Cutting

Cutting the coutil

Oh, wow, actually doing this thing!

Freezer paper

So in my extensive reading, and my experiments with my mockup, it is particularly critical that the marking up of the pattern onto the cloth is accurate.  I managed to add at least an inch in the mockup because of sloppy cutting out.

What a number of bloggers use is something called "freezer paper".  This is a way of transferring marks to your material accurately.  Essentially it's wax/plastic coated paper that people used to use to wrap meat before sticking it in the freezer.  It's not available easily in Australia but readily available in the US.  The only (yep, just 1 maker) is Reynolds. You can buy it by the metre from Spotlight and from a number of online retailers.

You use it by tracing the pattern onto the dull side of the paper, cutting out and then ironing the shiny side onto the material.  It should stick there and then allows you to mark the lines precisely. You can then peel it off and iron it back onto the material again.  In my case, I'm tracing the pattern, and then add carefully measured seam allowances on the freezer paper, then transferring to the material.

More mods

So, I drew up my pattern onto freezer paper, and then thought to myself "hmm, it would be totally cool, and very steampunky, if I modified the pattern to add a fob-watch pocket".  And then, I couldn't stop thinking about the idea*, even though it will make MORE work for myself. But I did it anyway...

But the pattern mod this time wasn't too hard - as the piece to be widened was straight sided and it was easy to take 2cm off the next piece over. I did need to draw up another freezer paper copy though, because my concentration is EXTREMELY likely to lapse at the worst time and I'll end up wasting material... Expensive material...**

Cutting out

I started by using my trusty scissors to start cutting out, then thought "bugger this, why don't I try my new cutting wheel" and it was SO much better! I'm sold, particularly on such a heavy material like coutil.  It sliced easily through two layers, though I wouldn't have wanted to try four.  I pinned the material together but not the patters, just to stop movement, and used a heavy weight to hold thing steady as well, and it all went very smoothly.

After the first round of bits were cut I used the original cardboard patterns to mark out the stitching line on the wrong side of the fabric in pencil, as well as the waist and bust lines.

Then I did it all again for the second layer.  All up, cutting out and marking took about 90 min or so***.

Flatlining

Flatlining is where you join two bits of material together in such a way as you can treat them as one.  The two panels of "fashion fabric" needed to be joined to the underlying coutil layer. You'll notice I've pinned the fabric as it's lying over a tailor's ham; this is to give the finished panel some of the curve that would have as it sits on the body.  This helps to prevent wrinkles in the panel.  Next time, I'll use interfacing on the back of the fabric (which is just quilting cotton) and it's just a little too "floppy" compared to the coutil.

The very last step was to iron all the pieces once more (as it's much easier to do that before sewing).

As you can see from the pictures, the fob watch pocket works out nicely.

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* Because I am an idiot.
** And then I forgot to add extra material to the back piece to support the grommets, of course. Not the end of the world, and I remembered on the second pair. 
*** I'm thinking I need to start a time tally to work out how long the whole thing takes.

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