise and extensive seam grading and the collar lays much nicer! 😍

[ten-and-his]

Stitch to the Under!

If there was a penitentiary for seamstresses and I was imprisoned there, you know for breakin’ all the rules, I think I would get:

(st)(it)(ch) (to) | (the) (un)(de)(r)

tattooed across my knuckles.

There are sewing techniques I hate (grading seam allowances), there are sewing techniques I haven’t mastered (pleating, surprisingly hard to get perfect) and then there’s stitching to the under. It solves… So. Many. Problems. It’s the most final, delightfully simple way to FORCE a seam to lay nicer. Yet I have seen award-winning costumes on display that were missing this lovely, polishing detail.

It was excluded from the instructions for the butterfly train but, renegade that I am, I added it 😘.

[ten-and-his]

Preliminary Instruction for the Modern Novice Seamstress: SEWING MACHINE TENSION

I am trying to go through chronologically in this series, basically give pointers that would be needed along the way to make a simple dress from a commercially available pattern. I am skipping the step about how to make your machine work well because when I started writing it I quickly realized it would be different for every machine. But basically, FIND YOUR MANUAL, practice on a scrap and don't be surprised if you get totally bizarre results at first. My machine is a BEAST, it is really awesome (thank you Mammy for leaving it to me in your will) but it will still do bonkers stuff if the settings are wrong, the needle is wrong for the fabric or it needs to be oiled.

A piece of advice from my machine's manual that I think would apply across the board:

Match the fabric to the project, the thread to the fabric, the needle to the thread and the machine's settings to the needle.

The first time I read that I was like, well that's annoyingly obvious. But situations do arise where you have conflicts and you have to address things in that order. The only exception I have found was sequin fabric because you use a denim needle but a medium tension setting. Again, these problems will make sense when you encounter them and maybe you will remember the advice from Elna above.    

Practice patience and don't write your machine off too quickly. I imagine this would be simplified if you buy a brand new machine but I can't speak to that. Which is another reason that I'm not writing a step by step post!

-his

[ten-and-his]

Preliminary Instruction for the Modern Novice Seamstress: FABRIC!

I think fabric is a useful access point because it is usually what inspires a project so maybe a particular piece of fabric is what can inspire you to sew!

Hand: The variety of fabrics and distinct names for the weaves is overwhelming, I recommend putting it out of your mind at the start. In the beginning think simply, synthetic and natural. Heavy and light. Think about your wardrobe and recall how certain garments feel and how they hang. Unfurl fabric from the bolt a bit and hold it by the edges and shake it a little, let it slide off of your forearm, lay it over your leg. In doing this you are examining the "hand" of the fabric. There are some things you can't make a fabric do. A lovely brightly colored pattern may catch your eye but a good examination of the "hand" will help you understand whether the fabric will drape nicely on your body and recognizing that goes well beyond whether it's the color you envisioned.

Avoid stretch fabrics and incredibly lightweight fabrics in the beginning. You want to be off to an encouraging start and selecting a tough fabric can be really discouraging. (My fledging seamstress self barely survived a brush with an idiotic pleated chiffon skirt I dreamed up as my first project.) Also, note care instructions and fiber content stickers on the end of bolts, Some really do have to be dry cleaned, which means they have to be dry cleaned before you cut and sew, which is super lame. Ah, yes, you have to prewash fabrics and trims before getting started. But that will be in my "preparing fabric for cutting" post.

Yardage Requirements: Mostly fabrics come in two widths, the 45" range and the 60" range. Which is why commercially available patterns have two sets of yardage requirements on the back with those measurements associated with them. These same yardage requirements will refer to "nap". Nap can be present on solid color fabrics, or it can refer to a pattern on fabric. For instance if you're eyeing that lovely floral then surely you'll want all those cute little tulips to be right side up, right? Well that takes more fabric because instead of being able to invert pattern pieces and make them fit snuggly together you have to make certain they are all right side up. Solid colored fabrics may also have nap. For instance velvet has a really pervasive nap. Look down into the fibers and it is rich and buttery, rotate 180 degrees and it goes shiny.

Try not to pay full price for fabric, most chains are constantly having sales. Similar advice for commercially available patterns. Sign up for the store's circular thingy and wait for a pattern sale, then go in sit there with the books, dream and buy a bunch of patterns. Oftentimes, the sale price is $0.99-$5.00 as opposed to the $15/each MSRP. On the flip side, if you're in a larger city try and figure out if you have an independent fabric store, which will have a larger more diverse selection.

The goal here is to get out of the house and to a cloth store and excited! You gotta want it! And you have to be relatively intelligent and patient with yourself. Those are the criteria.

As this is my first substantive post in this series I want to stress again that I have seriously only been at this for about 13 months. Humbly, please take that as encouragement and a disclaimer. Mom is going to look these over, so I don't lead you astray. But also scroll through, look at the stuff I've done, 13 months. And I have a full time job. Before I started all I could do was sew on a button and do small mending jobs by hand. That's it, I swear.

I think the next post will be on either fabric preparation or basic sewing machine terminology....

-his

[ten-and-his]

Preliminary Instruction for the Modern Novice Seamstress

I have had this project in mind since I started sewing last year. I get lots of questions, in my personal life and online etc, about how to get started sewing. I won't be speaking from knowledge and skill as much as I will be from experience and tribulation. And my experience has been that the sewing industry assumes that even beginning seamstresses have a fairly large body of knowledge coming in.

My Mother, as a person with a degree in such things, really is part of the "sewing establishment" as it were and often she seems taken aback when I ask questions. Not as much anymore, but a lot at the beginning. There's this level of preliminary instruction that the previous generation would have received at home or in a primary school class that my generation doesn't have access to or opted for computer science etc. This series of posts is meant to be about the dialogue between myself and my Mother and our realizations about what my generation doesn't know and what they would need to know in order to actually begin to sew.

So, away we go...