capes for super superheroes::day 1

Hello, again, friends!  Is everybody ready to play dress-up?  I figure, since it's been a little while since we sewed together, we'll start in nice and easy with some simple capes.  They'll be pretty straightforward, just a lined, reversible deal, but they'll give us a chance to explore some things, like shaped hems and applique, that maybe we haven't considered before.  

First, some housekeeping.  

The basic pants patterns have been revised (and repriced) and are available on the patterns page now.   

As with the bodice patterns, three sizes are now available in one file.  Those of you who have already bought pants patterns will be receiving the updated pattern within the next little bit.      

Now, in order to explain why we're doing capes, I ought to give you a little background story.  My children love to dress up as superheroes.  The most vital piece of clothing for a superhero is, of course, a cape.  They have not, heretofore, had any actual capes devoted solely to dressing up, and I've spent a whole lot of time trying to double-knot baby blankets around their little necks.  Receiving blanket capes are one thing, but when they bring me one of those quilts with chubby batting inside and insist that this is the cape they want, I am flummoxed. 

I am tired of tying (and untying) and re-tying blankets. Thus, we make capes. 

The fabric of choice for my capes is lightweight polyester satin, since it's inexpensive, shiny, and light enough to "blow in the wind".  (A definite requirement for capes.)  I have two little boys who need superhero capes, and these are the colors I chose for them:

I'll use red for the cape and blue for the lining on one of them, and do it the other way around for the other.  Tidy.  But my daughter was standing in the fabric store with me, and I turned to her to ask her what colors she wanted her cape to be. 

Here's what she chose:

I'm sure there's an interesting psychological study in here somewhere.  Lavender and flame. Hm.  

What I'm using for each of these capes is 1 yard of fabric, cut in half lengthwise.  So I bought two yards of fabric for two capes, one color for the cape and one for the lining.  If you could do without a different color for the lining, you could get away with buying one yard of fabric for this project.  But, happy day! I have extra fabric, just for you!

So here's the giveaway part.  I have two "cape kits".  Each contains two 36"x22" pieces of lightweight polyester satin, in red and blue.  Over the next several days, as we work on the capes, all you need to do to enter the drawing is make a comment on what's going on.  Then, at the end, I'll draw two names randomly from all the comments received, and the makings for two capes will be on their way to two more superheroes.  Let me know, of course, if you'd prefer a cape kit in lavender and flame. 

Now to the good part.  I must admit that this idea is not original to me.  (Not many ideas are.)  I saw a reversible cape at a friend's house, and looked them up online.  Sure enough, someone has instructions for making them, and the capes are so very adorable.

But I got ready to do it, just as she says, and found that she'd just laid out her fabric and drawn the shape of the cape on it.  Just like that.  Confident that I could do the same thing, I laid out my fabric, raised my chalk, and ran crying back to my basic block patterns.  I am a lowly mortal, and must needs use crutches when I can.  I bow to superior skill. 

So what we're going to start with is the basic bodice pattern, taped together at the shoulder.  We know that at the center front we'll need to overlap a little, so we'll add just a little chunk of paper right there to support the overlap. 

Then, as you see, we'll fool around sketching the cape front until we get it looking right. 

Cutting that out gives us this.  (Remember to add seam allowance!)  Of course, the back of the cape doesn't look like we want it to, but we have the front, and I do think we can tackle drawing the back of the cape straight on the fabric. 

So we'll just lay our cape center back on the fold of the fabric, and place a ruler alongside.  Then we'll fool around with the shape of the cape until we get it looking like we want it.  Just don't fool around with scissors yet. 

When we get to the bottom, we're going to do upside-down scallops (think Batman cape) all across the hem.  To do this, we'll divide the width of the cape into even increments, cut a circle with the diameter that we want, and use it as a template for our scallops.  We'll need to leave two seam allowance widths between our scallops so that we can sew the points. 

Now let's pin it on the dress form to see if we like what we've got, shall we?

Very nice!

Now we'll use the blue, upside down scallops cape as a pattern for its red lining. 

And now we'll use those as a pattern for our next cape, only, we're going to do this cape with a zigzag hem.  We'll do the same thing that we did with the previous hem, only this time we're using a right triangle instead of a square.

And now, once more, in the purple and flame fabrics, only this time we're doing the scallops the traditional way, pointing downward.

With our capes cut out and ready to go we're ready to come up with some fun emblems for the center back applique.  Which thing we'll do next time we meet. 

Until then, then!

~Erin~

let's play dress-up!

Hello again, everyone!  I have moved, have unzipped my sewing machine and set up a little sewing spot for myself, have been to the fabric store (oh, what balm for a jaded, tired soul!) and am back here again ready to play with all of you again.

Just look at the beauties I picked up:

Oh, yes, it's dress-up time.  Starting tomorrow, we're going to take my little stack of wildly-colored fabric and turn it into fixings for a dress-up box extrordinaire.  I will, as usual, be giving away a good portion of it, so you'll want to hang around if you have little folk with fantasy-figure aspirations and an itchy needle-finger.  (That's akin to an itchy trigger finger, only with less potential for violence.)

What I'd like to hear from you is your suggestions for stocking the best dress-up box ever.  I have three superhero capes and a princess dress in that stack of fabric up there, but what else do you think will help little imaginations blossom? 

Let's play dress-up!  See you tomorrow!

~Erin~

glitch, fixed

While I was out gallivanting across the country, it seems that the bodice pattern ordering system developed a glitch.  The sheer audacity of the things that go on behind my back astounds me.  I have sicked my tech crew on it, and it's up and running again.  I apologize for any inconvenience and/or loss of creative momentum you may have experienced. 

~E~

2010 bodice patterns

So the progress on packing and moving is...maybe 75%.  But the progress on the new bodice pattern sets is 100%.  Oh, am I ever thrilled.  (Perhaps I should have packed my paper, pencils, and computer when I packed up the sewing machine.  But I did not, as you see.)  

Here's what's changed about our bodice patterns:

-Three sizes now come in one file.  You can choose one of four files: infant sizes, 2-4, 5-7, or 8-10.  Or, of course, you can purchase all of them in one swipe. 

-They're more accurate than they were before.

-They're much, much cheaper. 

Other than this, they're the same basic bodice patterns we all know and love.  As always, the following things apply: the patterns have 10% wearing ease, which makes for a fairly close fit.  They have no seam allowances, because I expect you'll want to change them, and seam allowances should be added after all that.  And, because I've worked like an absolute dog on them, I ask that you not print them out for all your friends, but that you recommend that your friends get their own sets.  I appreciate this greatly.

They're available now, for your designing enjoyment, on the patterns page. I will be sending out updated patterns to those of you who've already bought them within the next couple of days. 

And now, honestly, really, I do have to go pack.  Happy designing!

~Erin~

how I make my patterns (and how, if you want to, you can too)

I do not have a design degree.  Okay, I do, but it's a landscape design degree, and not a fashion design degree.  Before I began designing my patterns, I had read a lot of pattern designer's bios, on their websites and such places, and it seemed that every one of them had been to fashion design school.  It was discouraging, in a way, since I'd had four years of college and wasn't really in a position to have any more.  And I wanted to design patterns. 

Fortunately, however, I remembered something very important from my own college years.  The most valuable information, the most rubber-to-the-road stuff, hadn't come while I was in a classroom doing all those factor-label problems about fertilizer titrations.  It had come during summer jobs and internships, when, hoping to glean all the useful information I could, I worked in the university greenhouses and completed street-tree analyses for city councils.  The knowledge that I left school with I had pieced together from classes, library books, part-time jobs, and those internships.  

So that when I stood at the bottom of the pattern-making learning curve looking up, I knew this one valuable thing: that no one person or entity holds all the keys for any particular piece of knowledge or set of skills.  If I dug long enough, I told myself, I could figure this out on my own.  And you know what?  I was right.

As I'm in the middle of reworking my basic patterns, it occurs to me that you might like to know where they come from.  Heck, you might even like to make your own.  When you're finished, call me and we can talk patterns, okay?

First I began with this book:

Childrenswear Design, by Hilde Jaffe and Rosa Rosa.  This book is designed, I think, to be a children's design class textbook, and they assume that you have a dress form on which to drape fabric and create your basic block patterns.  I suppose they assume you have as many dress forms as you need sizes.  I did not, and was chagrined at this new roadblock.  This book is, however, very useful for explaining how to tweak your basic patterns, and was the beginning point for my understanding of that part of designing. 

Then I got my hands on this book:

Make Your Own Patterns by Rene Bergh.  This one is all flat-pattern drafting, but for women's sizes.  So now I understood darts and fitting for a woman's shape, but I wanted children's sizes and designs. 

At this point, I found this little gem:

Pattern Making for Children, by Sarah Doyle.  Now I was getting somewhere.  Sarah's method is entirely flat-pattern, requiring no dress form, and made from measurements you take from your child.  Bravo, Sarah!  I made patterns by her method for a while, but then I realized that her book is geared, more or less, toward sewing for plus-size children, which I don't have, and my patterns were looking a little...large. 

Also, I realized about this time that if I had a chart of standard children's sizes I could just make a set of patterns and put them away on a shelf (or in a computer file) somewhere and grab one when I needed it.  Starting from scratch and making a new basic pattern each time was keeping me from wanting to sew. 

So I dug some more.  And I found this:  Dress Rite Forms Measurements Chart  It's a sales brochure for dress forms, but it has all the measurements for each dress form in one chart.  Fabulous! Now I had what I needed. 

But I used the chart to make patterns from one book, and they weren't quite right.  I used the method from another book, and those didn't fit well either.  So I cleared off my dining room table, laid open every one of those books, a copy of the measurements chart, and a blank notebook, and began to triangulate.  I went through every step in every book and tried to figure out why the author had told me to do that.  And then I searched for correct ease amounts and figured out where, in each equation, the ease came in.  And, after much tongue-chewing and eye-squinting, I finally came up with a method that worked every time, for every size.   (In retrospect, it seems it might have been easier to go to fashion design school...)

After that it was a matter of drawing them into the computer, making sure all the measurements stayed correct, tweaking all the corners to look just right, and printing, printing, printing, to make sure they were still correct and that I caught anything that wasn't just right. 

The original patterns, which many of you have, were created using a difficult string of computer programs that I had available at the time, the inefficiency of which left several of them with minor glitches.  Now that I've upgraded, I'm redoing them to erase all those little snags.  Just now, I'm at the print-print-print stage, which is also the send-patterns-to-testers-and-wring-my-hands stage, on the bodice patterns.  Pants patterns will, naturally, be next.        

Now that I've told you all about it, you're ready to go make your own set of patterns, aren't you?  Good.  Let me know when you're done.  I'm going to go take a nap.

~Erin~