Another class of mostly doing.

First off: Tacking the skirt ready for first fitting. The idea here is that you sew up the sides of the skirt together, good sides facing each other. On one side, you sew up all the way from top to bottom, but on the other side, you need to leave about 10cm – 15cm at the top for the zip (and to get in and out when you’re trying it on…)

Once that’s done, you go try your skirt on. If it fits (as was the case with me) you can sew it up. Otherwise:

• If it’s too big:
1. You need to use pins to make the skirt fit better
2. Using those pins as a guideline, sew a new line of tacking along the pins.
3. Try on again
• If it’s too small:
1. You need to unpick the tacking and re-tack so that it fits.
2. Try on again
3. Repeat if necessary

The class this Monday was a bit less teaching and a lot more doing as we pinned our patterns to our fabric, ready for marking out on to the fabric and cutting.

Since our patterns don’t already have a seam allowance, we have to draw that around afterwards. This is the process for getting your material ready for sewing:

1. Pin the pattern to the fabric, making sure that the pattern is in the same direction as the the fabric thread. Since we just have half a pattern for the front and back, you need to fold the fabric in half and align the pattern edge with the fold. You will pin the pattern through both layers of fabric.
2. Using the chalk, draw around the pattern.
3. Draw the following seam allowance lines around the pattern:
• Bottom seam: 4cm
• Side: 2cm
• Top: 1cm
4. Cut! (along the seam allowance lines)

You now have half a skirt, folded in half. Since you have only drawn out the pattern on one half of the fabric, you need some way to transfer the markings onto the folded over bit. For this you use a tailor’s tack, which is essentially leaving a loop of thread between stitches, instead of pulling the thread tight to the fabric. You then open up the two tacked sides, cut through the stitches between and use the stitches left on the non-marked side as your pattern markings.

So, we have our basic straight skirt pattern, made to our dimensions, but that doesn’t necessarily make for a very pretty skirt. What you can do, however, is to transform it into another skirt pattern. The easiest transformation is the A-line skirt:

A-line Skirt

For the A-line skirt, both the front and back patterns are going to be the same. However, since we have different dart sizes on the front and back, we have to calculate the mean dart width or intake (G in the diagram below).

G = (dart width from back + dart width from front) / 2

Essentially what we are trying to do is close up the dart at the top. So what you do is:

1. You take a copy of your basic skirt pattern (you can probably just trace around it)
2. Re-draw dart with new intake measurement.
3. Cut a straight line from dart apex down to the bottom of the pattern
4. You are now left with a rectangle and the other shape.
5. To close dart you join both sides of the dart together as per the diagram
6. Close up left over triangle.

A-Line skirt Transformations

Yoke Skirt

You might want to have a different fabric on the top. In this case you just make a copy of the A-line pattern and you cut a section off the top in a curved line. The width of the yoke section varies with individual preference.

Skirt with a border

Equally, you might want to have a different fabric on the bottom. In which case you make a copy of the A-line pattern and you cut off the bottom in a similar way as you did for the yoke:

Basic Straight Skirt Transformations

The following transformations are derived from the original straight skirt pattern.

Yoke Skirt with Gathered Bottom

For this you simply make a pattern for the yoke by cutting off the width of yoke you’d like from the straight skirt pattern, and joining up the dart. Then, for the gathered bottom, you need a rectangular piece of fabric which is the original straight skirt width (A) plus 1/2A once again (e.g if A was 20 then your rectangle would be 20 + 10 = 30cm wide)

Tiered, Gathered Skirt

This is the same principle as the yoked skirt with the gathered bottom again, only you increase the rectangle size by a half for each tier you have.

Pencil Skirt

For the pencil skirt, you need to take off approximately 2cm from the sides of the skirt below the hip. In order to do that, you draw a line 2cm in from the side at the bottom of the skirt to the new hip line. You then cut off the excess triangle as per the diagram below.

Box Pleat Skirt

For the pleats in the box pleat skirt, you need to take the original pattern, cut it in two along the dart apex and redraw adding extra width for the cloth. You must keep the dart location, depth and angle in order to then make the pleat by sewing up the dart as shown below. The extra width in the pattern should be 2xdesired pleat width.

NB: Please note that diagrams are not proportional or to scale, they are simply to illustrate the principle of how you transform from one pattern to another

July is turning out to be a very crafty month. On Monday I started the first of a set of classes on pattern making that are being ran at Golferichs centre cívic here in Barcelona.

Since Ivan got me a sewing machine for my last birthday I’d been looking for a chance to use it properly. So far all I’ve done with it is hem the curtains and found it difficult enough to get a straight (parallel) line. I was very disappointed I had missed out on the previous term of classes, when I was planning to do both a learning to sew and the pattern making class. So when the July intensive course list came up I signed up for the pattern making straightaway. Unfortunately they didn’t have the sewing one available but I’m hoping to pick up some skills during this course and complete the rest when the autumn timetable comes out.

For those of us not familiar, pattern making is the process of drawing up a template to use when cutting cloth to make garments.

The teacher explained to us that there were many methods of making up clothing patterns and she was going to teach us the Camps method, which is an industrial pattern making method developed by Jordi Camps. This is only a theory and what we are trying to do is to turn a volume (our body) into a surface area. Everyone has a different shape, and so the instructions may not work for everyone, but the idea is to get a starting pattern which we can then modify to our own bodies.

Anyway, we are going to start off with a very simple (somewhat ugly) straight skirt and see where we go from there. In order to make our own personalised patterns we had to take our measurements. We did this in pairs to make it easier. For the skirt you need the following measurements:

• Waist – this is measured at the narrowest point where your body goes in from your hips (if that makes sense…)
• Hips – this is measured at the widest point and around the fullest part of your buttocks
• Distance from Waist to Floor (or Knee depending on preference, in any case, you can always make pattern longer or shorter)