What to look for in choosing a designer or alteration specialist

Choosing a Sewing and Design Professional

When you contact an Association of Sewing and Design Professionals member, he or she will ask you about your project, time line, and budget. Your sewing pro will probably ask to see you in person to talk about your project before quoting a price. Some sewing pros charge a consultation fee, which may later be applied toward the cost of your project.

At your first meeting, be sure to ask questions! Association members welcome your questions about the type of work they do, their education and training, and how long they've been in business. Ask to see photos or samples of their work, and ask for references. Many members also have websites where you can learn more about them and view photos of their work.

For custom garments, you'll want to bring your design ideas with you to the initial consultation. Photos, sketches, sample garments and fabric swatches are all helpful. Your sewing pro may also invite you to email links to websites with designs you like so he or she can take a look at them before you meet in person.

Design details, fabrics, trims, pattern development, fitting issues, and anticipated sewing time all affect the price of a custom garment. Your sewing pro will explain the options available to you and then quote pricing according to the choices you've made. Custom garments are usually more expensive than ready-to-wear, but there are no additional alterations charges to factor in. Your custom garment will be the style, color and fit that flatters you best.

For alterations, you'll need to bring or wear the undergarments and shoes you plan to wear with the garment being altered. Pricing will depend on the work needed to improve the fit and the way the garment was originally constructed. Specialty alterations on garments such as wedding gowns may require more than one fitting.

from the website of the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals

                                                           July 2011

How to choose clothing that looks good on you!

7/16/2011

OK, when I go to a store, I am always looking for a bargain, but I get discouraged because bargain items are generally not found in my size. So then I look for ANYthing in my size. I might find 5 or 6 items, take them into the dressing room and 3 actually fit. How do I know if they look good on me?
How do YOU know what looks good on YOU? Do you take a friend you can trust who will be brutally honest with you? I have clients who purchase garments and then make an appointment with me because they know that I WILL be honest with them. That doesn't mean that they will always listen to what I say, but they WILL take my advice into account as they decide what to keep and what to return.
One client in particular really takes buying clothes seriously and does not want to make a mistake by buying something that does NOT look good on her, or cannot be altered to fit her well. She actually has had her husband take photos of her in her undergarments. She then traced around her body shape, hair and face, and took this tracing to her copy machine and made it a convenient size to fit in a small notebook for her purse. When she finds something she is interested in buying, she draws the outfit on her body and looks for balance, proportion and style. She then evaluates how it will fit in with the rest of this season's wardrobe, and makes an intelligent decision. Wow! The garments she brings to me have really been scrutinized and she has a BEAUTIFUL wardrobe of clothes.

Aladdin Costumes for Miss Leah's Dance Studio, Watertown, WI

Miss Leah's Dance Studio   April 2011

What fun to see my original costumes perform on-stage! The girls danced like the wind and the reviews from the girls and their parents on the fit, style, and value of the costumes were wonderful to hear. There were 8 girls, and no two were sized alike, so alas, I had to draft 8 different patterns! The most fun part was sourcing for the fabric. The harem pants were made from a royal blue with silver sparkles, and I used the same fabric in gold for the belts. The vest was a beautiful purple brocade with colorful butterflies woven into it. To top it all off, were some shimmering hair ties. I'd say they were lots of work, but most certainly one of my most fun projects this year! YAY for the fabulous job Miss Leah did in teaching these girls jazz and ballet!


                                               

The Beginning of a very busy season

April 2011
In the alterations and custom sewing business, we have two seasons....busy, with Bridal, Prom and Homecoming, and the not so busy....Alterations and repairs come in both of our seasons. So if you need your pants hemmed, or your husband tore a hole in his jeans sliding into home plate, we really welcome the change of pace this gives us when we are up to our eyeballs in alligators with prom dresses. Here at Katherine's we all love what we do and really, really love the variety it gives us. If we had to do bridesmaid dresses every day all year, we'd get stagnant. What sparks our creative thinking is when you bring in a special challenge...a garment with a difficult fabric, hunting pants with zippers and ties at the hem that need shortening, holes in a beautiful suit you just don't want to give up. These things all make us work for a beautiful solution to a seemingly difficult problem for you. For instance, a young lady brought us a gorgeous silk sleeveless top she purchased online. She was so excited when her package came, she quickly opened the box with a razor blade, essentially cutting slits in her top. We were able to hem the top so

Fun Custom outfit

One of the most fun things we do here at Katherine's Design is to take a client's ideas and put them first to paper and then into fabric. This photo shows just that. The client needed an outfit to wear to her son's wedding, but she had some unique fitting issues. So I took some photos of her and drew some designs based on some patterns she had purchased. The fabric is what made this garment just pop with interest. The side drape not only camoflaged a fit issue, but its movement made everything sparkle. The base for the top and the pant were made from a beautiful stretch silk charmeuse...it feels so soft! The sparkly top layer of the top was a sequinned silk chiffon. The client was going to wear this to her son's beach wedding, so it had to be easy to care for, cool and comfortable. I think we were able to accomplish all that, and she looked wonderful. This is what makes us happy...fabulous fabric, great clients and a happy ending!
                            March 2011

Why don't store-bought clothes fit?

November 2010
 

Are You Well Endowed?

If your bra cup size is anything more than a B, then ready-to-wear (RTW) clothing made of woven fabrics will not fit.

T-shirts, sweaters, and other garments made from knitted fabrics will stretch to cover the subject, but most women who are amply endowed like to wear clothes made of woven fabrics, and they like to wear clothes that are fitted to their figures. In earlier decades, women almost always wore very fitted clothing, like the costumes on the television show Mad Men. Nowadays, most of the clothes that we wear are looser by design, but for formal attire, like wedding gowns, a close and precise fit is essential.

Most women know their correct bra cup size, but did you know that clothes have a cup size, too? They have to. A bra has to fit your breast size, and fitted clothes have to fit correctly over that bra.

Most clothing sold today is drafted to fit a B cup. Most commercial sewing patterns are also drafted to fit a B cup. If you are a C,D, E, F, G, H or I cup, you are out of luck when it comes to RTW. There are important reasons for this shortcoming.

Drafting is the process of drawing the complicated shapes of the pieces of cloth that make up the clothes that we wear. Some garments only have 3-4 pieces of fabric in them, such as a tank top, which might have a front, back, and maybe a neck and armscye (armhole) binding. Other garments can have 40 or more pieces of fabric in them, such as a menswear-styled tailored jacket or a woman's wedding gown. When the shapes of these pieces are drafted, each of the individual pieces must be the right length, width, and shape to fit the various parts of the wearer's body; each of them must fit together precisely; and each of them must comprise the intended design of the garment after they are sewn together. That's complicated!

Drafting garments is a very technical process. There are generally two approaches to figuring out what size and shape to make the pieces that make up a garment.

One is draping. With this method, pieces of inexpensive fabric, usually muslin, are layed over a dressform that has the intended design lines, such as seam lines, neck lines, and so on marked on it with black tape so the draper can see the lines through the muslin. While paying very carefull attention to grainlines (the direction of the weave of the fabric), the draper uses her hands to "sculpt" the fabric into the intended design, pinning and cutting as needed. When the drape is completed, the right and left sides are trued, or adjusted, construction lines are marked, and seam allowances are added so that the garment can be cut and sewn. Draping works well, especially for some types of garments, but in the RTW industry the draping is nearly always done on a standardized dressform that is tall, thin, and has a B cup size. Sometimes draping is done on an actual figure, but in RTW, that figure is always about the same as a commercial dressform: no G cups to be found in industry.

The second method is flat drafting. There are hundreds of hand drafting systems around that use paper, pencil, rulers, compass and other tools much as an architect would draw a blueprint, using the basic principles of geometry. Nowadays, drafting is nearly always done by computer using Auto-CAD programs. After the first pattern drape or draft is completed, all the pattern pieces for a garment are enlarged in length and width to make larger garment sizes using a process called grading. The grading process assumes that everyone gets proportionally and regularly taller as they get bigger around (we wish), and it assumes that no one has any figure variations, in other words, that we look like standardized dressforms.


When fitting women's busts (the polite and professional term for "the girls"), this process gets even more complicated. Breasts vary tremendously in size, shape, and position on the torso. As anyone who has tried to follow those little measurement charts in lingerie catalogues to order a bra can tell you, there is much more to cup size than numbers.

Cup size is really a kind of short-hand way of describing the difference in circumferences around the torso from the chest above the bust, to the fullest part of the bust, to the torso just below the bust. Cup size also describes the volume of the breasts.

To explain this geometrically, the base of a breast is basically a circle. Imagine two circles drawn on your chest where your breasts are. The size of these circles varies tremendously with the size of the woman. For a tiny woman, that circle might have a diameter of 5 inches, while a large woman's breasts might be represented by a circle that is 10 inches in diameter. If you remove a segment, (think of taking a slice out of a pie) from this imaginary circle, and then you bring the cut edges together, you get a cone shape, which looks like a breast! If you take out a relatively smaller segment, the cone on its base will not be very high. If you take a larger slice, the resulting cone shape will sit up much higher. The larger segment or slice corresponds to a larger cup size. Both the size of the circle and the size of the segment vary with body and breast size, and they need to vary with garment size and cup size to fit each body.

Those pie shaped segments are like darts in fitted garments. Darts are those triangular or diamond shaped folds that are stitched down inside a garment to fit the bust, as well as other areas of a body. The size of these darts must correspond to the cup size of the wearer or the garment will not fit correctly. The position of the darts on a garment must also correspond to the position of the bust on the torso.

Even more complicated, many garments are not fitted only with darts, but with dart equivalents, such as gathers, pleats, tucks, shaped seams such as princess seams, yokes, and so on. The fit for the bust can be hidden in numerous design details.

Because RTW is mass marketed, profit is far more important than fit. That is why RTW doesn't even bother to tackle the cup size issue, and consumers just buy what they can find.

Alterations can help, but if you are well endowded, you need custom clothing that has been adjusted to fit your cup size, or you need to adjust patterns for cup size if you sew for yourself.

More later on how to judge good fit.

Today is National Ride Your Bike to Work day. As I listened to the news this morning, I was thinking that I should get my bike out and pump up the tires and go for a ride while the wonderful weather lasts. My husband pipes up and says, "I don't think you should do that." Puzzled, I asked what he meant. "Don't ride your bike to work today." Still not "getting it", he went on to say, "I don't think you would make it down the stairs"! My studio is on the lower level of our home! OK, so you had to be there. Another guest on one of the morning shows had written a book about the little things that make you smile. Like the smell of bacon cooking, or the first bloom of the spring. We have much to be thankful for, and many of them are just that...little things. The husband who makes me smile all day. My intern who "gets" it and can get through a complicated Vogue pattern with minimal supervision. The client who is truly thankful for a job well done and gives me a hug. I LOVE those moments! I think if we think on these little things we receive great joy and the rest of life fades a little and is not as overwhelming. Enjoy the day! Ride your bike today!