Groxie

In my ongoing battle to become better at sewing, I have been tackling small projects left and right. I spent one whole day just playing around, making a little toy for myself (more on that next week, maybe). Once I felt comfortable that I could sew a mostly straight line, I decided to hem up the curtains. They didn’t turn out half bad, so I started tackling the scarier projects—our clothes.

We had plenty of shirts and pants with little (or big) holes that have been waiting to be mended. There are a still a few larger holes that I haven’t figured out yet, but I had some reasonable success with a jacket, a t-shirt, some pj pants, and a pair of gloves. It’s such a fulfilling task; I get to start wearing a beloved item again, and I don’t need to worry about trashing good stuff or buying new stuff!

The most important discovery though, was more about alteration than repair. John is a tall and lanky fellow, so he has a difficult time finding just about anything that fits him. He’s managed to peg down a couple of jeans brands that work, which is awesome since I’m deathly afraid of serious jeans alteration. But shirts are another matter entirely. Work shirts are always too short in the sleeves or to wide everywhere else, and t-shirts are also too wide or too short in the torso.

I’m not learned enough to make dress shirts, but I had a fine time downsizing John’s too-big t-shirts. I started out with a freebie that he wouldn’t be broken up about. He gave me a shirt that fits him well, and I used my tailor’s chalk to roughly mark it’s shape over the big shirt. I lined up the collars of the two shirts, roughly lined up the sleeves, and figured out how much to take off of the sides. Inevitably, I had to alter the sleeves a bit, too, and by the second shirt I was able to do this much better.

Now instead of turning those freebie shirts into (more) rags, I can make them useful in about 10 minutes. With a little sewing know-how, I can make second-hand shopping a possibility for John. I’m also inspired to do a little more adventerous altering for my own clothes, like adding fabric at the cuffs and bottom hems to extend shirts. I’ll put up a tutorial for the resizing next time, and there are detailed tutorials on resizing and altering t-shirts all over the place.

I got my sewing machine free as a hand-me-down, but I’ve recently seen some on Craigslist for as little at $10! Those old heavy machines last forever as long as you oil them and keep them clean.