Finding A New Rhythm

Dan the Fabric Man is Retired!

I retired from my position as Merchandise Manager, Retail, at Springs Creative on October 31 after 46 years in the fabric industry. It's a big life change in many ways, and I'm working to find a new rhythm, a new daily structure, a new purpose. The biggest surprise? I don't miss working in the industry as much as I believed I would!

Establishing a new routine is a challenge, and that does not happen overnight. Nearly two months in, the new DTFM is a work in progress, and there are so many opportunities! Retirement will also give me time to post more often on this blog, and to experiment with video.

Sewing Every Day

One of the best parts of not working is spending time at the sewing machine every day! One of my goals at work for 2019 was to do something fun or creative every day, and this allows me to continue to fulfill that goal. I have a large apparel fabric stash and plenty of time now to work through it. I am wondering, though: where I will be wearing all these clothes if I'm not working every day? Hmmmm.

Woolen Suit Project

This time of year is usually very busy, and when I was working, I had no time to sew up any of the many pieces of wool suiting fabric I've accumulated over the past 40+ years. I confess: I LOVE a good piece wool suiting, and have probably a dozen pieces on hand to prove it, some dating back to the early 1980s (they're stored in a cedar-lined trunk). There's nothing like working on a great piece of wool fabric.

With so much free time, I decided to make a suit from a great piece of glen plaid wool flannel. This fabric is one of the oldest wool suitings in the stash, circa 1981. Not sure how I had intended to use the fabric, but I had cut out a suit sometime in the distant past, including the lining and interfacing, and still had a couple of yards left over.

Now, I am not the same size I was in the distant past, so the jacket pieces that were already cut out (and interfaced!) were not usable. However, the main pants pieces were large enough that my current, slimmer pants pattern fit on them perfectly. There was enough yardage remaining to recut a jacket using my current unlined jacket pattern.

Streamlined Sewing Approach

Sewing, for me, is a great creative outlet, but is really just a means to an end, and that end is the wearing. When I first started sewing, I would find images in magazines of menswear I liked, and I would find a similar pattern or a pattern I could use as a base to create a similar garment. During my fabric store years I learned a lot of tailoring tricks and tips by talking with customers, and over time I improved my tailoring skills.

Now that I'm older with more free time, I've streamlined the sewing process to focus more on the wearing. That means patch pockets instead of welt pockets, underlining instead of lining, and using fusible interfacing instead of hand tailoring. Wait. I never did ANY hand tailoring; I ALWAYS used fusible interfacings per the guidelines in the Palmer/Pletsch "Easy/Easier/Easiest Tailoring" book. My current patterns for jackets and pants were chosen to align with this approach. It's not that I no longer care about quality workmanship, but I do want to spend less time on the sewing and more time on the wearing. If the garments aren't perfect, well, "done" is better than "not done."

The pants came together quickly, over a couple of weekend days.

Then I cut out the new jacket. After the interfacing was applied, the pockets were attached and the side front seams of the wool were stitched. After stitching the side front seams of the lining, the pieces were stacked, wrong sides together. The process was repeated with the jacket back.

Next the side back and shoulder seams were stitched, and the raw seam edges serged. The sleeves were assembled in the same manner. Using the lining fabric as an underlining, instead of as a separate lining, speeds up the process with a perfectly acceptable result.

Next was the collar and front facing, and then the sleeves were inserted.

One shortcut I do not take is with the shoulder pads: I make custom shoulder pads for every jacket, using the jacket pattern pieces. Shoulder pads are really easy to make using a couple of layers of poly fleece (from the interfacing fixture). Overlapping the front and back jacket pieces to get the right shape, I traced the armhole area then made an arc up and through the shoulder area.

The upper layer is cut smaller and zig-zagged to the larger lower layer, then each pad is covered with lining fabric and serged to finish the raw edges.

The suit took only a week to put together using these streamlined techniques, and now another stash fabric is off the pile. There's so much pleasure in working with a great piece of fabric. With plenty of cold weather time left to knock out another wool suit, I hope to get another piece of wool fabric into the "wearing" column!

Until next time, think about ways you can streamline things to amplify your enjoyment, and keep those sewing machines humming!

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@danthefabricman

danthefabricman@yahoo.com