Trying my Hand at Tailoring.

Note:  This blog post is about something I'm CURRENTLY working on, but it takes me a while to get to the point.  Just keep reading.  You'll get there eventually.

I sewed my first item of clothing when I was about eight years old, if I remember right.  It was a pair of shorts made from purple flowered material, and my mother wouldn't let me wear them out of the house.  (I don't blame her, although back then, I thought they were AWESOME!)

My mother did a lot of sewing when I was very young, and would make matching Easter dresses for my sister and I every year until we were old enough that we thought that was kinda uncool. As such, I learned a lot about sewing when I was little.  In fact, I even remember doing those little lacing cards where you thread the yarn through the holes to outline a cartoon character, and I was always annoyed that the string wasn't long enough to do a back-stitch.




But then my mom quit sewing because my sister and I quit wearing anything she sewed, and then her sewing machine broke anyway.  Or maybe the sewing machine broke and she didn't have the motivation anymore to buy a new one and so she quit.  Either way, I went most of my life without sewing or having anyone around who sewed.

Then I discovered the plushies and suffered the Inspector Javert Catastrophe, and so that wasn't much motivation to take up sewing again.

And THEN my friends and I discovered cosplaying, otherwise known as: wearing costumes to conventions.  It's like getting to celebrate halloween when it's not halloween!  And for some bizarre reason, I wanted to sew my costume myself.  I went out and bought a sewing machine and everything!  I bought a pattern and successfully sewed myself a coat: something akin to a western duster.  It's worn by a girl named Milly in the anime Trigun.  [I want to say, right here, that when I'm done talking about Milly's coat, I SWEAR, I will make a blog post that has nothing to do with Trigun!  ...I swear!  Until then, try not to throw things at me, okay?]  Now, I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty dang proud of that coat.  When I'm face to face with someone, I'm a little shy about showing off my stuff, but since I'm not face to face with anyone, I'll be honest, sometimes I think I'm pretty hot stuff for making that thing.

But there was something about it that bothered me, and I couldn't put my finger on it.  More recently, I finally figured out what it was, and it's something like this:  Milly's coat is smallest at the top and then tapers outward as it goes down, like so:

I realized that I had failed to do that while making my coat.  It doesn't taper, it's just straight, and what with me being so scrawny, it can make me look sort of like a fence post.

I can't make the coat tapered, because I'd need to add fabric to the bottom and that would look wonky, and I can't take in the top because it already fits well up there and I don't want to sqeeze myself.  So I decided I would tailor the coat to be more fitted.  It's not in keeping with the original, but it would make the coat look better.  I was thinking of something like this:

Ha!  Only joking!  April Fools!  Actually, it's more like this:

 

I'll pinch in the coat at the waist and leave the rest as it is.  I've never tailored clothing before, so it's all sort of new and exciting for me.  I've started pinning things, but haven't got it quite right yet.  The fabric is puckering a little at the hips, so I need to figure out how to fix that.

So!  Next week I'll post the finished product and talk about what exactly I did to the coat, because once I really got into how clothes are put together to make them fitted, I thought it was pretty interesting and I'd like to share.  I'd talk about it now, but I feel like I've rambled enough for this post, and the movie Tangled is calling me.  See ya later!