Draping 101

Warning! Sewing jargon!

I just posted my eportfolio for Draping class, so now I'm going to share my draping tutorial with you.  Lucky you!

First of all, draping is not about making draperies or curtains.  Draping actually refers to taking fabric and hanging it onto a form—a dressform or a person—and shaping it into a piece of clothing. I've been of two minds about this class: It seems a little impractical to drape an entire article of clothing onto a real person—unless it's a really unusual style that would be difficult to pattern otherwise.  But I learned a lot about problem-solving and fitting, and gained more understanding of making patterns. The coolest part is that I've learned that I can visualize, create, pattern, fit, and sew an entire garment in one week—and do good work, too! Not bad, huh?

I'm going to show you just how I made my . . . almost . . . final project:

First I have to prepare the fabric: I tear four pieces of muslin to the sizes I'll need to create each panel of the dress; I press them, and I make sure they're straight and square. I fold and press one inch over, down the lengthwise grain of both the center-front and center-back pieces (because that is the rules), then I'm ready to begin draping.

a beginning

Normally I'd line up the folded edge of the fabric with the center-front of the dressform, but since the piece I'm showing you is double-breasted I drew a line down the middle of the center-front fabric piece (on grain) and aligned that with the center of the form instead; the folded edge of the fabric is smoothed over to the left side princess line. (Draping is done on the right side of the form—her right, not yours.)

side view, after the drape is all finished

I smooth the fabric into place and pin it to the dressform.  (See? Impractical. I don't know what woman would stand still for two hours and let me stick pins into her "girls" —or shoulders, or anywhere else! ;-)) When the front piece looks right, I mark the seam line (princess seam) with a red pencil, then cut off the excess fabric, leaving about one-inch of extra material on the right side of the princess line.

I pin a fisheye dart between the front body of the piece and the collar, because the textbook tells me this is how you make a shawl collar.   When I'm satisfied with the front, I move it out of the way and proceed to pin and mark the side-front piece, then the center-back piece, and the side-back piece.  I draw the back neckline, mark the waistline, and make notch marks where I want the pattern pieces to meet up.

After I've draped and marked each piece, I remove all of them from the form and true up the lines.  I pin the pieces together matching up the notches and seamlines that I penciled in, then I hang it on the dressform again, pinning it to her center-front and center-back so it will stay in place. Once the drape is situated on the form, I make sure all the lines and notches are really where they should be; if I see anything that needs changing I re-mark it with a blue pencil.   The last thing I did with this drape was to pin the back-collar in place and trim the entire collar to the shape I wanted.

That took two hours, and at this point I'm about one-third finished with this project. Worky, huh?

pattern tools

Now I take my drape home, hold my breath and take out all the pins, then press it. I lay the fabric pieces onto the pattern paper and then roll over all my red/blue lines and notches with my needle-point tracing wheel. (A needle-point tracing wheel would make a dangerous weapon.  Seriously, I hurt myself on it every time I open my sewing box!)

The wheel leaves pin-prick marks in the paper that I can trace over with a pencil. After I've drawn the pattern pieces I make sure the pieces match up with each other, the notches are in the right places, and there's no weird dips or bumps in any of the lines.

I knew this would be a problem when I drew my pattern, but the muslin showed me exactly how to fix it.

Once the pattern is trued, I cut it out of muslin and sew it up.  Then I go back to school, put the muslin dress onto the dressform and check for any adjustments that might need to be made.  In this case, the whole dress looks good except for the collar: it has a weird little dip right in the center back where it attaches to the dress. The front collar didn't hang right either, but opening up the fisheye dart corrected that problem beautifully.

So now it's back to the drawing-board, literally.  I make the needed changes on the pattern pieces and then, taking a leap of faith in myself, I decide to cut it from fashion fabric rather than make another muslin.  (Usually I turn in a finished, perfected muslin dress, but I'll get extra credit for using nice fabric.) I have a cute, blue Hawaiian print that I think will be perfect for this dress; Michael helps me choose the buttons.

I cut it out, sew it up, and here is the finished product (which fit perfectly, by the way):

side



back

front

Cute, huh? And now you know how to make this dress yourself!

But the question is, who do I know who can/will wear a size six, open-necked, mini-dress?