I love piped seams. It’s the costumer in me. The trouble is that piping can get expensive, but making your own is super-cheap and easy…
4 CommentsCategory: Instructions
Let’s be honest – most of us aren’t buying jeans at a price point where we’re going to see a real flat-felled seam. It’s a…
Leave a CommentThis is the classic seam associated with denim, particularly when it comes to jeans. It’s really deceptively easy to do. (It does help if you…
2 Comments…without anyone looking at the finished tab and asking if you were drunk and wearing mittens when you sewed it. I mean, everybody “knows” that if you want to bind rounded tabs you just have to use bias tape. Like, duh. But be honest with me – how well does that action really work when you try it? Between you, me, and the interwebs, when I try to machine bias onto a rounded tab in one swell foop, it usually looks poo. But a miracle happened last week, and my brain kicked in. There’s a little bitty-bit of magic from millinery that makes the difference between the top corset (the drunken-mittens approach) and the bottom corset (so much nicer…). And it’s fast, people. It’s faster than fighting the normal Battle of the Bias…
8 CommentsNo, not grade like what I do when my students turn in patterns! Grading a pattern is the process of sizing it up (or down). It sounds fairly intimidating, especially if you’ve ever seen any of the mysterious old-school tools for “assisting” in the process. (They’re a strange array of bars and levers, and I have absolutely no mortal clue what they’re meant to do or how they’re meant to do it.) Fortunately, there’s a quick and dirty way to grade a pattern…
4 CommentsPad stitching is awesome. It’s fantastic. It’s often replaced with fusible interfacings and spray-glue products, and that’s a darn shame. Because pad stitching is pretty nifty. It’s used to bond an infrastructure layer (traditionally hair canvas in tailoring) to the layer it’s stiffening (often the under-collar). And the great thing is, it provides MORE STRUCTURAL GLORY than the original infrastructure product can on its own. Beat that with a stick!
8 CommentsSo,about that not-being-able-to-post-pictures-withcaptions thing? Yeah,so apparently, I need to have the pad in portrait mode…. Ahem, I mean, not-typey-keyboard-mode (Oh, autocorrect, why do you fight me?!), if one values captions.
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