Sewing is Planning!

I got my off-white linen and my three brown zips to make my next iteration of Vogue skirt 8499. Of course, my unbridled enthusiasm had me jumping in full bore without the aid of the thought process. Eeeeek, step on the breaks!!!!  So much of sewing is "foreseeing". Is that even a word? For me  it means seeing ahead in the sewing process to make all the tasks fit together into a final success. But things pop up that can put that train off it's tracks, particularly if you are forging ahead with great creative abandon.

Just as I was ready to put rotary cutter to cloth, I realized that the big long kangaroo pockets on this pattern would not match the skirt properly. I almost cut everything out without even thinking about that. On my first skirt I had taken a total of three inches in length from the pattern. OK, my pattern fit has been tweaked. Aren't I ready to cut and sew? Uh, no. The big long pockets needed to have their length adjusted to be in the proportion to the skirt the way the designer had planned. Whew, I almost blew that one and would have had big billow pockets that were not part of the original look. Here's what I had to do:

Here you see the pocket. I laid it on the skirt piece and it fell within the area where I removed one inch from the skirt length.Those bottom large dots on the pocket needed to match the skirt and that meant that the same one inch needed to come out of the pocket piece. To do this I first found the straight of grain and lined up my triangle edge to that line. I traced the right angle perpendicular to the grain line with my pencil.

That only went part way so I ran the line across by lining up the shorter line with my long ruler. I drew that across the pattern piece.

Here you can see the line across. This will be the line that is folded into a tuck. To make a tuck that will remove one inch of length a fold is made only a half inch wide. Remember, there are two sides to the fold and two halves make a whole inch. So the line was folded, the half inch tuck made and then interfacing was ironed on the back to make it secure.

These large circles (where the green lines point)  needed to match and still have four inches or so below to make the curved hem. Once the tuck was made I double checked by pinning the dots together and here you can see the results. There is a soft fold to this pocket at the bottom but if this alteration wasn't made it would have been much deeper and probably would not have draped as nicely or ended in the right location.

The large circles match, The tuck lines match and the fold is just right, in that it ends where it should in relation to the hem and skirt proportions.

You may never make this skirt and need this information but that really isn't the point of my post. If you are proceeding with wild abandonment on a project you think you have nailed down, stop and take a deep breath. Really look at the process. Read the the pattern instructions again a couple more times. Ask yourself is this all right and do that before you put scissors or rotary cutter to cloth.
T H I N K   S L O W L Y.  Then proceed. If you ever find yourself in a predicament like the above and don't quite know what your next move should be, just sleep on it. It will almost always come to you by the next morning and be clear as a bell. Funny thing about creativity, sleep and our brains!

This afternoon in quick time I had my well washed and dried on hot linen cut out and altered. Tomorrow morning I will sew full bore. Oops, maybe I'll slow down a bit before I start. Do you ever get caught up in sewing excitement to the point where you do a royal screw up? We all have.  But now we can maybe be a little more aware and prevent those wadders. ......................Bunny