Over the course of the last week and a half, I have sewn a remarkably ugly dress by hand. The keen-eyed will immediately notice that I’ve also sewn it quite poorly in many respects. The shoulder top seams are felled in different directions. There are all manner of other sins. Were it a dress I would ever wear, these things would matter.
As it happens it isn’t and they don’t, because what this dress lacks in style or even in correct construction technique it makes up for in fit. Some of the “errors,” in fact, were introduced intentionally as I worked with it to make adjustments simpler.
You see, this dress isn’t really a dress. This dress is a rough draft, if you will, of a garment of which I’ll be sewing up at least a couple of wearable versions in summery cotton prints.
Doing this sort of thing is a longstanding practice among those who sew. These rough drafts are called muslins or toiles, after the sort of inexpensive plain fabrics used to make them. This one is a muslin, run up in a lightweight undyed cotton muslin that, at $3.89 per yard, is perfectly priced to serve as an educational experience. Once upon a time, and also still today if you go to a seamstress or tailor for a completely bespoke garment, they would make a muslin for you and fit you in it before they even so much as touch the bolt of fabric for the item of clothing you’ve ordered.
Assuming you’re going to sew a garment at all, there are a few reasons to consider making a muslin yourself. If you’re inexperienced at sewing for one thing, it gives you low-stakes practice. The garment isn’t intended to be worn so you can make all the mistakes you like, pull the stitching out, regroup, and try again. If you stitch by hand rather than machine, it’s extremely easy to pull out seams when you need to. Just grab the thread by its loose end and tug, no seam ripper or scissors required.
Muslins also teach you what you need to know about the particular pattern you’re making. There are many things you only really learn about a garment by putting it together. Perhaps the sleeve construction is more fiddly than it looks, or less. The construction of many types of sleeves requires a fiendish disregard for the workings of normal three-dimensional space, so they nearly always seem more fiddly than they should be until you’ve done enough to get the hang of them.
The most important reason to sew a muslin is fit. Every pattern drawn, like every article of ready-made clothing, makes assumptions about the body that will wear it. Maybe the designer had a person with bigger breasts than you have in mind when they drew the pattern, or a longer torso, and the garment won’t fit properly without adjustments. Perhaps you want the waistband to sit a little lower or the neckline to be a little higher or the skirt a little shorter or… well, whatever you like, really.
Maybe, like most of us, you’re not the same size everywhere. Patterns are made like all other clothes, with a somewhat arbitrary range of measurements as a given size. There are few things in life that are guaranteed, but here’s one that is: It is vanishingly unlikely that your specific body will have the precise proportions of a given clothing pattern, whether you make the garment yourself or buy it already made. This is one of the reasons most of the clothes we wear these days aren’t closely fitted. Garments with more ease (extra space) can accommodate a wider range of body sizes and shapes. It’s also why fabrics that stretch easily are so popular. Any body, of any shape, can wear the garment so long as it’s within the limits of the fabric’s capacity to stretch.
As with ready-made clothes, a sewing pattern in a given size — let’s say it’s for a shirt — might fit well in some ways but not others. It might be perfect through the shoulders and chest but the arms might be too short or long or tight or loose and the waist could be not the right fit in another direction entirely. Making a muslin offers you the opportunity to find out.
Making a muslin also offers you the chance to change things if you want. You’re not going to hurt anyone’s feelings — or even your own progress with the sewing project — if you decide to pull it apart and reconfigure it in ways that you think will suit you better. In fact, that’s the whole point. Your body is its own inimitable self. Clothes that genuinely fit it will pretty much by definition not be clothes that were made on any other set of measurements.
For me, these days, I’m a combination of three different dress sizes if we go on the basis of what the tape measure says. My shoulders and upper chest fit into one, my torso from breasts to just below my navel fits into another, and from there on down it’s different yet again. If I wore trousers it’d be even more complicated, because my legs and my hips would be different sizes too. I don’t wear trousers, though, so I can stop doing math once my hips have been figured into the equation.
I also have one shoulder that sits a bit higher than the other, which is fairly common. It’s not something you’d notice unless you watched me for a long time and realized that my left bra strap slips off my shoulder with some frequency, and in some kinds of shirts and dress bodices, the neckline will drift a tiny bit left over time.
There are precisely zero pieces of clothing I can buy off the rack that are a combination of three dress sizes. In order to count the ones that are additionally adapted to a tiny bit of lopsidedness on the left-hand side would require negative numbers.
The best I can do, if I’m going to try to dress myself with ready-made clothes as I do most of the time, is to buy a shirt that fits the larger of my two upper-body measurements and a skirt that fits my hips, and try not to worry about the rest too much. With dresses, the only choice is to find something that fits the hips and, well, I dunno. “Wear a cardigan to cover up the rest if I don’t like how it looks” ends up being my usual strategy.
When I sew, I don’t have to settle. I can grade a pattern between sizes, or with some more advanced techniques, size it up it beyond the printed sizes if I choose. Making a muslin before I make the dress gives me the chance to see what it looks like in a big-picture way. I can see how it falls, how the proportions work with my body, whether I like how long the sleeves are and where the neckline hits me. Then I can play with whatever I don’t like and adjust the pattern, a little tuck here and a little fold there, until I figure out what fits right and sits right.
This ends up meaning that, for instance, the dress I’ll be starting to sew later on today in a printed blue cotton with flowers and birds on it won’t be three sizes at all, even though technically it’s based on a frankenpattern, an amalgamation of three different sizes. You won’t be able to see that it was altered. The dress will simply fit.
Yes, of course, this whole process is time-consuming. Yes, it requires a healthy appetite for experimentation and for trial and error. It is also a process that will shove you right up against any misperceptions you may have of your own body’s shapes and dimensions. That can be uncomfortable, but then again it’s always uncomfortable to realize that no, this thing you thought was one way is actually another way, and you’ve got to reset your expectations.
With this dress the record-scratch moment was the realization that if I wanted the waistline to sit where I do and look the way I wanted it to look, I would have to give up nipping in the waist as much as I had with the back darts indicated in the pattern. Honestly, my back fat needs some space to work in if it’s going to live its best life and it would neither look or feel good to leave the darts as they were.
The version of me in my head that was going to fit into a dress with a higher hip to waist ratio than it turns out my body actually possesses had a bit of a snit about this for a minute. It turns out, however, that bodies are in fact three-dimensional.
When I’m making a muslin and I realize something is genuinely not right, I always have to sit with it for a minute. I think about what my options are with regard to the garment and its construction versus what I need the garment to do. I make a decision about what seems best. Then I make the adjustment. In this case, this meant separating the skirt from the bodice in two places, tugging two pieces of thread out to release the darts, restitching them to be shallower, then restitching the skirt to the bodice. It took me all of about ten minutes. I tried it on. It fit.
Somewhere in the process of physically adjusting the garment, it always seems, I find some ease with whatever it is. The ease arrives through the act of accommodation. My back fat, it turns out, wasn’t the problem. Having darts as deep as they were in that particular spot was the problem So I fixed it.
The clothes we wear are part of our built environment. They are as full of assumptions about what bodies are “supposed to” be and be like as everything else we build. I know this full well. Yet it never stops feeling amazing to me that I can, with nothing more than my hands and some basic tools like pins and needles and scissors and thread, change those assumptions.
I don’t even have to ask for permission. Or apologize to anyone. I can simply make the thing so it’s right.
Yes, yes, I know. It’s just a dress. And why should a person have to go to so much trouble just to have clothes that fit?
Because it is a dress, that’s why. It’s an article of clothing that I’m going to wear out in the world, part of my self-presentation, part of how other people encounter me and understand me. It should fit me, not some random fit model or set of statistical averages. No, ideally a person shouldn’t have to go to this much trouble just to have clothes that fit. And still I’m grateful to be able to.
This is so inspiring. Wouldn't it be a lovely world if everyone could wear clothing made to fit them? Imagine. Yet most of us go around making do with the best we can get. I just finished a lined velvet jacket for myself to fit, that adjusts for the different shoulder heights, etc. Sewn by hand. Thank you for showing the entire garment with its warts and all!
I have a dear friend whose proportions are entirely non-standard, and she has been making all her own clothes (nearly all of which are dresses) for decades. She would be nodding like a bobble-head at this. I am not good at any handcrafts, but I’m short and sometimes I want to learn just to avoid having to roll up my sleeves all the time!