Radical Sewing: Pattern-Free, Sustainable Fashions for All Bodies

Radical Sewing

Pattern-Free, Sustainable Fashions for All Bodies

© Kate Weiss, 2021

This edition © Microcosm Publishing, 2021

For a catalog, write or visit:

Microcosm Publishing

2752 N Williams Ave.

Portland, OR 97227

www.Microcosm.Pub

eBook ISBN 9781648410512

This is Microcosm #577

Edited by Lydia Rogue

Design by Joe Biel

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Microcosm Publishing is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years.

Did you know that you can buy our books directly from us at sliding scale rates? Support a small, independent publisher and pay less than Amazon’s price at www.Microcosm.Pub

FOR MY FAMILY, Dot, RuthAnn, Claire, Bev, and Yenny, the craftiest women I have ever known.

AND FOR MY DARLING M, without you, none of this is possible.

Contents

Introduction

The Necessities

Basic Techniques

Machine Sewing

Sewing by Hand

Measuring Your Body

The Politics of Clothing

Modifying Your Existing Wardrobe: Pants or Skirts

Fit

Closures

Adjustments for Seated Bodies

Fixing Holey Pants: Mending

Converting to Cargo Pants: Adding Pockets

Expanding Your Wardrobe

Cloning Your Clothes

Making New Clothes from Scratch

Basic Principles of Design

Working from a Pattern

Bonus Stash Busters

Conclusion

Basic Sewing Terms (Glossary)

Additional Resources: Pattern Companies, Websites, Books, & Suppliers

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Things make us, as much as we make them.

—Christine Checinska, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum

The act of sewing should be, at its root, an act of resistance to fast fashion. They say fast, we say slow. They say more, we say less. They say perfection, we say process. They say competition, we say community.

—Meg McElwee, creator of the Mindful Wardrobe Project

INTRODUCTION

When I was in my early 20s, my aunt passed away after a difficult illness. After her death, I inherited her old sewing machine. The heavy taupe beast was difficult to get from Minnesota to Kentucky, where I live, but it made it home in one piece. This sewing machine was the first I ever owned myself. It was the machine that taught me to sew and allowed me to produce the first clothes I ever made. I nicknamed her the Rocketeer for her space-age lines and slanting body. The old girl is solid and confident in herself and her abilities. She still has a reliable and steady disposition—a workhorse after more than fifty years of making seams. My particular model was produced between 1960 and 1962—this was back when most sewing machines were made entirely from metal, domestically, and built to last beyond the lifetime of their owner with proper care and the occasional drop of oil.

When I inherited the Rocketeer, I had only sewn two things in a middle school home economics class: a small, lopsided patchwork quilt and a single pair of horrendous boxer shorts. The boxers were awful, they didn’t fit, and I wore them only once—to school over a pair of pajama pants. The thing I remember most vividly about those first sewing lessons wasn’t my experience learning to sew. But instead, was the drama of my classmate sewing right through her finger in the middle of class. She was sewing along at her machine and just didn’t stop. The needle went through her fingernail and broke off in her index finger. She screamed. She bled. Someone might have fainted. It was not an auspicious introduction to the world of sewing.

If you’re one of those folks that can dive right into a new thing with confidence or you’ve been sewing for years and can’t remember a time when you didn’t sew in your spare time, you can probably go ahead and skip the rest of this introduction. But if you’re like so many of the people I talk to who have always kind of wanted to learn to sew but are intimidated, this note is for you.

It can be intimidating to begin practicing a new craft. Insecurities come up, frustrations, that little devil perfectionism gets in the way. First projects that go terribly wrong and cheaply built sewing machines can turn people off sewing forever. Or maybe you never found the time or had the resources to try. Or found a design that really spoke to your style and the type of clothing you want to wear.

But when someone notices lovingly homemade clothes it can spark a strong desire inside them. I watch the thoughts turning in their mind when they say they really like my purse or jacket and I let them know I made it myself. They have never tried, they tell me. It seems too scary, like visiting a different country and not speaking the language. It’s just not a place they can go, they say. Here’s the thing though. Sewing is for everyone. Sewing is real power and I want everyone to know it and get to experience what it feels like to wear a pair of pants you made yourself. It is magical. It will make you stand or sit taller, I swear.

It can feel like some people are born with the ability to create clothes from flat pieces of fabric. Maybe it’s Grandma, Mom, Dad, or a friend. It may seem that they have an intuitive understanding of shape and grading (we’ll get into all the sewing lingo soon) and how to go from point A. a tube of knit fabric to point B. a cute t-shirt. But that’s not how craft works. A to B is not a single ruler-straight line and it never will be. There are hundreds of steps and missteps, zigs and zags in between. Some projects will go great and others won’t go well at all even after you’ve been sewing for years.

Sewing, like all craft, is a practice. One where perfection is a nice thing to aim for but wholly unnecessary and usually unachievable. And that’s fine; it’s OK. Most of us aren’t the women from Playtex in charge of sewing spacesuits that would go to the moon, working under a 1/64" (.39 mm) margin of error and without the ability to rip out the seams and start again if they messed up. (A true story.)

When it comes to clothes, imperfect garments will still do their job: covering and protecting our body. while also projecting an identity. Clothes can fit well, keep the rain off your back, and keep all your private bits covered even if they have slightly wonky seams or mismatched plaids.

We all must begin a practice from a place of unknowing. There is no passport or paperwork or permission required to begin to sew. Like with grammar and learning a language, knowing the rules is helpful, but also not the only way to learn.

You can physically take apart a pair of pants seam by seam to see how all the pieces fit together. You can make one sleeve short and one sleeve long because that works best for you. You can sew an entire dress by hand for the meditative quality of handwork. You can make a regency petticoat or a loud and proud outfit for a drag show. You can embroider your back pockets with political messages. Hem one pant leg shorter than the other because you ride your bike every day and are tired of rolling it up. Or use velcro or magnets instead of buttons because different closures work better for you.

Don’t be intimidated. Sewing has the potential to bring so much joy into your life. Sewing puts you in control of the garments and fabric that cover your body every day. You make the choices for yourself, not someone in a big corporate office that is beholden to shareholders and corporate bosses. You can make things in a way that doesn’t make sense for big companies, in ways they would never dream of making clothing, one piece at a time for one person in particular.

At its heart, this book is about trying things out, learning, experimenting, goofing up, and making things work for your body. It’s a book about our clothes, ourselves, our unique and infinitely varied bodies and how we want and need to dress those bodies everyday. This book isn’t chock full of patterns and that’s by design. I don’t know the kind of clothes you have or what you want to make and wear, but I do know a few of the tools and skills you’ll need to make whatever it is that you want.

By making your own clothes you are saying you want your clothes to actually fit your awesome body. That your body is right and the starting point of design and that clothes should fit it, no matter what your shape and size. Clothing touches our skin and our lives every single day. Making clothing at home is no small act of defiance to the established order of things. You are declaring that you want to know who made your clothes and under what conditions. That you will be responsible for the waste you create and the fiber you use.

Making and modifying your own clothes will change the way you relate to your wardrobe; it will change the way you see style and fashion and allow you to see your own body with fresh, more objective and grateful eyes. And who among us couldn’t use a little bit of that?

THE NECESSITIES

As craftsman and woodworker Peter Korn says, You can’t bullshit a chisel. The same can be said of a sewing machine, needle, and thread. Purchasing well-made tools and notions means your job as a maker will be easier. The fact of the matter is, it’s more difficult to make well-made garments with flimsy tools. I’ve seen fabric shears so blunt right from the packaging that they would shred any fabric they came near rather than cut it. And in all likelihood the conditions those tools were made in are the same factory and working conditions I’m trying to avoid by making my own clothes in the first place. A quality pair of fabric shears can last well beyond a single person’s lifetime. Unfortunately, that’s not what is most commonly available. The tools you choose to work with and spend your time with are as important as the fabric you choose. How you approach every stage affects the final result. And for the love of makers everywhere, if you are left handed, please treat yourself to a pair of left handed fabric shears!

Your Sewing Space

When I first started sewing, I lived in the attic loft of a 100-year-old house. The whole apartment was one large room with lots of support posts and angled walls, and thanks to new skylights, sunshine. Here, I was able to create a small sewing zone below one of the awkwardly angled corner nooks. And this is where all my fabric, tools, and sewing machine lived the rest of the time I lived in that apartment. My little corner was a great place to spread out on the floor and have all my fabric, notions, tools and machines tucked in together in one small area of the apartment.

If you have to hunt down your sewing machine and drag it up four floors from a dark basement every time you want to hem a pair of pants, you’re less likely to sew at all. That’s why setting up a permanent or semi-permanent spot for sewing, no matter your living situation, will help get projects started in the right direction and remove one of the barriers people often find most difficult: simply having the mental and physical space to do it. A functional and permanent sewing space doesn’t have to take up a large footprint. I’ve seen rad sewing spaces in tiny houses, small flats, and busy family homes. But these spaces were all set up deliberately, to give the resident sewer(s) the best possible working space out of the area they have available to them.

First consider where you want to set up your sewing space. If you have a large dedicated sewing room that’s amazing—but it’s not something a lot of us have. It’s completely doable to set up a flexible sewing space in a dining room, small work-from-home office (this is my current setup), or bedroom. Is there some place in your home or room where you can put a small desk, sewing machine, table, rolly-cart, and a couple of baskets? Do you want your family or roommates to participate and join in or do you want to be able to close a door and have some private sewing time?

One of the next things to think about is where can you lay out a yard or two of fabric? I still do this on the hardwood floor because I don’t own a table large enough to lay out more than a yard of fabric, or really enough room for it. This spot is ideally near your sewing machine, but that might not be possible and that’s fine. Sometimes you have to cut out on the dining room table and take your pieces back to the sewing corner in your