Flexible

A while back I stumbled upon a website that sold organic cotton jersey in fabulous prints, and I snapped up two pieces – one with navy and white stripes, one of flowers on a black background – imagining them as either leggings or long-sleeved tops (or both). The navy stripe was supposed to be my test fabric, because I wanted to make my own patterns by cutting up an old pair of leggings and a skivvy. Like I used to do in my 20s. Of course, my 20s was a looong time ago and when the fabric arrived I hesitated, and I put everything aside until I gathered some confidence.

Eventually I did, starting with cutting up a pair of leggings and making a pattern. I compared it to a leggings pattern I’d received free along with other patterns I bought from Style Arc. It was waaay different and after I had other problems tracing a skivvy pattern, I put everything aside again.

Since buying the fabric I’d become rather fond of the navy strips fabric, so I decided to buy some organic jersey from Spotlight to use as my test fabric instead. I also bought a double needle, after watching videos on how to sew stretch fabrics, for top stitching.

Recently I got enthused again. I brought out both patterns and laid mine over the Style Art one to see how different they were… then flipped it over. And they matched bar a few small variations. Duh.

So, using the Style Arc pattern, I cut the pieces and got sewing. In a anticlimactic short hour or so they were done.

I wore then the next day and they didn’t fall apart. Two tiny areas of sewing came undone – a tiny hole in one leg seam and a bit of waist overstitching that had snapped when it was stretched – but they were easily fixed. The legs were too long, which I’d anticipated, the calves too loose, and the waist was a bit high at the front. When I laid the traced pattern on top of the Style Arc one again, these were the areas that were different, so I figure I’ll use the traced pattern next time.

The Style Arc pattern worked well enough that I decided to buy a skivvy pattern from them. When I’d traced the skivvies I cut up, I found they were quite different in size and the fabric pieces were really distorted, leading to more guesswork than I was comfortable with.

Distortion in commercial garments is a bit of a gripe of mine, and one of the reasons I want to make my own stretch fabric garments. Since I started photographing clothes to put in Stylebook, I’ve been amazed at how badly cut the fabric pieces of commercial clothing are. Leggings nearly always twist around a leg – just one so it’s definitely not a design feature. T-shirt side seams twist around the body. Even the really expensive organic and ethically made leggings I bought are badly cut and twisty, and the fabric is really flimsy.

Hopefully the skivvy pattern will fit me, or at least be easy to adjust. Because if I can make my own stretch fabric garments, I could possibly make most of my clothes. Not that I’d have to be whipping them out constantly – just replacing garments as they wear out.