Sewing Simplicity

Ok, you must go watch this video.  Right now.

I found it over at Lucky Lucille and my boyfriend was endlessly amused by, mostly, my reaction.  But really, she's adorable, and her boyfriend is hilarious.  And the patterns, oh, they're such dears. 

Ok, but really.  There are a lot of steps I apparently should be doing that I miss.  For one, never have I ever pinned the pattern together to try it on.  Well, that's a lie, I tried it once when drafting... it didn't work.  Tissue paper is just not strong enough for me to try that.  And I've never basted the whole dress together before sewing.  In fact, I rarely baste anything before sewing it properly. 

Now, there were a couple things they didn't do that I expected them to.  For one, they used the actual pattern paper, not a trace.  What are you going to do if you want to make the same dress for your little sister?  Once you've cut out a size 8 you're never going to be able to use the size 10.  I know women used to trace out the patterns on old news papers rather than wasting new tissue paper (Make do and Mend ect) so I'm surprised the video would let girls ruin a perfectly good pattern by limiting it to just one size. 

The other step that wasn't there was making the muslin.  But, then again, that's a lot of extra fabric for the dress.  Thinking about it, they do have two pattern-checking try-on stages before the dress is made, once with the pattern and once with the dress basted togehter, so maybe it's not needed.  In fact, it makes a lot of sense, why waste the fabric on a muslin when you can just check with the pattern.  Let's face it, their way makes way more sense.  Am I going to switch to trying on the pattern? Probably not, I've tried that and usually just end up with a torn pattern.  But then, if I'm honest, I usually skip the muslin step anyway.  And yes, there are times when I regret that.