Pattern Master Boutique from Wild Ginger revisited

On Wednesday I took a day and spent it with two friends who have PMB version 5. Like me they bought it and like me thought that they now had a shortcut to fitting. Hasn't worked out quite that way. 


Of course owning expensive and powerful pattern design software does not remove a sewer's need for nearly every new pattern released - but the need for some TNT basics remains.


None of us have been perfectly happy with what we have been able to produce with this program. It all felt close enough however that we decided to explore the possibility of operator error and devote a day to measuring, sewing slopers, and critiquing each other. 


Only a sewer would appreciate how a day spent with three middle-aged women jumping in and out of trail garments and running around someone's basement in their underwear was a most excellent day.


What we all learned was this: another sewer is a much more accurate measurer than a husband who largely does what he has to do as fast as possible. So he can get back to whatever much more interesting activity he was engaged in before you interrupted him. You know like napping, looking at vintage motorcycles on eBay,  or standing in front of an open fridge door. Not hugely, world important, activities like trying to perfect a sloper pattern for a LBD despite the fact that your actual life doesn't require one except for funerals where, in this country at least, you are likely to attend with your coat left on anyway. 


OK. Where was I?


My sloper with pictures. 


I am going to alert Wild Ginger and see what I need to do to fix my problems, which are minor. Really with decent measuring help we all three found our products needed only minor tweeking, mainly I think because we all shortened our shoulder lengths.


Before you look these shots I can't help but give you a disclaimer.


We left the defaults on for our data inputer by mistake for all of us. She is 5'1" and I am 5'9". 


Therefore this is a mini skirt version. I don't want you to think I am actually delusional enough to wear my skirts this short, and I would have to raise my bust point too. Also the program can't see, so there are things like lowering the back darts for caboose accommodation that even I can see myself I need to do and we pinned out.


And finally this is a fitting garment - a sloper - and not a real dress pattern. I would be nuts to wear anything this form fitting and as revealing of my dumpy self.


I mean can you imagine wearing a dress made out of this? A person might as well forget getting taken out for anniversary dinners if she dressed like this. Forever.


This is why there is such a thing as Design Ease, the stuff that gets added to patterns along with that thing called style so you don't look like that aunt you told yourself when you were fifteen you would never end up dressing like when you were that old - you know really old like 45. 


OK my sloper:

A garment suitable for wiping down the tables after a church supper

A dress that Tells the Truth

The Truth with back darts lowered

Don't scare the children Babs.
 Note mysterious need to move shoulder seams back as marked. Also little looseness in centre front. We tried to tell ourselves this could be eased in. I hope so because having a single centre front dart will be uncool even in the kitchen in the church basement.

What do you think?

I will let you know what the experts at Wild Ginger advise, but to tell you the truth this is pretty good progress, and the conversation during our fitting day, largely off topic, was fabulous.

Wild Ginger PMB sheath

I am not sure what this picture, taken in hurry as I went out the door, shows much but it is evidence that I am getting a pretty good basic fit from my software. 


This is about as boring as a dress can get but I hope you can see that I was able to get a nice upper chest fit automatically really and the software put the darts in the right place, although I did have to length the bottom of the bodice dart legs because I am tall. 


There is also a neat feature built-in that I used called "dart over-ride" this eliminates the little peak of fabric you get in the front of your armhole that tells you you need a FBA. The software picks this excess up and shoots it into the bust dart and the upper chest then sits flat.


A good start on some more basic patterns and kind of interesting to do.

Shift work

Right now I am working on quick and easy projects, the kind of things I can fit into the rest of my life right now. Once I have this out of my system I will be going on to some more detailed projects, and yes, white shirts.


Recently I got it into my mind that I needed a shift dress for everyday wear. These things are appearing in the collections and on the fashion pages and they are wearable. I am not a T shirt and shorts summer person because I simply find dresses, even around the house, more comfortable.


I decided that a basic dress with front darts coming up from the waist at the side seam (what do they call those? it's not French darts) and a darts in the back would give me enough shape without having front, real French, darts at the waist. I also wanted a scoop neckline.


I wasn't able to find a pattern like this so decided it was time to try out something further in my Wild Ginger PMB software. The first pattern I drafted used the flared a.k.a. A line option but when this printed out I could see that the software added to the hem and then drew a line back to the waist and it really created a crazy extreme angle, like a kid would draw an A line dress on a mom. I can't show you this because I cut if off. I also found that the sleeveless dress version gave me essentially a dress with the sleeves just off, which meant a full shoulder and armhole that was a bit too snug IMO for a sleeveless summer dress. I found this out when the dress was sewn.


I have trimmed both the armhole and neckline in about 5/8" and will transfer this back to the software and will make this up in another version, already cut out, from an African print I like.


So essentially what I have here, in some patterned cotton sateen that I had lying around along with 8,000 other pieces is a wearable muslin that I will actually wear and actually is a muslin for future shifts.

Sewing intensive in Tennessee- lightbulb moment on pants fitting

I am back in Knoxville visiting my husband who is still working on a project here. I am having an excellent time but I realize for a normal person this is one nutty way to spend spring break.

I go for long walks and can't get over that the place is not covered in ice and snow.We eat out and just enjoy the people. Tomorrow we are going to Alabama and I am pretty happy about that because I have never been there.

But most of the time I am in my hotel room sewing.

My husband, displaying one of the reasons I married him, borrowed a nice machine from the girlfriend of one of the guys on site and it was set up for me when I arrived. And we know I have 13 boxes of fabric here so I am pretty much in my idea of an ideal situation:

No phones.
No cooking.
No errands.
No job.
No housework.
Nobody who needs me to do anything at all.

Just sewing.

I call this a vacation.

I brought my CD with Wild Ginger's Pattern Master Boutique software with me. I have used it a bit in the past but never really had complete success, particularly with the pants. You get out what you put in I suppose. So I decided, since there was no way I was going to get time to do this at home in my busy life, to just see what I could do for a pants pattern.

I have been wanting a nice simple slim legged pants with a waistband like I see in the collections and do not see in the pattern books. I figured they would go with my white shirts and whatever else I decide to make.

So I started my research and looked a pretty much every pants shot I could find in the blogs and Patternreview.

I was absolutely amazed to see that most people, whatever their shape, had the same problems:

1. Too tight across the butt but with baggy folds under the butt
2. A sort of pouchy thing going on under the stomach, like a handful of extra fabric, and some wrinkles at the top of the legs at the front.

I even saw in some Threads articles with their own patterns this extra fabric at the front crotch. I know those model girls wouldn't wear pants like that if they weren't getting paid for it.

I mean raise your hand if you haven't made 497 pairs of pants with this exact same problem.

So before I did anything else and started 498 I sat down in this hotel room and thought about it.

That's when it occurred to me that we forget about legs, as in we walk around in pants, we don't just stand in front of the digital camera for a picture. And then I thought about arms, which also move (mine have been heaving boxes of fabric around the hotel room) and it occurred to me that pants and a crotch are just a sort of another version of 3D drafting just like sleeves and armholes are.

So what do I know about armholes?

1. A higher tailored set-in sleeve armhole is more comfortable and gives more movement than a looser dropped armhole.
2. A closer armhole, in addition to giving more mobility, has less excess fabric and fewer wrinkles, than a dropped armhole.

When I thought about this some more I realized what pants do most people wear most often? Jeans. Now I know whatever your throw-on default garment is, it is that because it is comfortable. So jeans are comfortable and generally don't have a lot of that extra fabric at the front thing happening. They also have a crotch that is cut closer to the body than other pants.

In PMB there are four crotch styles from loose to close to the body - culottes, trousers, slacks and jeans. Because I was fooling around making slim pants and a looser pattern for linen wide legged pants I was using the slacks and trouser crotches.

I changed both patterns to the jeans crotch, even though neither pair were jeans, and presto the extra fabric at the front disappeared and the pants ( I made 6 muslins during this process) became a lot more comfortable.

I also rethought my crotch length measurement. In all my versions I was measuring my crotch length as specified but ending up with something too long. I then realized that when you add a waistband you want the top of that to be at your waist, and if you add a waistband onto pants that stop at your waist, well you are going to settle them in and give yourself a droopy crotch. So I subtracted my 1" waistband, total of 2" from my crotch measurements and that did the trick.

In addition I learned a few things about PMB that might be useful to other users of this program, understanding this works for my body which is essentially tall, with a butt that sticks out a lot, no real hip shape, as in straight up and down, and the kind of belly that comes with three babies, a section, and leaving the category of spring chicken.

1. I wanted less fabric in the thigh like the RTW slim pants I saw. You get this in PMB by reducing the knee width setting, this pulls in the thigh. I brought mine down to 0.

2. My front darts looked poofy at the bottom. I tried every configuration of dart placement and length with no improvement. Then I re-read the Help notes in the program and it said to release the darts at the fullest part. Since my abdomen is sort of a unit from waist to crotch there is no curve and no high point. I don't need dart shaping where there is no shape. So I set the program for three darts (this made them tiny and also moved the front crotch vertical giving me the fabric where I needed it) erased the dart lines in Pattern Editor and just sewed up my muslin without any front darts. Nice and smooth.

3. Being hip shapless I have always been annoyed by that jodphur thing which I could not get rid of in the PMB pattern. I then went back to the fine print in Help and realized that how the program works is to give you the widest fabric at the front where you have identified your hip depth (I located this not by anything happening at my hip but by my widest-measurement which really is created by the big rear end not anything happening hipwise). So to get rid of this curve I moved my hip depth measurement in Settings up, from 8" to 4.25". If you look at the slim pants pattern I have put here you can see that little curve is close to the top, giving me a little extra so the pants don't pull across my belly. I also lowered the side seams .75" and the front 1". All my RTW pants dip down at CF. You will notice that there is almost no shape to my front crotch, I took out -.02 of the crotch shape (first arrow).

4. The back crotch after all of this was easy since I knew what I would do on paper. I opted for round back crotch, wild cut (meaning extra at CB waist) increased the back crotch extension .25,  changed the back crotch break to -2.5 and moved in the crotch shape 1.8 (second arrow) ( this is the old lower and scoop out combo).

5. Finally I added 2" to length and choose a contoured waistband because they are more comfortable.

What I have ended up with are pants that I think fit pretty near as perfect as you get on an imperfect body, all this info saved into defaults and a program I can now use to draft different pant styles.

It took isolation in a hotel room to get here, and I hope some of this information might be useful to you too.

Pictures of some finished pants are forthcoming when DH comes back.

Happy New Year

I had a great time last night and intend to do everything I can to enjoy 2011 as much as I can.


My husband and I did a little babysitting, and rather than going out later to parties he made a wonderful supper, lobster and a fruit plate. He then lit firecrackers on the front lawn, enjoyed by the little boys down the street, and afterwards we slow danced in the kitchen in our pajamas.


I figured that was just about a perfect evening.


Now this morning I am starting in implementing my New Year's resolution. Here it is:


Sew more. A lot more.


Enough with fitting sewing in around all my other duties. I am putting it back on first. See enjoy 2011 as much as I can above.


This is what that is looking like:


1. Major organization of the sewing room, started this morning in the same outfit I wore dancing last night. I will be posting some pictures of this. Right now it involves putting the fabric I actually think I will be sewing, like all my white shirt fabrics, out on shelves and putting what I am calling "all that weird shit" into boxes for the moments when that is exactly what I need.


2. Learning to use the very nice camera that my husband gave me for Christmas after having reviewed my blog. So I can take better pictures of what I sew.


3. I upgraded my PMB software to version 5 yesterday. I had fabulous success with a well-fitted sheath a few years ago with version 3 but got bogged down getting the pants to work, probably user error more than anything. Some women in the local sewing guild say the new version is easier and more effective. It's not so much that I have fitting issues as it is that I get frustrated sometimes trying to find a pattern in a style I see in the collections or magazines. For instance I really want a slimmer pant right now, not a trouser and not a skinny jeans. I think a couple of us locally are going to be working on getting proficient on the software.


4. I'm going to buy more fabric in 2011. Yes, I love fabric and living in this fabric purchasing wasteland I just need and want more on hand. See enjoy myself above.


5. Get those shirts going again now the Christmas production cycle is over. Dying to get this started.


Now I have a major question for you. Any great ideas for a good shirt collar interfacing? I prefer a sewn-in and don't want one of those cardboardy kinds you find in so many men's shirts.


What works for you?

Wild Ginger part one

A while ago I made a blouse, a fitted classic simple blouse and although I did all the necessary alterations I still ended up with something too loose at the neck and too tight across the bust, etc. of course this was at the muslin stage, but something in me just said Barbara who has time to make muslins, you hardly have time to sew as much as you want and the next thing you know I downloaded version 3 of PMB by Wild Ginger.

So far I am very pleased with my skirt and the sheath dress (pictures of that will follow this weekend). The sleeves have needed tweaking and the pants were not too bad first couple of times out, but with everyone of my "improvements" they are getting worse. I have found Karen at WG very helpful but even she said that my last pants photos had the crotch length looking like it was 3-4" too long... I think my next step will be version 4 and some serious pants fitting. The interesting thing of course is that I can actually buy pants that fit, providing I try on 48 pairs. Serious pant fitting is in my future. 

I considered posting my last pants versions here, but my youngest and very wise son Ben said to me that as a general rule I would be best not to post anything on this blog that I wouldn't want to see up at a bus shelter. How is that for a sobering thought? 

My current issue with the pants is actually that the back is not so bad but the pants (in all my versions) have this handful of fabric at the front just above crotch level. Not so good. I suspect the issue is, as my sewing machine repair man used to say, that "the problem is in the chair" meaning me. I will sort that out on another day.

So back to the skirt. This one fits really well and is a true classic. What I like is the option to "taper" the bottom slightly, which makes me look thinner at least in my own mind than I am. I have also customed the back vent. I hate sewing vents. They are fussy and they tear if you are a little hard on your clothes as I am. My solution is to lay the vent extension on the fold, press it into a box pleat and stitch across the top. Photos to follow tomorrow. I also sew a thin, non interfaced waistband, only about 5/8" wide finished (wide waist narrow band is my rule, and I suppose narrow waist, wide band makes sense too) a flat button, and an elastic loop at the top of the zipper.

So skirtwise WG has worked for me, but my real favourite is the sheath.

Tomorrow. Rascal needs his walk and my DH is hoping I put the clean sheets on the bed. We tend to wait that one out when we are both tired to see who gives in first ...