Dressmaking

[elspeth]

Anybody here do any dressmaking? I have a rather gorgeous pattern to make when I have time, and if it turns out well it's going to be one I'll be making several duplicate garments from... so how do you stop your patterns dying from all the cutting and pins and tears? They're so flimsy! They have to be flexible of course, but I need to think of a way of keeping it usable for repeated uses. It's a complicated pattern, too, so I can't really make one garment up from it and then just copy the garment like you can with easy ones.

I was wondering about using some spray-on adhesive to stick it to some muslin or interfacing. Not sure if it'll work, though... Any other ideas?

[pianoplayer88]

I've made a few dresses.
You could use a thin cardboard and cut it out around the pattern...don't have any other ideas right now...

[quantum]

I've watched my mom make many a dress.  Seems like tracing paper has similar consistency as pattern paper, you may want to make copies on that stuff.  Work with the copy and not the original.  Similar to what I do when I need to colour and highlight my music scores, I make copies.

[thalbergmad]

Why when clothes are so cheap, would anyone want to spend time making them?

I get mine from Primark.

Thal

[ted]

My wife used to do a lot of tailoring, dress design and dressmaking. We used to buy a big reel end of paper, five or six feet in width with many metres still left on it, from the newspaper office and she cut her patterns out of that.