Muslin – The Couture Counsellor

Sarah Veblen’s You Choose Your Focus Workshop

February 10, 2016February 10, 2016Wendy2 Comments

Last weekend I took another quantum leap in developing my sewing and personal design skills. As always, Sarah Veblen was at the heart of this experience.

Sarah was here in Chicago to teach a workshop she calls “Choose Your Focus.” Instead of having a predetermined topic such as fitting or jacket fit and construction, this workshop provides an opportunity for each participant to work one-on-one with Sarah with whatever project or projects are at the top of that person’s wish list. It is basically private instruction in a group setting. This is the second Choose Your Focus Workshop I’ve attended and it definitely won’t be my last.

All levels of skill are welcome in these workshops and Sarah is more than capable of meeting each participant’s particular needs. Everyone’s experience in these workshops is unique. Steph has shared her perspective on her blog, 10 Sewing Machines & A Serger, and she also generously allowed me to use her workshop pictures in this post. I always start out with the intention to document with pictures, but often don’t follow through.

The first morning, the group gathers and each participant discusses what she hopes to accomplish in the workshop. Often we’ve emailed Sarah in advance to give her an idea of what we will be bringing, but this is everyone’s opportunity to crystallize their thinking and Sarah’s opportunity to formulate an idea of workflow and how she can most effectively help the participants reach their goals. Some topics come up that will best be handled with a demo, which the entire group will benefit from watching. This exchange also allows other participants to learn from the other projects that are being worked on.

I arrived with a list of projects in order of priority that I placed into two categories: “required” (a/k/a “gottas”) and “extra credit.” The workshop was three days long, but I only had 2½ days because of a volunteer commitment. Factor into that my lack of speed in all things sewing and patternmaking and I knew that I needed wiggle room in my list of goals.

At the top of my “gotta” list was finalizing the design, pattern, fabric, embellishment and construction methods for a Little Black Dress to wear to a wedding in June and, I hope, model in the Haute Couture Club of Chicago fashion show that I’m co-chairing in April. I had chosen a lovely matlesse that I bought at A Fabric Place outside Baltimore (known as Michael’s Fabrics online) when I had worked with Sarah at her home studio a while back. I had questions about whether I should make the collar out of a different fabric and whether I should go with my original plan to add a few black faceted beads or use the fabulous embellishment piece made of beads and covered buttons that I bought at Soutache quite some time ago with no idea what I would do with it.

The verdict was to use it on this dress and Sarah demonstrated to the group how I should handle it. The collar will be made of the same fabric as the rest of the dress. I also asked about underlining—yes, with silk organza—and confirmed that I will be using China silk lining.

I also had questions about fabric choice, closure placement and design details for the dress I’m making to wear to the luncheon portion of the upcoming fashion show and to a bridal shower I’m co-hosting the following week. (It’s going to be a ridiculously busy spring). Those questions were answered and I was able to check that item off my list.

To finalize the design of the LBD, I assembled the muslin pieces that I had cut last fall before the workshop began. The body of the dress is derived from my sheath pattern, which has armscye princess seams. I wanted a curved Empire waist seam that dips lower in the back, but not so low that it reaches waist height and accentuates my most prominent feature. (My derrière draws quite enough attention without any help.) I wanted to use the 60’s-esque collar that I’ve worked with before, only I wanted it to sit higher in the front and extend a little farther out on my shoulders and then follow a dip in the neckline in back and trail off in points. In preparing the muslin, I made the front of the neckline what I thought it would end up being, cut the collar longer than I would need and only attached it from the front to the shoulders so that Sarah could drape it.

After some testing, we decided to make the front neckline a bit wider and Sarah worked her magic on the back.

This is exactly as I had envisioned it!

The next step was to transfer the adjustments to the pattern. This is an area where I still am prone to doubts and confusion. As the workshop progressed, I got more confident about drawing new lines with the Fashion Ruler that don’t pick up every single pin placement mark. (It’s only pencil! I have a lifetime supply of erasers!) I’m just so worried about making a mistake that will throw off the entire garment when I sew it. I got better at this as the workshop progressed and was able to draw lines where I thought they should go. This confidence came from knowing I could ask Sarah to check my work right away. Call it a crutch if you must. I prefer security blanket. In any event, the whole point of participating in these workshops is that we don’t have to guess and compound our errors until we end up with a mess.

Anyway, Sarah ended up doing much of the pattern work on the LBD and I did more on my own on the next project.

The final step was to test out the collar on a quick mock-up of the neckline on Day 2 of the workshop. It worked perfectly. I’m now ready to cut the fashion fabric!

My next project was to address yet another issue that has cropped up with my two-piece sleeve pattern. When I attended Sarah’s workshop last November, I corrected my basic two-piece sleeve pattern so that it fit well and had a total of ¾” ease evenly divided between the front and back when it is set into my basic jacket pattern. However, I’ve been using this as my all-purpose sleeve pattern and when I walked my pattern pieces to make a two-piece dress last month I noticed that the sleeve pattern had too much ease and it was not evenly distributed front to back. Both garment patterns were derived from my basic fitting bodice pattern but there have been some adjustments along the way and now there are differences. When I made this discovery, I prepared muslin pieces for my fitted blouse pattern and my topper pattern and brought the lining pieces for my two-piece dress bodice, along with all three patterns. I also started the project of making a full set of pattern pieces for each of my garments, instead of reusing side panel pieces and sleeves for multiple garment patterns.

I tried to make a mock-up of the sleeve before the workshop by putting in one adjustment to the sleeve pattern to even out distribution of ease, but I did what I almost always do—I added to the piece that was supposed to be made smaller and subtracted from the piece that was supposed to be made larger. I’m amazed at how often I defy the odds in that annoying way. Sarah straightened me out and I made a new test sleeve.

I now have a two-piece sleeve pattern that works as it should for my fitted blouse pattern, my two-piece dress and my topper pattern. The topper pattern is going to be a building block for upcoming blouse projects.

That brought me to the end of my must-have list. Amazingly, I was able to make substantial progress on my extra credit.

I consulted with Sarah about my plans for developing a “flowy” blouse pattern from my topper pattern for a lovely teal hammered silk and a gray and cream striped rayon that have been aging in my collection for quite some time.

I can’t get the true color of the silk, but the picture is a close-up of its texture. I’ve been wanting to do that trick with the rayon that uses stitched-down tucks to hide the stripes at the shoulder, extending down just a bit. We decided I’d do that at the sleeve cap as well.

The blouse will use the front pleat from Vogue 1412 that I used in my shirtdress and have a shirt-tail hem or a curved hem with side vents.

The striped version will have a variation on the neckline from View B of Vogue 1412 and the teal silk will have the shirtdress neckline and collar. For both, I wanted sleeves similar to the one in Vogue 1367, a scaled-back poet’s sleeve.

Development of the sleeve required me to merge the two-piece sleeve pattern together and make the necessary design changes. Sarah worked closely with me to get this done. I then mocked it up and Sarah worked on getting it into the topper armhole.

We decided on a series of tucks, which are going to be a lot of work but will achieve the effect I’m after. I now have a pattern for the sleeve and cuff and instructions for working with the tucks.

Sarah took this opportunity to give us a demo on her method for attaching a continuous sleeve placket using a bias strip of fabric.

With this checked off my list, I couldn’t believe there were still a couple of hours left in the workshop. I started on my second “extra credit” project, which is to draft a trumpet skirt. The shape will be similar to this picture, but without godets.

I got a little bit of the way into it, but realized I was tired and that would make me prone to even more mistakes than usual. Still, I have a process plan and Sarah answered my dumb questions about the pattern work so I can pick this up after my “gotta” sewing projects are done.

As always, the workshop time flew by and all too soon it was time to say good-bye to Sarah and get back to the real world where sewing and design have to share time with earning a living and volunteer commitments. I’m really amazed at how much I accomplished and I have renewed energy around my projects. All that, plus I got to spend time with a group of talented, dedicated home sewers who always inspire me and never fail to offer encouragement. Who could possibly ask for more?

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

January 30, 2016February 1, 2016Wendy3 Comments

I could give you a list of reasons why it’s been three months (!) since my last blog post, but that would accomplish nothing. The real reason I’ve been hiding – yes, hiding – is that I made a series of avoidable mistakes in a jacket that made me lose confidence in my abilities. Simply put, I was too embarrassed to post anything.

This episode has taught me that it is absolutely essential to check all assumptions and reinforce the basics no matter how far I think my skills have progressed. With a lot of encouragement from Sarah Veblen, I overcame the urge to allow the jacket to become yet another UFO and then worked with Sarah to correct the pattern mistakes I had made for a new version of the jacket. We also revised the collar pattern because the design needed some fine-tuning. The final step in this learning process will be to make the 2.0 version of the jacket. Before going on to that step, I want to share the experience to reinforce the lessons learned so that I don’t make the same mistakes again and, I hope, you will be able to avoid making them in the first place.

Back to Basics

First and foremost, test all assumptions. I made two muslins, so all the adjacent seamlines on the pattern pieces had been walked, right? Then how did I end up with a back piece that had a much longer shoulder seam than the one on the front piece? Obviously, I made an adjustment somewhere and didn’t recheck to make sure the adjacent seams matched before cutting out the fashion fabric. The thing that really got me is that the mistake wasn’t buried in a princess seam or something that took some time to check. The difference in the shoulder seams is something that hits you in the face when you lap the pieces over one another at the shoulder.

Lesson learned: keep track of all steps. The simple solution is to use a checklist before cutting the fashion fabric. I’m not doing this just when I’ve made changes to the pattern, but also when I pull different pieces from different garments. I might have made tweaks in a garment that I’ve forgotten about, so I can’t assume that the side front piece from one blouse will fit together with the front piece from another project. In this project, I started out intending to make three-piece sleeves, using the pattern from my still unfinished French jacket, but changed my mind and used the two-piece sleeves I’ve used for other jackets. It was only after I found myself struggling to ease in the sleeves that I realized the armscye for my French jacket is smaller than the armscye for my jacket sloper.

My new routine is to make a checklist with all the garment pieces and all the adjacent seams that need to walk. It looks something like this:

Front to Side Front
Side Front to Side Back
Side Back to Back
Front to back at shoulder
Sleeve to armscye

When everything is checked off, I’m ready to cut.

Resist the Temptation to Combine Steps

When teaching patternmaking in her fit and design workshops, Sarah carefully lays out each step that her students should follow, which includes cutting the pattern on the cut line before walking adjacent pattern pieces. I thought this was a step I could skip and simply cut away excess paper when I used the pattern to cut fabric. I was wrong.

After I had kvetched to Sarah Veblen about all the mistakes I made with this jacket, I worked on fixing each of the problems in a workshop that she calls “You Choose Your Focus,” where each participant works on whatever she needs to accomplish with Sarah’s supervision. As Sarah watched me walk two pattern pieces, she noticed that I had veered off from the seamline on one piece and was walking one seamline onto a cut line. She assured me that this is not an uncommon mistake, especially when changes have been made to the pattern and there are extra lines and markings that have been crossed out. She then said in her gentle, patient and non-accusatory manner that the best way to avoid this mistake or at least minimize the number of times you make it is to trim away the excess pattern paper before walking the pattern pieces.

Lesson learned: If a step seems unnecessary, ask the instructor why she advises taking that step before skipping it.

Don’t Forget to Think Seamline

This is another place where the number of lines on a pattern piece can cause confusion. Some lined garments are lined to the edge, whereas others have linings that hang from a facing at the neckline and other really ambitious garments have both a neck facing and a faced hem with a lining in between. Here is what that looks like on this particular jacket:

IMG_0564 (1)

The facings are made of a beautiful black silk taffeta that has a tone-on-tone embossed rose pattern. Sigh. The silk lining is from A Fabric Place outside of Baltimore and I managed to buy more when I was there in November. Yea.

So, on my first attempt to make the lining pattern I marked the depth of the facings on the garment pattern pieces, plus cut lines above and below each of those seamlines, which meant I had three sets of lines at the top (seamline, then cut line for lining and another cut line for the facing), plus two at the bottom, since the lining and hem facing don’t get attached as a seam but have a jump hem instead. I also got mired in math trying to figure out the depth of the jump hem, which is why you see that seam at the bottom of the lining in the picture above. That’s where I attached a bias strip to add length.

Sarah’s advise is to only draw the seamlines, or if you must draw multiple lines, color code them. She draws her seamlines in blue pencil.

Here is a visual for the neck facing/lining segment of that convoluted explanation:

The reduced scale pattern piece for the garment back is on white paper. I’ve marked only the seamline where the lining (purple tissue paper) attached to the facing (yellow tissue paper). As you can see, the lining’s seam allowance extends up like it’s supposed to and the facing seam allowance extends down. The process was to mark only the seamline, then draw the facing piece, add the seam allowance and cut, then draw the lining piece, add the seam allowance and cut.

Lesson learned: Pattern pieces that get too cluttered are confusing and it’s a mistake to think I will always be able to remember which piece goes up and which goes down.

The whole jump hem thing is a little more involved, so it gets its own section.

Map Out Jump Hems Visually

You don’t have to be math-challenged for math to trip you up, at least I don’t. And there’s something about jump hems that have had me confused for a long time. Sarah walked me through the process visually with strips of paper and I think I finally get it.

When a jacket is lined to the edge (no neck facing) and the hem is turned up (no hem facing), the lining pattern pieces are the same length as the fashion fabric pattern pieces. To get a nice jump hem that covers the hem stitches and ensures that the fashion fabric isn’t pulled up by a too-short lining, we build in a jump hem, which simply means that the fabric hangs down part way over the hem allowance, has a soft fold, comes back up to the hem stitching line and is hand stitched in place. Sarah advises to turn the raw edge of the lining under by ¼” and pin that fold to the hem stitching line and then stitch. Everything works out just fine.

Here is an attempt at a visual representation of how that works:

The blue paper simulates a back lining for a jacket that is lined to the neck edge. It is the same length as the back jacket piece. The only difference is that it has a little extra width to allow for a pleat at center back and it is marked in approximately the places where the stitching ends to allow for arm movement. The white paper represents the fashion fabric pattern piece, which is turned up at the hem with cross-hatching to represent the right side of the fabric in the hem allowance.

The picture above shows the fashion fabric piece with the hem turned up overlaying the lining piece, which has ¼” turned up at the hem edge.

The rest of the pictures show mock-ups of a jump hem with a lining, neck facing and faced hem. The principles are the same. The only difference with the faced hem is that you want a bit more of the facing to not be covered up by the lining.

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Here we have the lavender tissue paper as the lining (it worked much better than the stiff blue paper I used earlier), plus the yellow tracing paper showing the facings at the neck and hem. I’ve turned the lining under ¼” and pinned it to the top edge of the hem facing. Notice the fullness above the area that’s pinned.

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Here it is with the lining tissue smoothed down. Try to ignore that hemline that I drew in. Obviously, I misjudged where this would end up, which is why this method is better than doing the math.

IMG_0570 (1)

Here is a view that tries to show everything that’s going on in the area under the jump hem that is hidden when you see a sewn sample.

Lesson learned: Visual mock-ups can avoid a whole bunch of stress and can sometimes clarify things that were once a mystery.

Resewing Has Its Limits

Not all of the problems I encountered were in the pattern. I made some plain, vanilla sewing mistakes that gave me quality time with my seam ripper. There was a snowball effect to this, which I encounter quite a bit. Once I make one dumb mistake I seem to make a whole slew of them. One example was that I set the collar with right sides together. Very dumb. Ordinarily, sewing mistakes are easy to fix, assuming you haven’t trimmed or clipped anything yet. But the lovely silk and wool blend fabric I used for the jacket raveled an unbelievable amount when handled. No matter how careful I was in removing stitches, I was left with very little seam allowance in many areas. It makes me worry about the jacket falling apart when I wear it.

Lesson learned: check the big picture before sewing a seam. Just because the pieces went together nicely when pinning doesn’t guarantee that they are oriented correctly.

There’s More, But It Can Wait

I also learned that my understanding of collars and undercollars had some gaps. We can walk through that in a later post once I’ve gotten comfortable employing my new knowledge on the subject. Besides, I’m more than ready to stop dwelling on my disappointment and move on to some successes.

Here is what the jacket looks like. I finished it in time for the Sew Chicago holiday brunch. Everyone was very supportive and had nice things to say about it and I know that if I hadn’t blabbed about all the mistakes I made most people would never have noticed. I’m looking forward to getting the 2.0 version of it done and feeling really good about the work.

Homage Jkt 1 Modeled

Designing the Tulip Dress

August 2, 2015Wendy8 Comments

This dress has a neckline I’ve been wanting to incorporate into a garment for a long time. I first encountered something similar in a knit top from Talbot’s and later in a jacket from Chico’s. I set out on a mission to find a pattern for it, but I never thought they got it quite right. The knit versions collapsed and the patterns for the woven versions stood up a bit but leaned into the neck. Then I saw a picture of a jacket made from a Burda pattern that looked right. I tracked down the pattern on a vintage pattern web site, bought the only size they had and discovered the secret to achieving the effect I was after: darts.

Shaped darts in the back of the neck, to be precise. One on either side of the center back seam.

The pattern drafting was pretty straightforward. I decided how high I wanted the neck to go up and extended center back to that point. I curved the line out a bit, which meant using a center back seam instead of cutting the back on the fold. A center back seam also has the advantage of adding structure, which helps prevent the neckline from collapsing.

From the shoulder, I drew a curve to the height I was going for, then connected those two points and added the dart. The picture below compares the final back pattern piece to my jacket block pattern piece. The back seam is at the left in this picture.

For the front, I wanted the neckline to open out into a shape reminiscent of a tulip. Starting from a copy of my sloper bodice front piece, I marked the same height that I used for the back and drew a shoulder seam that curved from the shoulder point to that highest point. I played with curves from center front to the highest point until I was happy with the shape. Here is a comparison between the final front pattern piece and the front of my jacket block.

The next step was to test it out. I made a mock-up of the upper part of the front and back pattern piece, sewed in the darts and tried it on. I brought it with me on a trip to work with Sarah Veblen and she made some adjustments.

During that same session, Sarah draped a cap sleeve on me that I used in a blouse and this dress.

The next idea I had to complete the tulip theme of this dress was to incorporate a shaped faced hem like the one in McCall’s pattern 2818.

(Do I have two copies of this pattern? Oh no. I have three. Tracking my patterns in an app is the subject of a future blog post.)

To achieve this, I drew a curve at the bottom of each princess seam with the help of one of those pocket curve templates. I also marked the point where the stitching needed to stop when joining the seams and I drew a line to mark the top of the hem facing pattern piece I needed to make. The curved line drawn toward the top of the pattern piece is the bottom edge of the back facing piece.

With the pattern work done, I was all set to make the dress. The problem was that I wanted to use the inky navy linen from MarcyTilton.com that I had been saving for just the right summer business meeting-appropriate dress and there wasn’t enough of summer 2014 left for me to get it done. So, I packed the partially-constructed dress away and worked on it in spring 2015. Constructing this dress was an adventure in itself that we’ll cover in the next blog post.

Sarah Veblen, Fit Goddess

July 23, 2015July 24, 2015Wendy2 Comments

I’m happy to take credit for introducing Chicago area sewists to Sarah Veblen, whom I like to call The Fit Goddess. I did that by organizing two back-to-back fit workshops that Sarah taught for the Chicago Chapter of ASG in April 2012.

Sarah began the workshop with a half-day session in which she lectured about her methods and gave us exercises to familiarize us with using a Design Ruler (some people call it a French curve, but that’s actually a different set of rulers). We need this skill to draw new seamlines with smooth curves once we transfer her pinned alterations to our paper patterns. After that first afternoon, there were two groups who had two full days of workshop each. A few of us were there for the entire time.

Before the workshop, Sarah sent all participants detailed instructions about how to prepare their muslins. Sarah had a list of suggested patterns to use and was happy to consult with participants about their pattern choices. I wanted to make a basic fitting pattern in two separate pieces. I had in my head an image of two-piece dresses from the Sixties that I thought might work well on me. But, I wanted it to have princess lines because I thought that would be more flattering. From an online skirt class with Sarah, I had learned that I need princess seams in both the bodice and the skirt so that there is plenty of three-dimensional space in all the critical areas.

There was time for everyone to get four fittings in the course of two days. Once Sarah pinned changes to the muslin, the participant marked where the pins were, took the muslin apart and transferred the changes to the paper pattern. The next step was to walk the adjoining seams to make sure that they were all the same length and adjust as needed. We also learned how to true our darts. These steps make a huge difference when sewing the final garment and they are essential to making the next muslin that is an accurate reflection of the new pattern.

Things were going very smoothly for everyone else. I got bogged down. Part of the problem was that I was the organizer of the workshop as well as a participant. There’s also my talkative nature that doesn’t serve me well when I should be concentrating on tasks that my brain isn’t naturally wired to perform.

As if that weren’t enough, inspiration struck mid-way through the process. I had prepared a shoulder princess muslin. It occurred to me that if an advantage of princess lines is that they divide the body visually, it stands to reason that a shoulder princess would emphasize the difference between my narrow shoulders and wide hips. I asked whether an armscye princess would be a better choice for me and Sarah agreed. That gave both of us additional work to do.

So, there I was, the world’s slowest sewist taking on additional work and trying to take care of other people at the same time. There were several times during the workshop when my brain refused to process the visual information in front of me. That’s when I learned just how patient and understanding Sarah is. It also was one of many times I was reminded that I’ve made some pretty fabulous friends in the sewing community here in Chicago.

With a lot of help, I came out of the workshop with basic sloper patterns for a two-piece dress or blouse or jacket and skirt. More importantly, I emerged feeling confident I could make clothes that don’t look frumpy.

There was some fine-tuning that followed in online consultations and follow-up fitting sessions with Sarah. And I did more work with Sarah to get a dress pattern and – the ultimate challenge – pants. But that first workshop was the turning point for me. I had been through enough trial and error to know that other methods don’t work for me. This one does.

In the next post, we’ll start looking at garments I’ve made using the slopers as a starting point and how they are constructed.

Fit Odyssey

July 19, 2015Wendy1 Comment

At first, it sounded straightforward. Not difficult at all. All I had to do was measure my body at prescribed points, compare those measurements to a pattern for a basic sloper, do the math and adjust the pattern to reflect my own measurements. Simple, right? Hardly.

The first problem, of course, is where to measure. Where is the shoulder point, anyway? Is that exactly at the waist? Should the hip measurement be here, or a little lower? Is the tape measure straight?

Okay. So I got a set of measurements. Several sets of measurements. At different times. In different classes. Using different books.

Starting with vertical adjustments, I lowered the bust point (is anyone other than a 14 year-old as “perky” as a commercial pattern?), shortened the waist and raised the hemline. I followed the advice to use a pattern size based on high bust so the shoulder length would be right (more or less). But the shoulder length wasn’t correct. Later I found out that the shoulder angle wasn’t correct either.

Moving on to circumferences was when things got really dicey. Teachers and books instruct us to slash the pattern open and spread it to fit, then fill in the gap with paper. The problem with doing that when you are shaped like a pear is that the side seams become so distorted that the original shape of the design is lost. So I tried to create a curve that allowed the side seams to follow their original direction using the seam-only method and ended up with ugly “wings” or flaps of fabric.

What about making the transition at the armscye? Tried that, which meant spending hours trying to make corresponding changes in the sleeve. Just about every time I corrected a problem with a pattern adjustment, two or three other problems seemed to crop up. I was going in circles.

To make matters worse, this process brought all my body issues front and center. Comparing my measurements to the “ideal” I saw in the patterns made me berate myself for every pound I had gained since I was in my twenties. I even had an instructor point to me in a workshop as an example of an “irregular figure”.

At one point I thought draping might be the answer and I made a dress form that was supposed to be an exact duplicate of my body. It turned out that the dress form and I were not really twins. I still don’t know what went wrong there. What about tissue fitting, you might ask. Tried that, too.

There were many times that I asked myself why I was spending so much time and money on something that was making me so miserable, but I was too stubborn to admit defeat. So, I persevered and joked that I was an artist who worked exclusively in muslin. The only garments I finished were knits and the occasional loose-fitting woven. I even managed to make some pleated trousers that looked pretty good until you got up close and saw that the side seams weren’t straight. I was sure there was an answer out there. I just had to find it.

Yes, there is a happy ending to this story. In 2009, I signed up for a class on PatternReview.com called “All About Set-In Sleeves and Armholes” taught by Sarah Veblen. Once I started reading Sarah’s class materials, I knew I had found a teacher I wanted to work with. I went to her web site, read about her workshops, learned that she is an expert in fit and decided I had to not only take more of her classes but share her with my ASG group.

The first time we talked on the phone I learned that Sarah was working on her book, The Complete Photo Guide to Perfect Fitting. Using the words “complete” and “perfect” means this book makes some pretty big promises, but Sarah delivers on those promises.

The foundation of Sarah’s method is draping. She has her students make up a muslin with regular seam allowances. Like other teachers, Sarah will “read the wrinkles” in the muslin, but where she differs is that she also uses a grid to help identify areas that require changes and to indicate when the problems have been resolved. The grid is formed by marking the center front and center back as well as one or more perpendicular lines called horizontal balance lines, or HBLs.

After Sarah pins the changes, she has you transfer the markings back to the paper pattern, following the rules of flat patternmaking so that the pattern is accurate and reusable. There is a learning curve, which she patiently guides you through.

Not only does working with Sarah give me the result I had been striving to achieve, but Sarah’s approach frees me from comparing the contours of my body with the dimensions of a pattern. Once I’ve made all the changes, I make a fresh pattern and that becomes the standard, not some set of measurements that represent an average of some unknown number of women who look nothing like me.

In the next post, I’ll tell you about my first workshop with Sarah and how working with her has transformed me from the disappointed would-be garment sewist stuck working exclusively in muslin to the happy camper who is cranking out garments that flatter my curves.