Fashion-Incubator

Hey!

Autism Diva looooooves tools. These are some great tools, too.

Thank you for sharing the pictures and descriptions.

AD

These are also my favorite tools, except rather than the applique scissors I use the Gingher G-5s, like an embroidery scissor but much more hefty. They also have the fine, sharp points.

Home Depot has a version of the zipper hammer (I guessed right on this, yay!) for about the same price. If you have anything else to buy from SouthStar, get your stuff there - they deserve it.

Rather than a knitting needle, I use a chopstick that's been run through a pencil sharpener and then had its end smoothed with an emery board (also useful for French manicures).

My version of the non-white china marker is bright orange. Also languishing while the whites get grabbed.

I use big washers (from a scrap yard) covered with fabric for my pattern weights.

For preliminary patterns, I use physician's exam table paper. It's only about 22" wide, but easy to handle and won't give a paper cut. Considerably more durable than flimsy commercial pattern tissue, yet thin enough to fold into a 9x12 ziplock. Also cheap.

My other indispensible "tool" is drapery weight, the kind you find in the home dec sections of the chain fabric stores, about a dollar/yd. It's a series of tiny lead cylinders in a cotton casing. I have sections about 2', 3', and 5', and use them constantly for checking pattern work, as they're much easier to use to track a line than a tape measure.

Also useful are style tape, 1/4" wide and about the same less-tacky as drafting (which is also used, but the style tape is cheaper), and the quilter's pins with the flat flower heads. I ignored them for years because I don't quilt, but you can lay a C-Thru ruler over them and score a line without the unfortunate roller-coaster effect.

The first positively industrial piece of equipment that we acquired was our trusty Bunny Punch, used to place circular holes in patterns so that they may be hung by a pattern hook.

Carol,

could you explain further how you use the drapery weights? I'm intrigued...

AD loves tools? Alert the presses!

This is like Autie porn, eh?

It is not highly recommended that you "push" out points (such as on a collar) from the inside of the seam. It gives a much crisper point if you properly trim the seam allowance and very carefully "pick" out the point from the correct side of the garment with a pin. Sometimes when you push the point out, you can damage the fabric or poke a hole right through it.

Paper questions:

Do you do initial drafts on the 1 by 5 paper or directly onto the 100lb hard paper?

What is your recommended technique for accurately transfering a pattern from 1 by 5 or hard paper to the 150lb final pattern?

Thanks!

Do you do initial drafts on the 1 by 5 paper or directly onto the 100lb
hard paper?...What is your recommended technique for accurately transfering a pattern
from 1 by 5 or hard paper to the 150lb final pattern?

Nearly always, I draft directly on hardboard altho I use 125lb paper. I didn't know you could readily get 100 lb paper. Since I draft directly on the oak tag, transfering it onto 150lb paper is simply a matter of weighing the pieces and tracing them.

This is somewhat unrelated but I don't trace all of the lines. If it's a straight line, I usually mark off the start and end point of it. After removing the piece I'm tracing, I use a ruler and redraw those straight lines. The reason is that lines can degrade over time, either through bowing via tracing usage or miscuts. Redrawing all straight lines with a rule maintains the integrity of the piece. As a matter of fact, when setting up the pattern to be digitized, I usually make some sort of notation indicating the digitizer can skip any midpoints, going directly from point to point. This has two advantages. One, it saves them time and two, it maintains the accuracy of the line.

I would like to know what material the head of the sewing hammer is made of: leather, metal, rubber or plastic