This week, I started off my Monday working on my jeans some more. I decided that I was going to take inspiration from a pair of Rick Owens pants that feature a distressing that goes from the back left pocket down to the hem. I started working on this back distressing initially because, in order to distress jeans with a needle, you have to cut slits in the jeans, but instead of separating the two pieces of denim that make up the leg, I held them together and cut through both sides of the jeans. Levi gave me the idea to work with what I had and I decided to make the distressing go the length of the pant leg. I worked on this distressing for a few hours. While being quite tedious at times, it is similar to sewing as it is quite therapeutic. I mostly focused on making sure my distressing looked purposeful and tidy on this day, as I was still learning the technique.
On Tuesday I had the sewing class, and I had been working on a tank top. I had cut out one portion of the tank top from the cutouts that were provided by grace, but I forgot to fold the fabric over the template. so I ended up with a quarter of a tank top as opposed to a half. I began with scrapping that whole mess and starting over. I grabbed a black and white printed fabric and got to work on my cutting. Cutting fabric has proven to be much harder than it looks especially cutting curves, because the fabric likes to move around as you cut it, making it almost impossible to create fluid and clean lines. My cuts looked sort of like bite marks, but Grace knows a method that will make these imperfections not show in the final project. I cut out the front panel after pinning the paper with only 4 pins, and my cuts came out quite rough once again (I don’t know what I expected, I did the same thing expecting a different result), but on the backside, Karen came out of the alumni room and helped me add additional pins to my paper. She told me to pin the fabric to the paper perpendicular to the paper’s edge and put the pins about an inch apart all the way around the template. This strategy proved to work very well, as the additional pins kept the fabric moving and allowed me to make a parody of the clean cuts I had envisioned I was going to be making going into this. She also helped me figure out how to work with a large amount of fabric on a table, and how to fold it so the pattern lines up on both sides of the fold. If it weren’t for these various lessons and tidbits from Karen, my tank top would be practically defective.
This was my real introduction to making garments from scratch, and it has proven to be a lot more difficult than I imagined. I have learned so much in such a short amount of time from this sewing seminar, and it has surprisingly gotten me much more interested in the overall construction of garments from scratch as opposed to the detailing I had previously been indulging in.