Hi you guys and welcome back to the prep work section of our sew-along that I'm doing for Simplicity 9-6-4-2. This is the free workbook that I made in conjunction with this sew-along. So if you don't have it, check the description box. Go ahead and download it. I'm gonna be referring to it a bunch. But today's video is all about making the pattern alterations. If you're just finding this video and you haven't seen any other videos in the sew-along yet, you have missed one. That was the very first video we just put up and it talks about how to find your size and what alterations you are going to need to make. So if you haven't seen that one yet, this video won't make a lot of sense. So go back, watch that one, and then come back to this one. I have them all linked in the description box for you. But to talk about pattern alterations, obviously we're gonna be able to check off this little box here for our pattern alterations. You should have notated them in the Project Planner page with your sizes and the alterations to make so that they are all in there. I'm being lazy and I haven't done mine yet. But trust me, I know what they are. You are gonna need to gather up some materials. We're gonna need some kind of dressmaker's ruler, probably a straight ruler. Keep your calculator and pencil out from the how to pick your size video. Then you're gonna need all of your pattern pieces. And depending on what view you're making, those are all listed on page one of the instructions. If you go to here, this is a little mock up of all the pattern pieces and which ones you need for each view. I'm making view B just as it is. So I'm just gonna go through and anything that has the letter B in it or no letters at all are the pattern pieces that I'm gonna need.  I went ahead and cut around mine pretty generously because I know that I'm gonna be making alterations to some or all of these pieces. Be mindful of the bodice front. There are four versions of the bodice front in your tissue paper. You only need the one that corresponds with your bust cup. So I'm only cutting out bust cup A. The sleeves are also like they printed out each size of the sleeve as an individual sleeve. So you have to find the sleeve pattern pieces and then also the size that you are cutting in the sleeve. Whatever your bodice measurement is, your bust measurement, everything up through here is the same as your sleeve. I'm gonna take you first to my cutting table where I'm gonna demonstrate how to grade between seams and then how to figure out either how much you need to add to the width of your pattern piece or if you want to be like a work smarter not harder kind of gal, how to use the seam allowances that we are already given to make fitting adjustments. We have a 5 eighths inch seam allowance here in America for a reason. It's not just to have this huge seam allowance just chuck off later. The intention is that you would use that half an inch that you have within there multiplied all the way around by all the seams that you have to help you fit a garment. So that's what I'm going to encourage you to do. But I understand it's an extra little layer of awareness that you have to have while you're sewing. So if you're new to sewing itself, it might be a little bit much. So I'm also going to show you how to just go ahead and make the changes to your pattern pieces.  This lighting is getting annoying so let's get to the cutting table and I'll show you how to begin altering your pattern pieces. Alright let's first talk about grading and how we can ensure that we are me cutting the right sizes at the various areas. I'm going to use this skirt side front as my illustration but obviously this applies to all the skirt pieces that we cut and then if you're grading in your bodice that it will happen there as well but this is just an easy way to visualize it. What I like to do is extend out this waist marking. This is denoting horizontally where our waist is and then down here this is where our hip is. So now we have like some target areas for where to aim for as we're grading. So I'm doing an 18 in my waist which is right here. So I know that at least right here we need to be hitting the 18 mark and then as we come out I want to hit the 20 mark right here. So I'll grab my design rulers. This one emulates a hip curve so I'll just be coming from the size 18 up here out to my hip and I might hit it a little bit soon through here but that's okay. As long as we have it coming and then coming down and meeting at our 20 that's what we're aiming for. Let's see I'm not grading the bodice so I just have to do this to all my skirt pieces and then we need to add for me remember I'm adding one and a half inches to the bust one inch to the waist and three and a half inches to the hip. So we calculated before that there were what eight seams. We have the side, the two fronts, the other side and the center back. So that's four that's five seams. Each seam has two seams that come together so that's ten and each seam allowance is five eighths of an inch so you have half an inch to work with in that area. So if you divide if you multiply out the ten seam allowances by half an inch that ends up being five inches that you have to play with just in the seam allowances. So we don't even have to move this line out. All we have to do is tell ourselves at this area in that area I'm gonna be taking a different seam allowance. So for the waist where I only need to add one inch I am going to make a note to myself in the fast fit worksheet or in your pattern workbook that for the waist additional inch that is gonna be a half inch seam allowance at side seams only because our side seams there's two of them each one of those has two seam allowances so if I take half an inch that's taking a quarter that's adding a quarter of an inch per thing of a jig to the dress and so that gives me my extra inch but the big big thing here is the for me is the hip because I need to add three and a half inches so seven seam allowances is an odd number which makes no sense so I'll probably do side seam center front center front side seam because my back is actually my bottom is where a lot of the you know bulk of my circumference comes from so I do want to leave it through the center back so as I come through here this one again I'm only gonna take a half inch seam allowance through this hip so that will be hip plus 3.5 equals half inch seam allowance at side seam and these are called front seams only so as I'm sewing this to this right and I've got my size 20 on the hip marked through here as I come through here putting these two things together I'm again only gonna take that half inch seam allowance if that's too hard for you to remember to do while you're sewing you can obviously always just add in that quarter inch and then do your grading situation again that's just as simple I would do it here this I would just make the size 20 and then I'd be grading between here and here instead so it's just a matter of like how much awareness do you have while you're at your sewing machine do you want to just go ahead and get it all taken care of here and then keep your 5-8 seam allowances or do you want to use that fabric for how it's intended to alter the garment so let me get all of this transferred let me get it all cut out our next step is going to be to get out the ditto form again and tissue fit this thing to one make sure that our measurements are all good and everything looks right horizontally but also to double check our vertical measurements so where they're telling us our waistline is is that actually where our waistline is going to end up being same thing with the bust it'll help you determine the v-neck how deep that will look on you and then we'll also double check the shoulder seams since this does have a sleeve we want to make sure that the length on those are good so that's more headed but go ahead and draw out everything get your pattern pieces completely cut out and then I'll meet you at the ditto form okay so we have basically our pattern pinned together at all the critical points the hip line the waistline and then have this seam pinned together as well as the upper bodice side seams all that kind of stuff okay this is tissue fitting so what I am looking for now is a couple of things we always always start at the top okay so the shoulder seams don't quite come together so I've got to add to the back and the front for that however when I have my center front place where it's supposed to be placed and I have the little the dots all matching up my bust line is in the right place right the bust line is here that's the right place for me you can see that all through here is still funky so I need to pinch out ever so slightly a little bit from the center front or from the front what's this thing called the front neckline I need to pinch that out a little bit the the waistline so way for me the pattern is here my waistline as you can see is way up here this is a very very common adjustment that I have to make a lot so I will need to fold this up so that the waistline matches here that in turn will cause the hip line to not be in the right place so there are some considerations to take here one is I can just leave it right I mean this isn't like I have a waist seam that needs to be absolutely perfectly at my waist there is some curvature through here that's supposed to you know denote a waist so I do want that to kind of be in the right place I think if anything I would raise this up and then not worry about the hip line too much however much I raise this I would add to the hemline to make sure it's still gonna be long enough we do have that big ruffle that goes on the bottom but I still want to make sure that the proportions are still right so that's probably what I'll do is I will honor the waistline kind of forget about the hip line because remember we have that seven and a half inches of ease in the hip as well as we come around to the side seam all of that looks good the arm side up here for my back bodice make sure this is nice and flat is when you look at the arm side here remember we're adding a sleeve so we do need to have a little bit of room especially in the back because that's where like your arms move it doesn't seem too low at all but it does seem very very big right it seems like there's a lot of gaping but also you can tell there's this bunching that's happening in the back as well so that needs to be pinched out and when you do that it fixes the arms side see now it's pulling it all down a little bit and so now it's fitting a little bit closer and then the same thing will happen whenever I like officially because I'm taking some a little bit out of here too so I think all of that will be fixed and you know you guys the big takeaway from this and seeing this demonstration here is really how critical it is to tissue fit or muslin your garment and making sure that your horizontal like the vertical the bus line is where it's supposed to be the waistline is where it's supposed to be and sometimes the hip line is where it's supposed to be to just to make sure that all of those things are keeping the proportions that the designer had in mind and then once you have all of those in place ensuring that things like the neckline aren't going to gate that your shoulder is the right that you have enough for your shoulder that the shoulder length is or the shoulder width is good enough mine is hitting right at that little notch on you know your shoulder joints that's perfect that the arm side is not too low that's a big thing that we see in home sewing and just that there's not going to be a lot of bunching and gaping everywhere so this isn't a perfect science tissue fitting because this is paper and not fabric but I will say my fabric acts a little bit more like paper than it does drapey fabrics so there is some of this that is going to be relatable to my fabric as well but I just think that it's a really it takes a little bit extra time to do but once you get it on here you can start to see a lot of the issues that come out and I remind you this dress form here I talked about it in the first video but this is my ditto form this is my exact body so if you don't have a ditto form you're doing this on your body not just any old dress form because I am specifically me my body is high-waisted a standard you know universal dress form would not be able to capture that I only figured this out after getting my ditto form so either get yourself a ditto form which I believe they are worth every single penny or figure out how to tissue fit it on your own body and get some help or get a like a mirror behind you in front of you and so you can see like a 360 degree view and then you'll be able to nip and tuck and make some adjustments on yourself but yeah so we have all of that in place and those are the those are the alterations that I'm gonna make they're all pretty straightforward just you know pinching out wedges so let me get to that alright as always starting at the top so I just added a little sliver of tissue paper drew in my shoulder where my shoulder is so that I can add on seam allowance for the front and back I did that and then coming down the front I only had to take out this little itty bitty wedge this is still in the right place now this seam is sitting right at my under bust and coming around I ended up having to take some out of the bodice further away helpful yeah and then there's where I took it out of my waist and then again I'm gonna add that to the hip and then coming around to the back I ended up splitting the difference between the amount that I needed to take out of the back I split it between above the armpit and below the armpit because too much up top was gonna make the arms I too small so I did a little bit there and a little bit here and now my waist is sitting where it's supposed to back here and I took up the waist in the skirt in the back but you can't see it because it's underneath the bodice now so that's the rough and dirty of how I do it and as you can see I just tape it all on on my ditto form as I'm going so when I pull all of this off of the ditto form and onto my table it's mostly already done I'm just nitpicking and making sure everything's laying nice and flat and like this for example I will actually cut that wedge okie dokie so there she is those are the alterations that I have made and quite honestly not that much might look like a lot to you guys but for me and what I normally have to do this is all par for the course and this is just your friendly reminder that whatever changes you make to the neckline and the shoulder also have to make those same changes to your facing pieces or else they will not match up I'm kind of hold them out here so these are the facing pieces you can see that this is the front facing and this gets matched up I think like this stitching oh no it's upside down so it was like this okay there we go it goes like that so I have to pinch that same little wedge out of here and I have to lengthen my the length here same thing for the back pattern piece where I'm adding to the shoulder seam I'll have to do that to these pieces too the only other area where that might be a problem is if you are making your skirt wider than a size 20 you would want to apply that to your ruffle I think that this these little doodads are gonna be fine no matter what I did to the shoulder seam they're just gonna go in the shoulder no matter how big or small it is yeah that's really it so as you can see this is what it looks like whenever it comes off the ditto form so I'll just come in and make sure all this is nice and pretty and flat and that's doing what it's supposed to do it might very well take a bit of a angle see how it's like bigger here and smaller here that's fine because I know that where I put this down was where it needed to be through my bust apex so it happens to the outer portions of this is fine I will I guess one more point is I will make sure that the side seams here match up with the back so here's my back pattern piece and you can see that's a little wonky so I'm gonna come in and fix that but I do want to make sure that these two things are the same length and if they aren't I will true them up so that they do end up being the same length but I think that's all you really need to know it's just about kind of going for it at this point and trusting the process trusting that you did all the math right in your fast fit worksheet you've done the tissue fitting you've made the adjustments to the best of your ability and at this point we cut out our fabric or a muslin wearable muslin too if you're really unsure and and sew it up and then we can make any final tweaks from there but just trusting yourself and trusting this system is gonna go a long way okay alright so back to the workbook you guys have a lot of information that you started to fill out and a lot of boxes to check the pattern alterations box is absolutely done so yeah yeah yeah okay so now the next video that we are going to do together is all about fabrication so now that you know how much fabric you need because you know what size you are you're gonna start shopping for some fabric run over watch that video really quick before you do any shopping I have links to the fabrics that I'm using there but the links to the videos are all getting added to the description box so you can check there to find the fabric video if you need to go back for any reason you can go back to yesterday's video and yeah that's gonna do it for today so come back for some fabric talk fabric inspiration in the next video