Copying a RTW skirt

My lovely 83 year old bride-to-be brought me a skirt which she likes to copy for her wedding outfit.  It is one of the simplest garments to copy, being a simple six gore skirt - no darts, no gathers, no intricate details.  Here's how I like to do it.

Firstly I had to have an appropriate surface.  I need to poke pins through the garment into paper, so it has to be padded, but not so soft that I can't hold down garment sections with my hand without distortion.  Like this.  This is a blanket folded in four, and when I press down the paper distorts, which would make an accurate copy harder to achieve.

This is the blanket folded in two.  When I press down on the paper there is very little distortion. A carpeted floor is also good, but hard on the back to be hunched over!

To copy each section I placed pins vertically through the piece to be copied to hold it in place, then used another pin to poke through at intervals all along the seam lines all around the piece.  I couldn't get a photo of the the pricked holes unfortunately, but basically after pricking off the piece you connect the dots to reproduce your garment section.

To copy the centre front I aligned and pinned the seam lines and lined up the CF along a ruler before following the same process.

After adding nice wide seam allowances, the pattern is ready to go.

The first fitting showed the skirt needed minor alterations at the waist, and the top a couple of tweaks, which show up nicely when drawn onto my toile with a sharpie.  The shoulders are too wide, the waist needs to come in a little, and the CB seam needs to be slightly more contoured.

The sleeve didn't hang well when moved into place, so for our second fitting I modified it to raise the sleeve cap and narrow the sleeve.  This is the altered pattern on top of the original sleeve. (The diagonal overlap is where I joined two pieces of paper to make the original sleeve pattern.  Ignore it).  The pattern has been slashed vertically and horizontally, with the vertical slash overlapping, and the horizontal one spread.

At our second fitting this was a big improvement, but I'm going to do the same thing again to get a bit more height and a bit less width.

And for myself I've started working on a trench jacket.  Progress post on that to follow!

Copying details

I saw a picture somewhere on the web of a top for a girl with a neat pocket detail I really liked. I didn't take note of where I saw it, and had to sketch it from memory later. Basically the top has a curved front princess seam which forms a gathered pocket. The seam and pocket edge are bound. Here's one front, after I completed it. Creating the pattern pieces was pretty simple. Slash and spread for the gathered pocket, add on pocket bag, draw pocket facing. Mark in a couple of match points before splitting the pattern. Nothing complicated. Oh, and I had to add a hood and give it a zip front. According to the Nine Year Old Fashion Expert all sweatshirts must have hoods (and are therefore designated hoodies, not sweatshirts) and front fastening zips.


Turning it into a finished garment did require a fair amount of head scratching. I had to think very carefully just how to sew the binding so that it was along the outside of the pocket edge, and incorporated into the princess seam. It was easy enough to execute, once I'd worked out where to clip and turn. Which isn't to say that I didn't do the exact same head scratching when it came to doing the second one!

This pic sort of shows where it all lines up at the pocket edge after being topstitched down. The topstitching had to be done in two parts - first along the pocket edge, then the rest of the seam.

Then I sewed the raglan seams as bound seams. I think they may be called strapped seams, but I'm not sure. I am quite willing to be corrected :-) First I lined up the pieces wrong sides together and pinned them, then I added the velour binding/strapping and pinned that. I pinned the seam first to be sure I didn't distort it by adding binding.

Lastly I just folded the binding/strapping under the sewn seam and topstitched it down.


Here are the pieces I started with.

Now I just have to finish the sweatshirt. If Georgia sees it half made when she gets home from school today she'll bug me for the rest of the weekend to get it done! I realised years ago that when sewing for kids you have to pack away the project after each session. If it's out on the desk I'm supposed to be working on it ;-)

This was a fun exercise. I really like the mental challenge of recreating something I've only seen as a picture. I find that if I have too much easy sewing I get bored. If I have too much challenging sewing I get burnt out. I need to have a bunch of projects lined up so that I can just pick whatever takes my fancy when the sewing machine calls.