November 4, 2022

This week's newsletter is a video (click here to see the video).  I had a fitting with a student.  She's an apple and she is working with her core pattern.  One of the things that happens when you first start working with it, is dealing with different weights and drapiness of different fabrics.  It doesn't mean that they won't work, but sometimes you need to make some adjustments to make it work.

On this particular piece, she is working with a Cloud 9 fabric, which is a rayon fabric from a domestic company.  The fabric is very drapey and it's lighter weight than what we originally fit the core pattern.

If Emily at Bernina, does not have this anymore, that's OK - she keeps a good stock of Cloud 9 fabrics and they are a dream to sew with.  


This will happen with your core pattern.  Periodically you will have to tweak a garment depending upon the weight of the fabric.  But this is no more cumbersome than what you might do with a favorite pattern of any kind.  And that's what we're doing in the video.

There are a couple of notes.

Note 1:  Although the stripes in front help us understand the drape of the fabric, you can see how there is a definite tilt. 

So the stripe helps, but at the same time, without the stripe you can see a definite tilt to the front - it's tilting outwards. 

Note also that the front of this top looks just fine.  I talk about that later in the video

Note 2: The stripes matter and tell you what's going on at the same time.  Sometimes these can be a nightmare, but not if you stop and think about it. 

First, your body is three-dimensional.  As such it has angles and shapes and drapes that are important in fitting.  As such they fall on our body not in straight lines. 

The best way to describe this is in the familiar Goode Homolosine Map - you may not recognize the name but the map is familiar.

Because the world is a round sphere, this is how it would look if we spread the 3-d Earth into a 2-d map.  That's why you see airline flights (in 2-d) look like this.

This looks like the airlines are taking the really long route from San Francisco to Hamburg, but in 3-d is really is the shortest trip - over the tip of Greenland, even though it looks way longer in 2-d. 

The same thing happens when stripes cover our bodies and they are a lot more intricately shaped than a simple sphere.  We have breasts, stomachs, fannies, hips and all sorts of other bumps and rolls that enter into fitting.  But the stripes work the same way.

What this means is that we have to set priorities in our stripe fabrics.  Because in 2-d they are straight and seem logical, on our bodies sometimes we can get into trouble with them.  So we set what needs to be straight and best first, and then we give in as we go along.

Here's a common list of priorities

1. around neck - yeah
2. Shoulders
3. Décolletage
4. Center front & Center back - yeah - I know it's two, but you can work with both and they won't be in conflict with the other.
5. side fronts
6. side backs
7. sleeves - although really you have much more control here than you think - that's why it's so low.  Sleeves are almost like starting fresh, whereas everything else above (except #1's) depends upon what #1 is.
8. underarm

So now that we know what's first we can easily figure out where we have to match and look as perfect as we can - center front and the neck/collar area. 

Here's a good example - center front matches and it is on the perfect vertical of the garment although it looks funky here, it really is straight up and down.  The darts in front have been calculated so as not to take away from the center front.

We did them like this:

Here's what we did - we cut the pattern out as normal, and instead of taking in the dart in old way, we made sure that the actual dart was as even and straight on the pattern as possible.  That meant that we had to change where the dart ended at the hem to make sure it was straight.  In a basic and very graphic way, you can see the difference with the two stripe examples at the bottom.  The stripes are more easily matched (and therefore look correct) on the right version (that has been straightened with the grain), as opposed to the one on the left with the old dart layout which was slightly off the grain.  Basically we are rotating the dart ever so slightly so that the middle of the dart - the foldline of the dart - is on the straight of grain. 

That's it, and no one would really pay any attention to this, because our clothes are so cheaply made, they are cut wonky to save money.  But when you are dealing with stripes, diagonal, and particularly plaid fabrics, this may look confusing.  But it's knowing about it that helps you be aware of some of the problems in dealing with stripes.  Simply knowing the problem is more than 50% of the solution.  The rest is making sure that when you sew it up, it looks correct.

Here is an example of being careful of the stripes.
 

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