Adding Grow Room to Children’s clothes

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

Hi! I’m wanting to make a dress for a little girl but would like to leave some grow room in the chest, waist, and length (and wherever else might be needed). The dress is sleeveless but wondering about the armhole?? I’m very new at adding any alterations so I’m wondering what would be the simplest way to do this. I’m working with a vintage pattern I found that is not multi-sized.

Also, was wondering how to tell which is the crosswise vs. lengthwise in a cut of fabric (from thrift shop) that is missing the selvage edge?

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

If the dress is larger, you can make the seam allowances bigger than what is called for. As the child grows you can replace your seams with smaller ones. Maybe add some extra inches to the hem so you can also extend the length of the dress as needed. As for the armholes, I guess it just depends on how they’re finished. If they use bias tape, then I imagine you’ll have to redo with a new piece of bias tape everytime you let the dress out. cute pattern! 🙂
As far as your fabric with the missing selvage, tug your fabric both ways. I don’t know if this works with every fabric, but if I pull my fabric lengthwise, it has no stretch whatsoever. Pulling crosswise does has a very small stretch. So the direction of your fabric with no stretch will then be your lengthwise, or straight-of-grain direction. Hope that helps and I’d love to a picture when you finish!

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

Thanks! I understand what you’re saying. In regards to this particular dress though, I think I would need to re-size the whole dress larger, (she’s a size 3 but she’ll probably grow into a size 4 pretty soon) which makes me apprehensive for fear I’ll end up disfiguring the dress completely. I guess, my question should have been, how to resize a garment larger? Not sure whether it’s a different approach when dealing with different garments or basically the same method for all? I watched your vids on resizing bust and waist, which were totally helpful, so I tried doing it with this little dress but when I got to the collar and facings…I wasn’t sure whether to leave them the way they were or make my new line go inward instead of outward (to make the collar deeper/larger), or what?? Started to get a little stuck. Maybe that might be a little too advanced for me to delve into yet… = (

Thanks for the tip about the fabric too!

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

So you’re trying to increase the overall size of the pattern? With that you’ll more likely do pattern grading, which we don’t have a tutorial on yet, but hope to have one in the future. In the meantime, check out this article I found on it: http://www.threadsmagazine.com/item/4368/making-sense-of-pattern-grading/page/all If you do this, you will need to increase facings and the collar.

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

That’s exactly what I need to learn, thanks for the link! Looking forward to a tutorial!

Also would love a tutorial on how to match one way designs (stripes, plaids, etc.) to the pattern pieces so that the entire garment looks unified.

Ahhhh so many questions…so much to learn! = ))

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

That is definitely one on my list 🙂

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