A Darting tutorial

This is a post that will have appeal to the sewing geeks among you. If you don't care about garment construction, don't bother reading the rest of this post.

Yesterday one of my sewing buddies wanted to know how I figured out where to place the darts in my daughter's birthday dress.

I had learned a cool method from this book

Amazon.com Widgets

Which you can download from Amazon for not very much money, or buy on Google play for even less money.

I am using paper for this tutorial because I am not making a dress today.

This is your basic A line dress shape. It already has a crease down the center because you have probably cut your dress out on a fold. You will need that crease later.

Fold the dress where you want the starting point of your waist dart. Press that fold well.

Do the same for the ending point of that dart.

Then fold the dress on that center line. Waist darts are often put in line with the top shoulder point. In this paper sample the darts are placed a bit closer to the center of the dress. Fold the dress where you want to place the dart. Press hard so the press line shows up on all layers of the fabric

Use the lines you pressed into the dress to form the waist darts.

I was also asked about how I do neckline darts. Often when I cut a sheath dress like this out of a woven fabric, the fabric at the upper chest tends to sit away from my body. Neckline darts are an easy fix.

This is how I add the darts.

I cut a nip into the fabric with the dress folded along the center line.

Sew the dart shut starting about a presser-foot away from the fold and then angling your stitching line down to nothing.

Depending on your build you might need more than one set of neckline darts. You can get clever with the placement of the dart if you are working with a striped fabric. You can also play with where in the neckline your dart goes.

That's it a no fuss way to get some nice shaping in a dress.

Comments

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog