How to Trace Patterns from Clothing

Ever wanted a piece of clothing to fit like your favourite item? Why not trace the pattern and make it yourself! This post will show you a quick introduction to how you can copy a pattern straight from a piece of clothing.
Lay out your garment as flat as possible where you want to trace. I am tracing the right leg below:

Place the garment flat along the side seams. As you can see in the picture, the front trouser leg is smaller than the back. The shaded area in the picture on the right is the extra fabric. You need to follow the shape of the unshaded area so fold any extra fabric out of the way when tracing.

Once you've traced around the basic shape of the front, add in any details such as waistbands and pockets. You can do this easily by measuring the size on the garment and drawing it into place on the pattern. With these trousers, I was also able to pull out the pocket to trace around the pocket bag shape:

Next trace the back. As before, place along a side seam and trace. After tracing the inside leg, I had to carefully pull the fabric along to find the seam on the other side. An easier way to do this is to measure the width of the back piece on the garment then draw onto the pattern:

As with the front, measure on the garment and draw on any details.

Once front and back are drawn, you can place another sheet on top of the first and trace each separate pattern off of the drawing. Add seam allowance and construct!

Capsule Collection Coming Soon!

All set to deliver my collection to Cagecity tomorrow :)

Capsule Collection: Shirts

Shirts for Cagecity capsule collection:
The first shirt I will be selling is part of my graduate collection already

The second shirt is a slightly adapted version of one of my graduate pieces:

 

Both these shirts along with the top and dress will be available through Cagecity very soon!

Capsule Collection: Photos

Some photographs of my fist two garments for Cagecity :)

Capsule Collection: Pattern Cutting and Construction

This weekend was a rather busy and productive one. Half of my collection has been sewn up, hooray! After moving all the furniture out of my way in the living room to create my pattern cutting 'floor-table' I started working on the printed garments: 

 

First of all, I was pleased to find that I had enough length of fabric to create the dress I wanted instead of having to change it into a top. However, this added length meant that I didn't have enough fabric left over for sleeves - doh!  So I decided a sleeveless dress was the way forward. 
This capsule collection for Cagecity is based on my graduate work which featured fitted, printed garments. For the capsule collection, however, I decided to create a slightly oversized, boxier silhouette as the pieces are one-off garments to be sold online, meaning that customers haven't got the chance to try it on first. With a loose fitting silhouette, my collection will be more versatile, suiting a wider range of body-types and hopefully more potential customers! So, I opted for a slightly A-line shift dress:

The neoprene fabric was straightforward to sew but the jersey lining did give me a slight headache whilst I tried to figure out how to deal with it on a domestic machine... Sewing jersey when you don't have a machine specifically set up for it can be very difficult indeed! A great way to solve this problem is to use zig zag stitches instead of the straight stitch - this prevents the jersey from puckering up. Once I was past that hurdle, everything was smooth sailing and my dress was complete:

I'm not going to stop there though as I think this dress could do with some surface interest. During my graduate collection I experimented with using bright embroidery on top of my prints to add some interest and more layers to the artwork. I really liked the effect but unfortunately I didn't get the chance to use this on my garments due to lack of time. I plan on finally using this for my Cagecity collection. Here is a sample of the idea: 

Dress finished, I moved onto the top. For this I used the same pattern as the dress to get a uniform silhouette within the collection. All I needed to do was add a sleeve pattern and decrease the length of the pattern pieces and voila! complete.

Pretty sure I've inhaled a lot of neoprene fibres during the process and I am covered in threads but I guess that's the look I'm going to be pulling off this week as I make the rest of my collection... stay tuned.