Friday, June 17, 2011

Brown Frock Coat 2 - Setting a pattern piece to the grain

I managed to be short of fabric for my coat by a sleeve back, about 0.7m, so off I went today to get more, and I'm taking the opportunity to do a quick tute on the thing I mentioned in the last Brown Frock Coat tute about setting the pattern pieces straight on the grain.
 Here's my pattern piece with grainline marked. This appears on all commercial patterns too. I made it nice and black so it would show up in my abysmal photos...
 This is me putting a pin into one end while taking a photo with the other hand. MrC was too busy to help! I pin it, catching just a 1/4 inch of fabric and pattern so it can swivel fairly easily.
 Measure the distance from the pinned end of the grainline to the selvage. I'm using a quilter's ruler, but a tape measure would do just as well.
 Now go to the other end of the grainline and slide the pattern piece around until it is the same distance from the selvage as the first one was.
 Pin that end too. Now the whole piece is lined up perfectly withe the fabric grain. Getting this wrong can result in garments that twist and shout in ways you don't want them to!
 Now, smooth the pattern piece outward from the pins and pin it around the outside. This pattern is newsprint and not very big so this isn't very impressive, but if you've got a whole dress centre front in commercial pattern tissue, it really makes a difference!
All pinned around then grainline pins removed. No sense wasting pins :)
I hope that makes sense!
By the way, when I opened out my lovely stripe fabric remnant I found that a big chunk was cut off the side of it. How this happened in the shop, who knows. They were very helpful when I took it back and bought more velvet though - gave me a discount on the velvet to compensate. Luckily I have enough stripy left to do what I wanted to. It was strange though...

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