Has it been 4 months since my last post?! (Bad, bad blog owner!). When I last wrote in November, I had grand plans for a Christmas outfit (didn’t happen), a New Year outfit (also, didn’t happen), a Chinese New Year outfit (miracle of miracles, this one actually materialised) and Christmas presents for family and friends (all of which, did not happen… lol). The truth is, towards the end of last year and the start of 2016, I completely lost my sew-jo. It happens to the best of us, I suppose. At first, I was overloaded with work commitments, then I went on a couple of overseas trips and more recently, my family has had to deal with the loss of a very beloved grandfather. Though no one was pressuring me to post or sew anything, I spent the entire period being weighed down by self-imposed sewist and blogger’s guilt. That made my time away from the machine even more stressful! So this year, I’ve made a resolution to slow down, enjoy my hobbies to the fullest and not to stress out over them. If I get home late from a long day of work and cutting out pattern pieces feels like a chore – I’ll leave it off till another day. If I feel really crummy about having to set my alarm for 6 in the morning just to photograph my latest make before work – it can wait till the weekend. Hobbies are for leisure and enjoyment and I sure want to keep them that way! ^^
That being said, I haven’t been completely out of action these last 4 months. Last year, I visited the lovely ladies from Fashion Makerspace (FMS) for the first time and spent an extensive part of our meet-up bemoaning the lack of pattern-making classes in Singapore outside of the formal design schools (who charge an arm and a leg by the way). Imagine my glee when a little while later I got an invite from FMS to try out their new Sewing and Pattern-making Basics class (!!) which was targeted at beginners. This meant that I would be drafting a full outfit from scratch based on my own measurements and then sewing it up over the course of 10 lessons – I found this astounding. As a complete beginner I had previously taken a pattern-making class (conducted in Mandarin no less… who was I kidding?!) which took me no less than 5 weeks to complete the drafting and sewing of a simple A-line skirt. That FMS’ plan was to finish a full outfit in 10 weeks seemed a little ambitious to me. I was wrong, of course; all of us in the class finished the entire syllabus within the 10 weeks with time to spare. If you’re interested to hear more about my experience with FMS, then read on below!
I attended a total of 10 lessons (2.5 hours each) from November 2015 to January 2016 which covered the drafting of a bodice sloper, skirt sloper, reverse peter pan collared blouse and A-line skirt, as well as the construction of both the blouse and the skirt. The drafting and construction ran concurrently throughout the course – this meant that we began with the skirt sloper and the skirt draft, and then tackled the skirt construction whilst simultaneously learning to draft our bodice slopers and blouse drafts. I thought this lesson structure was really helpful – one week we were learning about drafting concepts and the next we were seeing them in action being translated from our paper drafts into 3-d garments. Nothing like seeing theory in practice to drive home a point!
https://www.instagram.com/p/-fb_ASgR3k/?taken-by=jessiehuen
Would I recommend this class to anyone else? Definitely! I was in a class with 2-3 other ladies who had very little experience with garment sewing and they did superb. Even as a fairly confident sewist, I took away a lot of new information on things I thought I knew well – like setting in sleeves and sewing darts! All 3 of the ladies who run FMS are professionally trained and have experience working in the fashion industry which means that they have a wealth of knowledge both in pattern-making and sewing that I shamelessly took every chance to tap on (and which they were totally nice about!) >< Some of the completely random out of syllabus tips I got from them included – their favourite fabric shops, serger troubleshooting, small bust adjustments, the best places to buy certain elusive notions, feedback on one of my unrelated drafts… the list goes on! (A big thank you to Danlin and Hailey for being so patient and tolerating my gazillion irrelevant questions!)
My only complaint (if you can even call it one, given that it’s mostly my own fault) is that I don’t care much for the eventual blouse I ended up with. For one, I made a poor fabric choice in picking a cotton lawn that was both too lightweight to hold the weight of the collar and wrinkled like crazy (all that wrinkling you see up there was from putting on the garment sheesh). Second, the reverse peter pan collar isn’t really my style. I did have the option of leaving off the collar but I wanted to get in some practice inserting the collar and then was wayyyy too lazy to unpick it. Lastly, as the course didn’t build in time for toiles/muslins, we had very little time for fitting. This meant that the top I ended up with is a little too tight around the armholes – which you can see from the pulling around my bust and shoulders.My draft has since been adjusted based on my feedback, so I’ll definitely give it another shot! As it is, I’ve already put my bodice block to good use in self-drafting a new dress for Chinese New Year – watch out for a post on that coming next week! As for the skirt, it’s perfect for the office (roomy enough to hide my lunch belly and tight enough to look business-formal) which makes it a winner in my books!
Tldr;
Class title: Sewing & Pattern-making Basics: Womenswear
Class duration: 10 lessons of 2.5 hours each
Class size: I believe it varies, but for my class it was 2 instructors to 3-4 students.
What do I get out of it?: A bodice sloper, a skirt sloper, a peter pan top with keyhole neckline, an A-line skirt and patterns for both these garments made to your measurements. Oh and a skill upgrade and new friends, of course!
Would I recommend it?: But of course! I’m already in the midst of taking classes in the next instalment – the intermediate pattern-making and sewing class for a shirt dress. I learnt a ton and I’m sure you would too!
Disclosure: FMS offered me a discount to try the class and if I liked it, to write a review on the course – as always, however, all the opinions expressed on this site remain 100% my own.
