Patterns: why a beginner should use them.

I recently had a run in with my arrogance which is actually quite a rare occurrence for me.  I'm, of course, not saying I'm devoid of a little arrogance here and there, but it is so very often misplaced.  Since moving down to Leicester and realising that I have a chronic lack of clothes to wear I either wanted to buy them or make them.

Sewing historical clothes and fantasy clothes is an acceptable and cool hobby, but at the end of the day where can you really wear them except from in your home, in a secluded area for a photo shoot, or at one of those period dos that I have never once been to or find.  Making everyday clothes is practical, fun, and tailored exactly to your body.  I have made two cotton dresses and a chiffon top, all with patterns.

A few weeks ago I went in search of a fabric store, cause I like looking in them to see what they have.  When I arrived it was empty, yay, and I was really in the mood for a tartan skirt.  There is two reasons for this; one, I like tartan skirts, and two, all of the ones they sell in the shops do not suit me at all.  I will admit to being influenced by recent tartan UK fashion, but I do genuinely like tartan.  After finding a nice tartan I bought two metres knowing that I would make a skirt and thinking a metre may be too little.

This is when my arrogance butted in.  I am one of those people who occasionally underestimates how difficult something is.  I wanted to make a pleated, kilt like skirt, my taking my measurements, adding a seam allowance, and then pleating or gathering it.  I would like to mention here that I gathered the skirt on my 15th Century Italian dress and apparently after doing that I thought I was an expert.

Needless to say I got home, drew a little pathetic sketch of the skirt, measured how wide I wanted the box pleats.  What I was intending on doing was box pleating the front and then kind of knife-type pleating at the back.  I measured my waist, added a seam allowance and all of the extra I would need for the pleats.  That is the sound of a promising start isn't it?  Wrong.

My two dresses I had made were box pleated, but I had to change them to be smaller because I cut out the wrong size of pattern, and when I altered them manually the dress fit perfectly.  I had no measurements in that case and so I thought with the skirt I was at an advantage because I'd measured it out.  Oh no, I really wasn't.

Not once did I really take into consideration what type of skirt suited me.  For some reason the cotton dresses with the box pleats do, but when I did this with the skirt it was absolutely horrible!  The smaller pleats at the back did nothing to help matters either.  I loved this material, it is a polyester tartan, the same one all of the tartan skirts are made out of(-ish).  But it doesn't have a nice hang, obviously, because it's meant to be kilt-like pleated, and when pleated in any way it hangs straight, no flare, just straight.  Now that I think about it, the fabric is quite stiff, but it does have a drape of some kind.  Rather than just starting again with the remaining metre, I had cut the three panels wide enough to make a skater skirt instead, this time I used one of my current skater skirts as a pattern.

A few corners and edges were off, but that could be hidden within seams.  I'm going to jump straight to the end here since I finished it this afternoon.  The construction was good, I stitched down all of the seams (they weren't big enough to flat fell), I stitched on the bias binding waistband and I even sewed in the really bright coloured zip I purchased.  I knew it would be a bit big but that was easily sorted.  What an absolute disaster it turned out to be.

it actually looks quite good, doesn't it?  Do not be fooled by this picture!  The sewing, the seams and the zip are the best part of this skirt.  The hem is uneven (which, to be fair, I already knew), the side I put the zip in isn't even so bunches, and because of the zip the skirt sticks out at that point (I see now why some people use zips as a cheap form of boning for corsets).

I sewed down all of the seams because as I said earlier they weren't big enough to flat fell, and I hate any raw edges on garments showing it just makes me paranoid they're going to unfurl.  The entire thing was hand sewn and I love the tartan so much.

You can see the turquoise zip I chose.  I know the colour doesn't match but I like that colour and I think it compliments the tartan nicely.  The only thing that I am proud of is that before I went to buy the siz I didn't measure how many inches I'd left for its opening in the side seam, and so I had to estimate it when I bought the zip.  It fit perfectly, that's skill right there.  I do find I have a humble ability to approximate accurately the length of fabric, or a zip, or anything like that; it comes in very useful when I'm having to hem longer gowns on my own.

Ironically it wasn't actually the lack of a paper pattern that made this skirt horrible, it was that the material didn't suit the type of skirt I was making.  With skater skirts you need to have a fabric that can drape, cotton, polyester blends like this one, and other crisper fabrics just aren't the way to go.

I now have a metre left of this beautiful tartan polyester blend and a skirt that is only wearable under a very long and large jumper.  Thoughts on what to do with the leftover material are thin on the ground because it is polyester.  I might put it as a sneaky lining somewhere, pretend its a heavy cotton.  Hopefully when I begin to sew my Tempest gown over the weekend nothing this awful will happen.

Let this be a warning to other newbies like myself.  Patterns, it turns out, aren't necessary for beginners (but unless you like dancing close to expensive material death I would recommend them), but the right type of material for your project is essential!  Thankfully this material was cheap and pretty and I made the entire skirt for about £7, but it was a lesson well learned.