The last few weeks have been really busy. With the kids starting back to school at the end of the month, I’ve been in a rush to try and get loose ends sewn up in the sewing room. I’ve had fabric to make myself some clothes from for two years but just kept putting it off. I have a mental aversion to seeing myself during a fitting!

I’ve been playing around with pattern drafting again. Unlike the disastrous sleeves two years ago, I’ve now got pants and a bodice - With Sleeves No Less - that fits! WooHoo….. This time, I drafted the pants from Threads magazine - wanting to see how accurate they were - and a foundation top from Moore’s book on pattern making. I had to make several changes for them to fit me, sloping shoulders - sway back - longer stride etc. I also found that my left side is almost a whole 2″’s bigger than my right side! One would think using my right hand on the mouse and calculators these past few years would have hiked my right side up a bit more than that! I’ll just have to walk around like Igor a bit longer, I suppose.

The muslin was cut from a nice stable cotton with a grid print (looks a lot like graph paper. I used wash-able markers to make changes that were needed, changed my block patterns and then sewed it up into a really comfortable pair of pj’s. I had left 1″ S.A.’s all around, so I could add ease for pj’s, used up some pretty trims I had, added a peplum (the short bodice to my short waistline just wasn’t modest enough!) Shameless to say, I just took them off to wash them after 3 days….. I know, but they were so comfortable, I wanted to live in them!!!

Anyway, I’ve been using Open Office’s drawing program to get some of my ‘garment components’ like pockets, collars and misc. facings drafted. I started using Open Office with a pretty Manila folder color printed when my tag board ran out. I’ll add the following under manuals but ’til then, here’s some new schtuff:

1. Page 1 and Page 2 of Table of Aliquot Parts - the handy chart to figure out what 1/4 of 38″ is?

(The vintagesewing.info site has one, as does my Moore’s pattern making book but I needed higher and sometimes lower numbers, so Slobo helped me get an openoffice formula running to formulate it automatically.)

Here is the .ods or Open Office spreadsheet file and the
.xls or Excel spreadsheet file in case ya’ll wanna change things around.

2. Inch to Decimal Equivalent Chart.

The chart comes from seoconsultants.com website. I made it a jpg just for ease of printing. For some reason, the latest version of Firefox doesn’t seem to understand how to print a web page anymore. Until I can get it fixed, and in case others have the same problem, I offer the jpg.

This conversion table is handy when I’m at the Fashion Incubator. When Kathleen gives the measurements for some of her kewl gizmo jigs, welt and paper jig tutorial., I can punch in the measurements (which she so generously provides) and print out a nifty neat little gizmo jig too. One that is much more accurate than I can hand draft especially when she includes those very important measurements like bend allowances.

That’s really all the playing for now. Hopefully in the next few days, I’ll see ya’ll again with some newer - clean - threads on!

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