Somehow most of it is blue; resizing the 2 into a 13

 I do love this color of blue

Which is good, because there's even more of it

Although the latest alteration was on the black part of the dress, not the blue

The problem is: the bodice for a size 2 is the same chest measurement as a 13, but the proportions are very different, and on a young girl, that neck line of the size 2 is too low.

This is a good place to discuss fit models; grading patterns isn't just a case of sizing up, but recognizing proportional changes in ages and sizes. Children are not small adults; their torsos are differently proportioned. Old ladies are not young ladies, their torsos have shifted again. I could math it for you, but this is a post about me trying to do too many things in too short of a time frame. Like writing this post. So let's put a pin in that for now.

Because the size 13s are lost in transit, there are a couple of available size 2s, and the concert is coming up.

Can I raise the neckline? No.

I can lower the shoulder seams.

And. well,,... yes. Stretch velvet is a little forgiving that way.

I'm saying this now: these are the best alteration tags EVER. 

KaBLAMMY!

In brief:

The minute I put the red line on the sketch, I knew this would work. The proportions look alright.

Picked off sleeves, made template of armsceye, remarked and recut lower

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca1HMQqAPOl/ for hot video action

I swear by the lint ball. Thread sticks to my fingers and I need to get it off so I can pull the next one. I drag the thread across the ball and it catches it and I move on.

Though the tablecloth also does a similar job. Or my sleeve. 

Spent a lot of time reworking the shoulder sleeve and the neckline facing.

One was a bigger panic than the other and I just hope that it doesn't turn out to be totally askew and awful looking on the chorister. Some alterations look awful at a distance.

(cringe face)

And then I put the sleeves back in.

The puckering is all coming from the part of the neckline I didn't touch.

Hanging up, they all look fine (well, it's stretch velvet for the bodice, ponte for the skirts, which both hide/reveal a lot of slapdashery on my part as well as the original manufacturer.

I should mention these dresses are pretty well made in general. Now and then there's a seam that could have used a little more attention, but the sizes are generally consistent.  And these dresses need new size tags, which I neglected to add.

And a related sewing link, to a tribute to a shirt and the Liberty Fabric that it is made from (and how long lived that print has been)

https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/03/13/my-spring-shirt-o/

On a personal note, I am now done with Accounting 120, I will have a 92% grade, and I am just brainially beat. Lucky for me, work is going to be INsane.

Perfect timing.

Will Hem For Food 2019 Edition

Finally have a new thread that works with the blue hems

For a human that wasn't going to get any more sewing gigs, I have a stack right now.

The only one that doesn't pay is the bag.

So here's what I'm doing and then I gotta go back to it.

First due are the first set of custom pants that have been in the works forEVer.

Finally nailed down the pattern for Helene and have cut out the pants. Sewing them up Monday night, she comes to try them on Thursday.

Some blue hems for the choir. Actually blue and black and 52 altogether.

Small iPad bag for Blondini, who selected the fabrics from the stash. It's going to be gorgeous!

The Thomas patio chair family have failed seats. I'm making covers for them out of that outdoor fabric. They are going to be a cool new method. Probably next weekend. Yes, it's fall and rainy. The actual family can sit inside.

I almost forgot to post anything this week. I hope you've all had a good month, have been enjoying Second Hand September with the IG fam.

http://spygirl-amb.blogspot.com/2019/09/secondhandseptember-this-weeks-thrifty_21.html

I've got to get back on the blue hem train, so I can work on the pants tomorrow.

Oh, and I mended our basement door. Well, another 24 hours of dry time.

Flash! My sis sent me this link: Chanel atelier working on ballet costumes. The tulle petal colorwork technique is worth your time here
https://youtu.be/zq3c8UY-ec8

Choir Dress Hem Mystery

Another batch of choir clothes came in last week.Some of the black hems failed. Some did not. Some failed in epic fashion.

None of the blue skirts failed.

The front hems failed. The back hems did not. And not all of them. "A lot of them", which is not a useful damage report. They were all mended by the choir assistant director.

There is more stretch potential on the front skirt than the split piece back.

So this is where we left off last week.

The difference between the black and blue hems is functionally: the black had lace seam tape, the blue did not. The blue ended up with a slight zig zag stitch. The black had a straight stitch

(just thinking ahead on pulling out the hems next year). 

The one hem fail I got to see had broken in the front (the rest had been mended).

I used the same Gutterman thread for spool and bobbin.
I'm glad I took notes.

The bobbin thread on the outside hem is snapped. It's pretty frayed.

I'm going to wager that in pulling on the dress over the head, the front skirt panel gets grabbed and stretched, and because it's wider it has more elasticity in it. So you could achieve a larger failure rate and a large fail.

Live and learn. Girls gotta get dressed.

I've done the new hem (needed to be let down - girls grow a lot around this age) and done with a zig zag. I think it looks dodgy, but functional is important.

Alteration Nation:Adding width

Essentially, this is the dress.

Yes, that one.

Ten to eleven year old girls run a gamut of sizes, particularily on the 11 end. And someone needs a wider bodice this spring.

I could recut a new one, but out of what fabric? And what about replacing the rhinestones? This is going to get spendy.

Or...I can add width at the sides. It's under the arms, and if I have enough fabric from other hemming work on these, I can match it.

Hoarding enabled!

Ripping action shot

Serged some strips of appropriate width

Pulled off the skirt, added the strips to the side seam

So there is it. It is not an exact match, but when you  get them all together, all the dresses made from slightly different materials all look alike.

(the only one that sticks out is the one with the puffy sleeves)

There's still a hem to let down as far as it will go. 

So I'm turning up.....almost a 1/4".

Trimming up the unfinished edge of the hem. An actual dress I haven't hemmed before? NO! Just the new skirt someone else added.

They all come to me in the end.

The question is: will I get the job to make new ones? Will they try to buy something online? Will it be cheaper? 

Right now it will.

When it needs hemming.....no. No it will not.

I am putting a bid together and we will see how it goes. But for my money, I'd cut the skirts as long as possible, because you can always hem up. Hard to add onto the hem without it showing.

Which could be a feature.

Or a bug.

We'll see.

Hemming 2017 choir dresses I misuse a new tool

They're back. As much as I think I know them cold, I learn something new every year.

Note how the side seams flare out. They are double layered (taffeta with a chiffon overlayer) and the skirts are slightly flared on the side seams. Some more than others.

The tiniest hem on one of them. Literally just turning the serged edge over and sewing.

Not nearly enough. I take thread out. I put thread in.

Their nasty disposition has not changed. God, was I drunk when I did this last year?

No. It hung out for another year on the bias seam (to the right of the safety pin).

They keep sagging and growing. Seven, eight years of sagging.

I do alter those side seams as they come in. I straighten and even them out (the skirts were cut from different sized flats and mismatched when sewn together. There were 80 of them, so I can understand the mayhem potential).

Bias seams grow.

I'd like to thank the Understanding the  Bias/tAming the Bias class I took on Pattern Review years ago for helping me understand how to deal with this.

The seams on the sides that are on the bias will stretch out with time because there's no strong warp thread holding them up (the grey rectangle area will remain the same length.

You can hang them out until they reach maximum growth, and then hem.

Ideally, you match the angle of bias (an incorrect term, but I'm kinda skimming the topic for the moment) to itself so it grows out evenly. 

But let's say you're making a lot of dresses and you're doing it all on the flat. And let's say you miscounted the sizes you were cutting, so at the end, you're sewing different sizes together to get your quota.

A fair number of these dresses have skirt A and B sewn together, and are trimmed to the shorter hem.

The two different skirt sizes sewn together (and hemmed the same) will not have the same bias angle cut on the seams and will twist. The blue line on the right will twist more because it has a greater angle difference. And will never ever ever hang straight and make me curse and rue the day I took this job until I cut that seam open, recut the angle to attempt a match and try to true them up to each other. As big a pain as that can be, it has paid off over the years I've spent with them. 

After I've cut and resewn, the inch in seam length difference isn't unusual. That's been fighting to drop, stuck against the other seam. It had to go somewhere. So yes, one side will grow more than the other, but it will happen anyway and when it's done, it will stay done.

I've been hanging these to get the chiffon layer even. Not effective on an adult flat hanger.

Using this child display half-front torso hanger has helped. As creepy as it is, it's effective. These are dresses for ten year old girls, who range in height but mostly are 24/25" around with narrow shoulders.

As for chiffon, the poly is easy to burn while I'm taking out last year's creases and putting in new ones.

Steam it up, and weigh it down to set it with the tailor board. Man, it took me a couple years to use this technique, and I cannot recommend it enough.

I hem them up, I let them down. Like the tide. An 5 or 8" hem is not unusual.

And then there's the new toy.

The line is actually red, but shows up pink in all these photos. 

So we have a new tool to add

A new alteration is to bring that right (wearer's left) shoulder and sleeve forward (this is the after photo)

I reduce the seam allowance on the back of the armsceye

And I widen it at the front

Which does turn that sleeve to the front

It's not enough to match her shoulder's inward curve, but it is as much as I can carve out of the present seam allowances to allow it to be altered BACK at the end of the season.

Because we'll be reusing these dresses again next year I'm sure.

Unless we really aren't. No promises.

I'm 34 in, 13 to go. A little behind my own deadline, but well in front of the official one. This does not even touch the new iron (wore out the steam button on the old one) or the usual back to school hubbub. Someone may be an Eagle Scout this time next week. But why not run that down to the wire? 

Isn't that what we do here?

And pardon me, but HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!

The first autumn not sewing costumes for anyone.

(cue the sad trombone).

End of February round up: sewing for others and pattern matching fail

What am I doing now?

Mending. Fixing. Mending.

This is the sort of stuff that occupies most of my sewing time.

Fixed straps on bike helmets. Seattle Fabrics has an entire wall of drawers of this kind of hardware. Bless you SF!

There is a whole school of sewing that involved adding funky bits on top of nonfunky things. I am not really one of those people, though I do admire and love their thinking. This is my tribute to them. My husband begged me not to wear these pants out of the house. I did, but I did keep my coat fastened, so only he could see me wearing them around the house. Lucky guy.

Added removable alterations so I can wear the wool pants right now (vs when I lose ten pounds or alter it properly). This is what I do to make winter stop around here.

That and the grey coat.

You're welcome, Seattle.

Button over a buttonhole!

Added 'circuitry' patches behind 'preripped' jean holes. Also added three inches of pocket depth to them (to MENS JEANS. Men's jeans with shallow useless pockets. Wha?)

Altered photo to amuse Julie of Jet Set Sewing. And my sister. Hi Sandi! 

Bought magnetic bra clasps for future burlesque costume. You can store them on the fridge door until you need them. Or until your family objects.

Made those overalls for the boy. He's kept them in heavy rotation.

That whole tack button debacle. That really fries me: make a nice hole, pound a crap button into it, ruin the item as you remove the crap button. Do that a couple of times and it will affect your outlook on life for awhile.

Everything in the handsewing mend pile is black. Makes needle threading easier. Also harder to see tiny stitches. Family will not see badly sewn mends in the lousy lighting in our house. They won't wear these outside, will they?

 Sewed the long promised shirt for my sister.

 Traced it off and harvested the buttons ages ago.

I even took a photo of the original shirt and printed it out for a pattern page. I had good intentions. I even made a handkerchief for my sister from what wasn't all worn out on this shirt.

I did not lose the buttons!

I did not add seam allowances when I traced this!

My intention was to match up the pattern across the front, and ate up a huge amount of yardage in the attempt.

I can see here where I went wrong; I should have folded over more, basted it up, cut out the entire front piece as one entire piece, and then got back into the center to work out the underlapped placket and facing. I am so close to being right it kinda hurts to see this. I had scads of photos of my faulty process; it's a slow motion car wreck of pattern layout fail.

 And just missed by 1/2" in the end.

Spatial reasoning is HARD apparently
It's still a pretty fabric, and the shirt looks fine. My buttonholes are better than normal.

Sandi, your shirt is done. We'll lunch this week.

I have ten more choir dresses to alter, and four more belts out of that velvet ribbon.

I should clean house.

So that's the business until the 28th, when a whole new project starts up, just in time to be that last minute project for Emerald City ComicCon.

Because what is life without an impossible deadline?