New Sewists Thursdays - A Primer on Fit!

Colleen says:
I make my living fitting bodies. I’ve been doing it in some form or another for almost my entire life time. My skills have evolved into a paycheck coupled with international travel for companies that I’m sure you know of and most likely own a piece of clothing or lingerie by one of them. In short, I’m good at what I do – but here’s the secret -- people overestimate the skills needed to achieve a good fit.

Many home sewists grow to fear it, they leave fashion sewing and start crafting, or quilting or making home dec items because the ever elusive ‘fitting’ is too difficult. I’m here to tell you – it isn’t!

I’ve known Carolyn for probably 15 years and we have many shared fun moments around our families and our sewing machines. If you bribe me with chocolate, I’ll tell you how she used to fit garments before we met and I gently guided her in a more suitable direction.

Carolyn asked me to share some very general points in a first of several blog posts on what constitutes good fit and some tips to achieve it. Obviously I can’t cover everything in a blog format, but I’m hoping you can take away a few things that will enhance your future projects.

Perfect fit:
Perfect fit, does not always give you the most flattering garment. The idea is to flatter your figure, not just fit it. I’m a plus sized woman, I can make any garment for my body, but I’m steering clear of the bikinis and micromini skirts. . . they don’t flatter me.

Labels:

Instead of spending time to label your perceived figure flaws, I recommend you simply embrace your figure and keep fitting and fitting and practicing!

Fabric:

Fabric weight and weave can make or break a garment – when you decide on a pattern, take a shoping trip and find a similar style and feel the weight of the fabric that works for the garment shape.

More than Measurements:

A perfect set of measurements isn’t going to make the pattern magically fit you because it is the relationship of those measurements sitting next to each other that is going to give you a good fitting garment.

Think of this for a moment. You are a bird, sitting in a tree, looking down on a snowman that someone built below you. What you see from above is three circles, one inside the other, perfectly nested inside each other.
If you took the measurements of the largest point around each section, you could put pencil to paper. And draw out a pattern and it would wrap around this and zip up the back without problem and Ms. Snow Fashionista would be out the door. . . However – we aren’t all built with our measurements equally distributed off of one main center column as a snow person is.

Commercial sewing pattern measurements give several key measurements to work with; however they don’t speak to how those measurements relate to one another.

What if the snow person has a middle section that is the perfect measurement, but what if it is pushed far forward, overhanging the lowest section? Would the commercial sewing pattern still fit perfectly if the measurements were exactly what they called for? Hmmmm, the answer is ‘it depends.’

(for the record, every student I’ve ever taught would sigh heavily when I uttered the words ‘it depends’ as they knew they weren’t getting a short yes/no question answered!)

First, let’s look at what she’d look like from the birds eye view. Her head and hips are in the same location – all the measurements are the same as the pattern, except this time her mid section is repositioned more forward.

The finished garment will not fit as intended because the position of the measurements in relation to the others is not the same.

I use this example over and over to illustrate if a woman has a larger than a B bust cup. Commercial patterns are under the assumption that the bust on the person wearing the garment is a B bust cup. But what if you are a “D” bust cup, and you buy a pattern based on your larger fuller bust – the pattern is still not going to fit well because the pattern assumes you are the ‘regular’ snowperson all aligned in the center or ‘normal’ position, but instead your body pulls the fabric forward to cover your bust, and you are left with drag lines (lines in the garment that pull or twist and don’t look pleasing to the eye).

My long winded point in illustrating all of this is to help you learn that the ‘relationship’ of measurements next to each other is as important as the measurement itself.

LEARNING TO FIT:

How did you learn to make your bed and smooth out the wrinkles? You put on the fitted sheet and it was nice and tight and smooth, then you snap the top sheet over and it lands in soft folds on the bed. Then what? Your eyes look at the cloth and you read the wrinkles and instinctively know which corner or edge to pull to smooth it out. Fitting garments is as easy as that – read the wrinkles and smooth them out.

While I see the merit in writing books on fitting ‘methods’ and ‘techniques’ – many many of them if learned and studied and followed thru on will give you beautiful well fitting clothing – what I don’t see is having to have a Ph.D in fitting in order to enjoy garment sewing!

So, smooth the wrinkles to the edges (seams), fold out any corners, creating tucks (darts) and soon you’ll be fitting clothing as easily as making your bed.


The secret here is to not only think of the measurement at hand, but the adjacent ones. In other words, if you want to make a dress to fit the snow woman who’s middle section is forward, you need to have a piece of cloth that will not only accommodate the lower section measurements (the hip) but also take into consideration that the abdomen extends further and that must be added (see the red line on the right is slightly longer on the snow woman than the original – EVEN THOUGH THE MEASUREMENTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL SECTIONS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME)

(Another way to think about this is to picture having to wrap the snow woman in paper like a gift. When you lay the snow woman down on the paper and pass the paper over the top of her, you need to accommodate that middle piece that extends past the larger section, so you have enough paper to wrap it all up in – if you cut the paper only long enough for the longest measurement, it won’t be long enough!)

I’m obviously oversimplifying this and not giving specifics on ‘how’ to accomplish this, but my main objective is to simply open your eyes to the ‘why’ your patterns aren’t fitting even when you painfully take exacting measurements and match them to the patterns you purchase.

Here is what I tell students to have fun with: Make your bed for the next week, paying attention to your natural ability to smooth out the cloth and make it nice and flat for each layer of your bed. THEN for the next few days, throw a pillow in the center of the bed and smooth out and make folds (darts) around the pillow to make a pleasing bed that way. After that, put something tall, like your bathroom trash can in the bed, and fold and dart around that. Play with it; see what fits it and what flatters it into a nice pleasing eye. Practice gift wrapping odd shaped items for fun. Paper is not forgiving – you will learn lots of things wrapping balls, or eggs, or flat bottomed bowls etc. Start analyzing the draglines and drapes in your garments, and start smoothing them out into seams and darts to fit better.

...so that's the end of Part 1 of Fitting with Colleen. If you have any questions or need clarification on any point, please leave it in the comments section. Colleen and I will be monitoring the comments and then will do another post to answer your questions. Please realize that this is a "starter" post on fit. No one achieves fit overnight or magically. It is something that is worked on and perfected. You just have to be willing to start and press forward until you've reached your goal...not giving up when faced with obstacles...sort of like me and invisible zippers! *LOL*

If you want to see Colleen's fitting abilities in action - these pictures are from 2004 with Colleen fitting my Uniquely You Dressform to me! The pics will only be up to the weekend...so enjoy!

And as always...more later!