Making the Cut

My fashion fabric is shifty. My silk charmeuse is even shiftier. I was all ready to pin the pattern pieces and start cutting when I realized I was setting myself up to make a very ugly jacket. Lining up the warp and weft is like straightening cooked spaghetti -- impossible. So, I went online and asked my virtual brain, Google, how to cut slippery, stretchy fabrics.

Turns out there is a technique for making fabrics behave: cutting through paper. Luckily, I had some wide rolls of white paper in my supply house. I laid out the biggest piece on the floor of my studio and laid the fabric on top of that. It took about two hours to get the weft and warp more or less square with the edges of the paper, by tugging here and pushing there. Once that was done, I pinned the selvages to the paper.

It took another two hours to lay out the disassembled muslin on the fabric so as to leave generous cutting allowances around each piece. With a T-square and clear ruler, I lined each piece up correctly on the grain and pinned it in place.

Next, I cut the fabric in half to separate the right and left halves of the jacket and took one side to the cutting table for final pinning.

When everything was lined up perfectly, I re-pinned each piece. My final step before cutting was to outline each piece of the pattern with permanent marker:

I'd been working on this for hours and decided that was enough for one day. The right side will have to wait till it rains again.