The additional things I have to contend with are:
- she’s quite short so I’ve had to lower the ironing board which is a killer for my back;
- she has small hands and all of the cutting scissors available seem much too big for her hands and she can’t control the full length of the blade. I’m going to try to improve cutting by having her cut on a bench that I have which is lower than my cutting table. That will at least limit the reach problems.
-fine motor skills are not yet fully developed so we need all the aids and other assists we can find like magnetic seam guides. I’d appreciate any suggestions especially for heavy foot on the accelerator pedal (we using a domestic but it’s still a bit quick for her at this stage). I’m considering a piece of the rough side of velcro inside her shoe but that might be unkind.

For the same sorts of reasons that a garment lining is larger/longer than the garment it sews into, as must a pocket bag be larger than the area into which are it is intended. Think of it. You stick your hand in there, it moves around, not always efficiently. You have keys in there, a cell phone, weighting it down. Your hand moves in, *around* those items, fishing through them.

Consider this. You’re looking at a pocket bag as flat, basically two dimensions, but that’s not how the pocket bag is *used*. It’s like a garment. Garments need three dimensional space (like a pocket bag, rather than a hand, a body is stuck in there and it must move too) so if a garment were exactly the same size as a body, you wouldn’t be able to move in it. Making the pocket bag larger -this can only be done by extending it beyond CF and the hem- makes it more usable. It’s easy enough to test. Baste in a line to limit the pocket bag to the CF/Hem dimensions and try using it as you would under normal conditions. Then it’d feel chintzy. I rest my case :).

Why does the pocket bag need to extend beyond the boundaries of the CF and hem?

Now I have to tell you, I have serious studio envy…

I used it to do my first ever welt pocket, and I was extremely pleased with the result.

After you’ve had a few of these under your belt, I’d encourage Kathleen to set you loose on a commercial pattern - just 20 minutes or so [EG]. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that! Your being an engineer is icing on the cake - the comparison would be very insightful for developing training programs.

RE: cutting. Cutting fabric and cutting patterns are similar in that your shears [*should*] never leave the surface of the table. “Proper” tailor’s shears have a foot which keeps them absolutely perpendicular to the table. I posted a picture in the forum of my shears as an example.

With pattern paper, you turn it into the shears as they cleave. Coordinating the two hands is the challenge that requires a lot of practice. But, this is how smooth curves are achieved - notice how Eric’s left hand is curling the waste material away as he’s liberating the pattern piece from the paper?

With fabric, you travel around the garment piece, also keeping the shears against the surface of the table - liberating the garment piece from the cloth. (I know, it’s a strange turn of phrase. But, it’s how I was taught. It’s what made sense and it’s also what stuck!)

In both cases, the passive hand is removing the cutaway material and that effort is coordinated with the cutting hand. The process is a little different depending on the cutting device. But, that is, again, a whole other story.