Limitations of Tailoring?

Bernard, I love you attitude. As a student over 30 years ago, I was not as skilled a sewist as I am today, but I still saved hundreds of pounds making rather than buying most of my clothes (on an old hand cranked Singer I still own!)

There are few limits to tailoring, but most of what you are asking about comes under the heading of alterations, and yes, there are a lot more limits there!

tHERE IS A GREAT DEAL MORE TO TAKING AN INCH OUT OF A JACKET SEAM THAN JUST UNZIPPING THE SEAM AND TAKING IT IN. If you do that the whole balance of the sleeve is destroyed and it will no longer fit the hole! yOU NEED TO DECONSTRUCT both SEAMS AND RECONSTRUCT THAT AND THE ARMSKYE (THE HOLE THE SLEEVE CAME OUT OF) TO GET A PROPER FIT. i WOULD SUGGEST THAT IF YOU FIND A GOOD MAKE OF SUIT IN A THRIFT STORE, EVEN ONE BADLY WORN (especially ONE BADLY WORN - IT'LL BE cheap!)[Rats - sorry - caps lock got stuck] Take the suit apart carefully, taking pix of everything as you go, and making notes. It'll take a while, and parts will be boring. Intersperse your deconstruction with periods of sewing machine practice. For a suit you really only need straight seams, but for it to look good, they must be impeccable.

Also get yourself a good book on tailoring techniques (the library will be the place to go, though you may need to order them), and read all you can. And a pattern... Vogue do a good one, and I won't suggest that you draft your own just yet. Read the instructions through carefully, look in your book for explanations, and get back and ask about anything you don't understand. Once your deconstruction is complete and you know what you are setting out to do, get back to us and we'll guide you through the fabric choices and the making. The whole process of making and fitting the suit will tell you a great deal about your shape and size, and about how much can be altered. Then, when you see an Asquscutim or Dax suit in the thrift store that looks like it was worn once, you can see what size it is on you and judge whether it's worth the ours needed to alter it, and if a little tweak will do, and, indeed, if it can be done at all.

Think of it as an engineering construction technique using a plastic medium and you'll be about right - even if you use pure wool for the outer and silk for the lining! ;)

Thanks! Well, the one opportunity I have is someone whose father died, and she's selling all his clothing for $100 just to get it out as quickly as possible in one load (sure, selling piecemeal with long advertisements for each piece would net much more, and take weeks or months). There are 9 good sports jackets, 2 suits, 1 tux, 7 loafers (that are my size; I am NOT cobbling my own shoes), and then some other odds and ends.

So even if it's more work, it makes sense to alter a $5/quality suit! I've shopped with my sister before; good wool is going to be $20/ yard! Far more expensive to sew from scratch. These suits and jackets are all 46R.

So, I'll take all the steps mentioned. Get a book, pick apart my least favourite of the sport jackets, analyze some patterns.... if the pattern gives overlays for 42, 44, 46; S, R, L, then I can see what shapes I might alter my dismembered 46R to make it a 44S-- all the fabric should be there, it'll just be more complicated. I'll come back to this forum once I've made a disaster of my first sport jacket ;-) BUT-- in your experience, can 46R be shortened and shrunk to be a

44S? I suppose, again, if all the fabric is there; just in entirely the wrong shapes, I can pick it apart completely, trim it everywhere, and resew it.

In this case, fabric is an elastic medium-- which is why it's so frustrating! When you're sculpting in clay, you squish it to a shape, and it stays squished to that shape. It's plastic; and it is very annoying when some clay bodies are elastic and springy; you press on them and they push back a little. But if you tug on fabric, stitch it up, and let go, you can be very disappointed when it springs back a little and puckers in an ugly fashion; that's my main challenge. On the other hand, the elastic properties of fabric give you greater freedom! .0005" can mean the difference between a smooth rotation and a pressure fit in machined aluminum parts (I've been there; you can spend hours tweaking the lathe to be *just* right, and then it'll be different for the very next part!); 1/8" can be hidden if dispersed around a sleeve, and strange, impossible angles fudged and forced to work well :-)

-Bernard

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Well, I'm not an alterations specialist, but in my experience of MAKING a suit, you have pockets put across pre-existing seams, so it isn't always possible to cut new pieces from the old. Where there IS a pocket across a seam, don't unpick unless you don't intend to resew that particular jacket. And smaller bits are smaller all over, not merely shorter and narrower... if you see what I mean!

It's a matter of balance, with buttonholes and pockets and lapels and such all lined up and placed according to the size and shape of the garment ON the wearer! Shortening the hems and taking things in round about the way can leave you with all sorts of bits not in the right place and look worse than wearing it too big!

The CAN, but... Knowing where and how so it fits properly rather than bulging and wrinkling in odd places is where the skills come in! It's as much an art as a science.

Pure wool is both plastic AND elastic! There are areas where you steam bits to shape both before and after putting them together. And there are areas where you want the stretch to spring back after sewing. You'll see what I mean when you read the books! :)

And with good sales you need not be paying $20 a yard. We'll teach you about things like sales and bargain hunting and where to go for pure wool suiting at affordable prices!

Alright; I'll get back here after some reading and maybe experimentation (but probably, I'll have some educated questions even before I begin, once I've read).

I'm in deeper than I wanted to go, but isn't that always the case?

Hahaha, 6 years ago I told myself that I'd do just a tidbit of sculpture and woodworking to help wooden ship model-building. Just a little, as practice. Six years later I find myself having built guitars, carved marble, and invested serious time in oil painting.

Just a few sewing skills, to quickly modify cheap used suits, no more. Already you've got me thinking about having to sew my own suits from scratch. Six years from now maybe I'll find myself so obsessed with sewing, that I'll have spent 400 hours sewing up a 17th century ballroom costume for myself!

But hey, it's just another art? I should learn it, and in doing so will appreciate it infinitely more. I wonder whenever sewing acquired the feminine connotations that it has today; there have been professional tailors for millennium, not only seamstresses.

thanks; will post again in a couple days after a library trip! -Bernard Arnest

For inspiration, here's some pages made by a sporadic poster in this group -

Now, if this isn't a classic case of "one thing leads to another" I don't know what is!

Good!

I know the feeling... I ended up teaching art by accident!

My FiL started to make all his own trousers: at 6'3" and long in the leg, he had real trouble finding things to fit. Some years later he made a LOT of clothes for his wife, including the suit she wore when they got married, and the one she wore three years later when I got married! She was tiny and had difficulty getting clothes to fit.

As for the 17th C suit... Why not! I earn some of my living doing that sort of sewing for re-enactors and the like. It's a lot of fun, and I love the research as mush as the sewing.

There have always been sewists of both sexes, both professional and not. The thing with the non-professional home sewist was that wives and daughters were the ones that stayed home and did that as part of their contribution to the home while the blokes did the muscle stuff out in the fields. They separated work and home where women didn't, and it gradually lost status as more was given to non-home working men.

Here's a list of books to watch for:

Classic Tailoring Techniques: A Construction Guide For Men's Wear by Roberto Cabrera and Patricia Flaherty Meyers

Tailoring: Traditional and Contemporary Techniques by Thiel and Ledbetter

Tailoring (Singer Sewing Reference Library) (Hardcover - 29 April 1993) Tailoring: A Step-by-step Guide to Creating Beautiful Customised Garments by Creative Publ Intl

Easy Easier Easiest Tailoring by Pati Palmer and Susan Pletsch

Just to be going on with!

Back to the original question that's bugging my mind: is it possible to make a 42S or a 44R or a 46R into a 44S? That's what I would delve into all of this to do; to alter those available suits.

Do you know anyone whom I might ask, who could give me a quick green light or red light; and then I'll jump in headfirst?

thanks! -Bernard

42S may nor have enough seam allowance to let out enough in the right places... If it's tight across the shoulders, forget it! 44R could probably be taken up enough, but might look a little odd: lapels and pockets too low... Shorten the sleeves from the top. 46R might be possible, but would be a lot of work: you need to take some in on the side/back, some on the side/front seams (this is where you may hit the pocket problem), some off the shoulder width, some off the length, and some of the off the sleeve width (both seams!) and length. Sleeve length is PROBABLY better altered from the top, but as you need the sleeves taken out anyway...

Size is also variable: don't expect suits of the same size to fit the same way when made by different companies! And if any were tailor made for this gent, deconstruct to see how they were done, but don't expect to get the same level of finish when reconstructed!

My personal take is that it is quicker, easier, and you get a better job if you start from scratch, ESPECIALLY if you are fairly new to sewing. Tailoring is advanced sewing, and alterations a whole new can of worms! But I admit to being biased: I HATE alterations and do not do them as a general rule.

Chiming in here late. I do alterations. Mostly women's clothing, but I will do some menswear if it's someone I like. ;) Short answer, you CAN get from a 46R to a 44S.

Longer answer: It is always better to cut down a garment that has been worn than to let one out. There will be wear lines on anything that you let out that has been worn and cleaned. Also, you can't count on there being extra fabric still in the seam allowances, even on a tailored jacket. Usually, the extent you could let something out would be maybe 1" and it would look let out. Blechy!! When I do alterations my goal is always to improve the fit but for no one to tell the garment was altered. Make sense?

Now, as a general rule, the Most you can alter something is 2 sizes. More than that and things can get ugly. As long as the jackets fit you well from the top of your shoulder to the bottom of the armscye, you're fine. In real plain and simple terms, if the armpit of the jacket fits pretty well to your own, you're fine to make the other alterations the jacket will need. If the armpit of the jacket is way low, which being a bigger size they could be, you may not be able to get a good result altering the jacket. It can Sometimes be done well, but it falls then into the category of Remaking rather than Altering.

Taking the jacket in around the body will be fairly simple. Remember you will need to make identical changes to the lining and the suiting fabric. Remember too that you have a center back seam, and two side seams. Spreading the alteration out as much as possible around the garment gives a much better result. So not just taking 2" out of the center back. You take a little bit at the center back and a little at each side seam. Keep in mind where things like pockets are. Avoid messing with the pockets if you can. Also avoid taking side seams in enough that the pockets are WAY out of alignment from where they should be.

If you can find a tailor or an alterationist close to you, you might take one jacket to them and discuss what will need to be done.

Sharon

There are subtle differences among the varied sizes that will affect the general look. One area of concern is the placement and size of pockets. If you cut down from Regular to Short, the chest pocked may be off kilter or too low. Distance from the front button holes to the pockets may look off kilter too. JMO.

If you want to find a nice second hand suit, leave your name and size range in places that clean or rent or alter garments. When they have abandoned goods they usually want buyers. The alteration shop may help fit it to you as part of the purchase.

PAT > Back to the original question that's bugging my mind: is it possible