My fancy new Sewing Machine

I like making stuff. Sometimes I make things that are programming related, and other times I like making real stuff. I like making art, such as painterly paintings (more on this later) and lino prints.

Recently it’s been making stuff with my fancy new beast of a sewing machine.

For Christmas 2021 my awesome wife got me a fantastic Singer heavy duty sewing machine. It’s a beast and I love it.

My overarching goal with it is to be able ot make things like packs or bags. I’ve also really wanted to try proper garment construction. So as a warm up I thought I’d give it a go.

The skirt

I had a go at sewing a shirt for my wife. specifically this skirt, the simplicity s9387.

She wanted the A style (Buttons down one side) with the C-Style length (shorter). This meant I had to alter the length of the skirt. Which thankfully wasn’t that hard in the pattern transfer stage.

My first attempt.

I’m pleased as punch!. Not only did I achieved what I attempted, but it’s also a functional skirt, and everything sort of worked out.

I don’t think we pay nearly enough for our clothing.

All up it too me about ~1.5 days of effort to go from a pattern, to a toile, and then to an actual skirt. Tack on another 2 hours for buttons and button holes as well. And add on a really stressful hour doing the hem. It took at a lot of work. And at my current work rates, this was a pretty costly activity.

Anyway, the broad point I want to convey is that was it was a tone of effort. Yes, over time I would get quicker, but it’s still a lot of work. So my price for this skirt is $500 AUD.

More broadly, I can buy cheap a dress shirt for $20 dollars. Someone is being done over on the effort there. I don’t think the person getting $20 for even a bad dress shirt is getting adequately paid for their effort.

Pipelines make things quick.

I already knew that pipelines are magical in their way of speeding up manufacturing, data processing, processor computation etc. But it also applies to sewing things.

In a garment factory, you wouldn’t see someone working like I was on just one thing. Slowly, so slowly building one item. Rather you’d have 5-10 people sitting in a row doing the same small few steps. And there’d be one person at the end who’d be the final step that’d result in a garment.

I won’t post the pattern instructions here, as they are not mine to share, but there’s about 20 steps to the process. You could see breaking the work up into a few people building the skirt and a few people doing the yoke, and then someone joining those pieces and finally someone hemming and top stitching the thing.

The level of detail and complexity in every day objects is frankly staggering.

I have large hands, and even with a 5/8’ (1.5cm) seam allowance I sometimes had trouble doing things like under-stiching and wrangling the clothing into place. Looking at the flat felled seams on my store bought dress shirts, and knowing what goes into creating things like pant fly’s, pant yokes, or dress collars really makes you appreciate the skill in making clothes. And I should not fail to mention the effort. Garment construction, even with a mechanical assist, is still broadly a labouring job.

Clothing, especially with delicate fabrics is really complex. It is impressive that it turns out so well.

The hardest part of the whole skirt was the hem.

Hopefully this diagram I made in powerpoint conveys the complexity of hemming a garment that’s essentially a cone. The part that you fold up to create the bottom of the skirts ends up folded against the higher, and shorter, circumference. So, what you’re trying to achieve is to make two different sized hoops of fabric lay flat. Essentially just beating physics into submission here.

It’s kind of like how the big accidents happen at the end of the day. I was over this skirt by now.

I eventually just went with my intuition on dealing with this and gathered the excess fabric to bring in the excess on the back face of the hem (which is a proper technique). But I did try and just fold it up hoping that physics would just bend to my will. It’d didn’t. So, pleats a plenty on the inside edge. :P

Red for the outside, blue for the inside face of the fabric. In 2D to emphasize the point.

Next steps.

I want to make the following items:

• A Dress button down shirt that fit me well. I’ve got broad shoulders that usually mean I have a baggy shirt around my waist when I wear store bought stuff. Surely the cheaper and easier option will be to just learn to sew my own shirts!!! Nothing, nothing at all can go wrong.

• A roll top hiking pack. A lot of people make these for themselves, so why not me.

• A mid-weight sports jacket. Again, I don’t think the store price reflects the work involved and I’d like to know what the work looks like.