Another thread made me think about this, now I know some of you out there do make clothes and some of you are converted dressmakers and others of us have either never made clothes, or made one or two items and not found it satisfactory, so I was wondering why that was.
Previously, I would have said, it's the sizing, the shape never looks right, I can't fit something to a person, blah blah blah, then I realised that was a silly thing to say, if I can fit a teddy or a doll, I can fit a person. So my new conclusion is that it's the fabrics that are more wearable and washable these days actually aren't so good for a regular sewing machine, I wear a lot of stretch fabrics, the threads that are better to use with those are expensive and the fabrics aren't cheap either. Changing size was another thing I thought off, I don't doubt my ability to fit a fixed size, problem is I change shape and before you all go worrying about yo yo diets and what not, the extremes of my weight in the last 5 years have had no more than 25 pounds between them and that's including two pregnancies, but even disregarding my actual weight, or cyclical bloating, I still have an uncanny ability to change shape, I'm always going to be a pear with weight on my hips, but even so, in the last few weeks I seem to have shifted that to more at the sides than on the back, leaving clothes that fitted quite nicely looking baggy in the wrong places! So fitting is an issue, but it's not my ability to fit, it's the body it's being fitted to changing to much!
I would like to try making trousers actually, but then those I do doubt my ability to fit, dress forms don't have legs, plus, you need to have movement in trousers that allows sitting and standing and what not.
My expectation is that I will get into all these fabrics because I dance and so does my son and I expect my daughter will too, ballroom dance costumes are very expensive, so where you don't save money for a simple top from stretch fabric, the speciality nature of the ballroom dance market means you do, but that's going to be one heck of a steep learning curve!
Cheers Anne