Sometimes when you are trying to get thin knit fabrics to lay right and hang straight you get into trouble if you are trying to work them flat on the table. If you find that the edges are growing in weird ways or just not acting right, instead of recutting them try basting them together on the dress form first.
Debbie came to us with a special problem. She had cut the pieces from a two way stretch beaded and sequined illusion that was not behaving properly. The pieces were cut right and proper, the shapes had all been used before, but this particular fabric, and these two particular pieces were binding in a strange way and NOT binding the same way. This tells us that that it wasn’t a cutting error, but rather an error in the fabric itself. There are times when the fabric will have strange areas within the yardage that don’t have the same drape and movement. If the pieces are cut, you have to work with it.
Try setting the pieces on a dress form and basting them in place. Here Debbie does just that, trimming the weirdly stretched length from the hem and reshaping it. Much better than throwing the project out the window, burning it in the alley, stomping it into a melted sparkly mess, then drinking. Much.
If you don’t have a dress form at your disposal, you may want to try any number of other things:
• You can wrap a towel around a hanger and try to work with the garment suspended with he towel or blanket inside to give some shape.
• You can try to co-opt a friend of similar size to help you out and stand still for a couple of hours.
• You can try to find soft shape in and around your house – depending on the shape you need, you may find the arm of a chair or sofa or the back of a dining room chair with a blanket wrapped around it.
None of these are ideal, but when you are trying to get something done and you don’t have the right tools you have to thoughtfully improvise.