Garment Construction

A garment is flat cloth persuaded into the shape of a body, and almost all of that persuasion happens in a handful of techniques used over and over. This course teaches them in the order a garment is actually built. You begin at the seam itself - what a plain seam is, what stitch length suits which cloth, how to handle curves, corners and intersections, and how to press a seam so it lies down and stays down. From there to seam finishes, because a raw edge inside a garment is the single most common reason a home-sewn piece wears out before it should: zigzag, overcast, pinked, turned-and-stitched, French, flat-felled, bound - and how to choose among them by fabric and by how the garment will be washed.

The middle of the course is shaping. Darts, tucks and pleats take up fullness in a controlled way; gathering and easing take it up softly, and easing in particular is the difference between a sleeve that sits smoothly and one that puckers at the cap. Then the visible edges: hems by weight and by curve, and facings with the understitching that keeps them from rolling to the outside. The last four units are the parts that must open, close, or fit around something - necklines and collars, sleeves set flat and set in the round, cuffs and plackets and waistbands, and finally zippers and pockets. By the end you will be able to read a pattern's instruction sheet and know not only what it is telling you to do but why, which steps can be reordered, which cannot, and where a better finish is worth the extra twenty minutes.

The course is ten units of ten lessons - one hundred lessons in all - self-paced, with each lesson a short reading followed by a ten-question quiz that grades itself. It assumes you can already run a machine and cut out a pattern; it is written for adults, plainly, without busywork, for the parent sewing a family's clothes on a small budget and for anyone who wants work that holds up. Safety is mentioned where it belongs - the iron, the rotary cutter, fingers near a moving needle, and a sewing room shared with children. Running through it is the character Scripture attaches to this kind of work: Bezalel and Aholiab filled with the Spirit in all manner of workmanship, the priestly garments made for glory and for beauty, the woman of Proverbs 31 who layeth her hands to the spindle and maketh fine linen, and Dorcas, whose coats and garments were held up and wept over because someone had made them for somebody. Where a lesson touches on clothing the body - a neckline, a hem length, a fitted waist - modesty is taught warmly and positively, as a kindness to others and the adornment of a meek and quiet spirit, never as a list of rules and never as a rebuke. Skill here is stewardship, and the standard is Colossians 3:23: whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord.