InsaneJournal

When I have my own house ...
I want a kitchen with a large island. Or a peninsula. Because cutting fabric for sewing is easier on the kitchen table than it is on the floor, but it's still hard on the back. Those extra few inches of height make so much difference.

Right now, I'm working on the bridesmaids dresses for my brother's wedding. Two cotton sundresses (it's going to be outside in Hawaii). I am so glad my future sister-in-law said "Just buy the extra yard and a half on the bolt" when we were getting the fabric. Because the skirts are very full, and each panel is to wide to fit on 45" fabric folded in half (the standard fabric width), so you're supposed to unfold it and double it up (so you can still cut two pieces at a time). Except ... they're obviously assuming you're working with a fabric that has no "up" or "down," because it doesn't work at all if you do. The way they tell you to arrange the pattern pieces on the fabric to cut it out usually sucks, but this was worse than usual. I needed actually quite a bit of the extra yard to make it work. Fortunately, it's cotton, which is so easy to work with. It just lies there flat and straight on the table, needs a bare minimum of pinning, it's great. The lining, on the other hand, is thin rayon (breathes better than polyester, and these are designed with Hawaii in mind, after all). Rayon lining is a bear to work with--it slides around on you if you so much as look at it cross-eyed. Even if you use lots of pins, it's going to find some way to slide around ... and it's real easy to have it slide on you when you're putting a pin in, and the more pins you put in the more chance you have of that. On the other hand, if you use too few pins, you risk a catastrophic slip when you're actually cutting.

It's an easy pattern to alter to fit--it's a halter top dress with a relatively high waist, so only the bust and waist measurements matter. One girl has a size-14 bust and size-16 waist (there's no size 15 in between), the other has a size-14 waist and is just under a size-14 bust. Very simple to make the adjustments. Pattern sizes are much different than ready-to-wear sizes--I'd say both girls are probably a six or an eight in ready-to-wear. See, stores have been slowly increasing sizes in ready-to-wear garments for decades, because playing to the vanity of the women trying on garments sells clothes. If you can say "Oh, I must have lost weight--I'm not really a fourteen, I'm a twelve!" you're more likely to buy it than if you say "yeah, still as fat as ever." (This is also why sizes can vary so dramatically from store to store and brand to brand--they haven't all been increasing at the same rate.) Pattern sizes, on the other hand, have stayed exactly the same. If you take out a pattern from 1950 and look at the measurements they give, a size-14 is the same as a size-14 today. This is actually a bit of a problem, for me--I didn't start buying ready-to-wear clothing for myself until college. I'm not a clotheshorse, never went shopping for fun; all my store-bought clothes came from birthdays and Christmas, and the only time I had to actually look at the sizes myself was when I was looking at patterns and fabric to make something for fun. So when I went away to college and started to buy my clothes myself, my first instinct was to grab twelves or fourteens, and then wonder in the dressing room why they didn't fit, before going "duh, sizes are different" and going out to find something my size. (First few times, it took like four trips out to the rack to grab the right size; I am so not joking.) I still don't shop for clothes much; I'm only now getting to the point where my first instinct is to grab the right size in ready-to-wear.