Making your own clothes can be so rewarding in that you can make clothes that fit better than the ready to wear garments. But what if you're just learning and don't really understand how to customize it yet? Even if you're using commercial patterns and working with your own measurements, there can be times when things can still not fit perfectly. Luckily, we're here to help and in this demonstration we show you to do an alteration to the pattern right from the start that will, hopefully, save you on alterations later. In this particular case, we do the waist decrease alteration for those cases when the bust and hips fit perfectly, but the waist is just a little too big. We show you examples on how to do this for the bodice, skirt, shorts with pockets, and also for the waistband. After this demonstration, you'll quickly be able to do a waist decrease alteration for all your commercial patterns and feel like they were created just for you.
hi there! If I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like you want to decrease the overall size of the pattern, which isn’t the same as doing an alteration like in this tutorial. It’s not as simple as just removing 2″ of around the whole perimeter of the pattern. It might work in your situation but I can’t promise that it’ll work. If you’re looking to take a pattern that’s a large and transform it into a small, that’s referred to as pattern grading. Unfortunately, we don’t have a tutorial on this yet, but you can read about it here: http://www.threadsmagazine.com/item/4368/making-sense-of-pattern-grading/page/all If you think the pattern will work for the most part but just the waistline needs to come in, then you can definitely try the alteration that I show. I hope that makes sense.
Hello Professor,
First of all, thank you for this video! I recently acquired a 90s sewing pattern for overalls. It’s a bit too big (the pattern I got is a Large 42-44 and I am a Small 34 to 36) for me but I thought I could figure out how to alter it for my size. If I understood your video correctly, based on my calculations am I supposed to shave off 2″? Hopefully I got that right. I also figured I’d have to do the changes to bib portion of the overalls as well. Please let me know if I’m figuring it out right when you get a chance. Thank you!
Great tutorials….