Treat Your Vintage Pattern With Respect!
What a great find at Olive Road this pattern was! I think it was from the early 70’s, but I can’t find any date stamps on it.
The special feature is that it fastens at the waist with tabs and D rings and opens out through the pocket bags. Such a 1970’s feature.
However, what to do? I don’t want to cut into this treasure, and I need to grade up one size.
I thought I could be clever and scan it into Adobe Illustrator via a photograph, but after lots of faffing I discovered that a normal digital photograph has a subtle fish-eye type distortion that would take a lot of work to sort out, too much work! So back to paper and pencil. I traced it onto dot and cross paper.
Grading up one size was pretty simple for the main skirt, just add 1/2″ to each piece as it was only one size larger. Then it was a bit more fiddly to adjust the waistband and pockets, A trial and error process, finished off by making sure that all of the seams match at the end.
This process is a lot easier on multi-size patterns. You can see how much the previous size has expanded, then you can make a pretty good guess for the next size up. Then I just had to make sure that all of the seams will still match before cutting out!
Using Fabrics Scraps to Make a Skirt
I like to use a selection of fabric scraps from Get Cutie in Brighton. They sell off their fabric scraps at a very reasonable price, and I have made many distinctive garments with them over the years.
The fabrics are a collection of cotton fabrics in a dress weight. For this skirt, as it is essentially a topstitched denim skirt, I needed to bulk up the fabrics by laminating them onto a backing fabric with Bondaweb (I buy this by the roll now!).
Layout, this is the fun part. Because I’m using scrap fabrics some pattern pieces need to be secretly patched together with a perfect pattern match, and the best bit is that once finished you really can’t spot the joins!
The pieces are cut out once in fabric and once in Bondaweb. Each piece is ironed on to it’s Bondaweb counterpart. This is the “Zen” part of the process. It can’t be rushed as each press of the iron needs to be held for 10 seconds, and you need to make sure that you don’t leave any gaps. Time must be taken!
Obviously just the main pieces need this treatment, no need to thicken the pocket bags for example, and I didn’t think it necessary to interface the waistband any further.
After this process there was a pile of pieces each with the paper Bondaweb backing on the reverse. All of these pieces now need to be ironed onto the backing fabric – left-over fabric from my Christmas ballgown!
Rip off all of the backing paper and carefully bond each piece to the backing fabric, tessellating them tightly together, but paying attention to the grainlines (more zen meditation). Then they just need cutting out again.
I know that this seems like a long process, but the results are definitely worth it. Especially as I get to have Wonder woman on my skirt!
(Part 2 coming shortly!)