Comments on: How to go broke slowly

By: Tracy

Tracy — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 17:00:06 +0000

4th times the charm! The skirt pattern is sewing up much better. I am amazed what a difference the material the sample was sewn in made. I never saw that effect in such a definite way before. From the comments here, I am getting a strong feeling that sample fabric is more important then I thought.
I bought 100% cotton Duck fabric (10 pound weight) at Dharma Traders in San Rafael Ca. It turned out to be the perfect leather substitute.
I have a question for all you pattern makers.

This skirt has a lot of seams, darts zippers etc.
Can I get away with drafting a less complicated lining?

Everyone else who worked this pattern
seems to think that the lining must exactly mimic the leather. I think it is hard enough to sew that the cost might even double to sew a similar lining.

By: Marie-Christine

Marie-Christine — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:42:15 +0000

Oh, matching design to fabric is a horror - if you follow the recommendations slavishly you feel like you’re doing perfectly conventional work (and often are), and if you don’t chances are you’re… doing knit skirts in leather :-). I think this is by far the hardest part of anything sewing related. And very little but experience (read: lots of unwearable crap) gets it through your head. If DEs can’t do this, no wonder RTW sucks so badly!!

By: J C Sprowls

J C Sprowls — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 15:59:40 +0000

As they say: “experience is the high cost of tuition at the school of hard knocks”.

By: Diane

Diane — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 15:42:04 +0000

“Choosing the wrong fabrics for the style seems to be the #1 fault of students as well as newbie DEs.”

The lowly home sewer has already learned these lessons by trial and error. It’s all too possible that the original design was rendered in knit because it just didn’t work in a woven and most likely will be lost in(leather)translation.

By: Todd Hudson

Todd Hudson — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:09:42 +0000

Choosing the wrong fabrics for the style seems to be the #1 fault of students as well as newbie DEs. It’s a good reason to force students to do assignments in real fabrics rather than muslin. Otherwise, they’ll never learn how to cut, sew, nor design.