 Hi you guys it's Lindsay and believe it or not it is the last Monday in March which means we are wrapping up our series on how to make a commercial sewing pattern. Today we are going to be talking about cutting out your pattern pieces and tracing them on to your fabric so that you can cut them in preparation for sewing them. So let's get started. All right you guys here we are with our pattern for the series Butterick 5466. For the purposes of today's demonstration I'm going to be cutting out version A which you can see here it's just a basic pencil skirt with four darts on the front and it also has four darts on the back and a little back zipper. So you're going to need a few things to get started. First we are going to be cutting out the pattern pieces and then we're going to talk a little bit about tracing them and why that's important. Here are some of the tools that you will need and we'll go through them as we get into the pattern. So first off as we discussed last week to get started you're going to need to find the pattern instruction booklet. In there it'll tell you what pieces you need to make for each skirt version. So for skirt A we need pieces one through four. So I have those cut out I only have one piece one here but you can see so that you can see what we're working with but you can see I've kind of roughly kind of cut it out here and then I've gotten some tracing paper and I have completely traced it out onto this paper. This is called Swedish tracing paper. It's my favorite. You can research other tracing papers and find out which one you like but Swedish tracing paper is my favorite. I'll leave a link down below so that you can find it. It's available on Amazon. So you can see that piece one has a couple of darts. It has a notch there. It has two notches here and also has a fold indicator over here. So I've traced all of the information that's available on the pattern piece onto this tracing paper including the pattern piece number, the pattern piece name, what I need to cut of it, and the pattern maker. I would probably also add that it is 5466 just so that I remember that. Also I measured myself and it turns out that I am a size 14 in the waist which is exactly what this goes out to but I'm actually larger in the hip than the pattern allows which is totally fine. You know you can make those adjustments as I've said about a thousand times before in this series. It's best to go ahead and air on the side of making something larger. You can always take it in. So what I have to help me with that is called a hip curve ruler and you can see it has a nice lovely curve here. So all I did was is I took the ruler, I placed it at my waist measurement which was size 14 and then I rotated it out to where my hip measurement needed to be and I drew that line. Now on the pattern piece here remember last week we talked about the little kind of bull's eye with the measurements. So this is going to tell you that this is where your hip line is. So that's how you know where to make that measurement and then whenever you are putting together and tracing the back pattern piece like this you're going to want to take your front pattern piece and copy that over instead of getting the hip curve out and coming up with a separate looking arc you're going to just match the front pattern hip curve to the back pattern hip curve and so that is what this ends up looking like here. So you can see my front and my back on the side seam are exactly the same and that's what you want for really smooth side seams kind of curving your body exactly like the pattern is meant to do. So if you find yourself always having measurement having to do alterations on your hip I would highly recommend investing in a hip curve ruler it just makes it so much easier to get that nice smooth line. So yeah and then you can also see on the back pattern piece again I have traced the darts I have traced the notches and I put the pattern information and then this is called a grain line. This line here is called a grain line and it's really important that you trace that out too we'll talk a little bit more about that whenever we get our fabric out. So so yeah I have cut out roughly all of my pattern pieces I have traced them on to tracing paper made any sizing adjustments that I need to make here and yeah we're kind of ready to move on to the fabric. One quick thing though I just want to kind of quickly address the why it's important to trace a lot of people will just get their pattern tissue out and cut out size eight and throw all that other stuff away and just you know kind of move on with life and I really feel like the investment in time and the investment in money in the in the tracing paper is so minimal even if you get your patterns on sale and the patterns don't cost a lot of money it's just nice to be able to work with a pattern piece that you know you can make adjustments to and and not kind of ruin or tarnish the the original pattern pieces that way if you lose weight or you gain weight or let's say you did your measurements wrong you know you're not messing with the original you're only messing with kind of copies of the original so you could always go back and revert to the original and have all of that preserved for you so I'm a big advocate of tracing paper and I think you should be too so go invest in some tracing paper I think you'll you'll find it to be much easier and kind of give you some peace of mind as you're working through figuring out your your patterns and and all of that okay moving on to fabric this is what we call a muslin just like we talked about investing in tracing paper to preserve your pattern pieces I also think that it's a really great investment to make your pattern out of muslin first um so that you don't ruin any of the fabric that you love or the fabric that you spent a lot of money on muslin by design is made to kind of give you a rough draft of any pattern that you're sewing so if you've never sewn a pattern before in my opinion this is 100 a must even if you think oh this is just a simple skirt how bad can it be um you'd be surprised how many little tweaks and details you will end up changing if you take the time to make it out of the muslin first muslin cost about three to five dollars a yard um you can find it at any fabric store or anywhere online a lot of times retailers will also offer bulk discounts on it you end up going through so much of it if you if you really invest in the time and the money it takes to do a muslin so it's really worth it to me again it's just peace of mind it's giving you kind of a little bit of extra boost of confidence of knowing hey this can completely go wrong and it's totally okay i'm not going to ruin any of my fabric i'm not going to you know waste any money on that muslin is just incredibly durable so you can rip it out sew it again rip it out sew it again multiple times if you have to which not all fashion fabrics can hold up to that um this skirt obviously is for a mid-weight fabric so you know your fashion fabrics might be more durable but if you're making a silk top for example ripping out and re-sewing it is really rough on the fabric so try it with the muslin first see if you like it um i often take scraps from old projects and put them into these weird wonky pattern matched um muslins um so you don't actually have to buy the muslin fabric you can use scraps from old fabric you can shop the clearance then of your fabric store for what's called a wearable muslin and people will make a muslin out of really cheap fabric and then if it goes well then they can end up wearing it and it's not going to look like you know a potato sack so with all that said about muslin let's move on to tracing the pattern pieces onto the fabric and how that works remember in your interestee instruction booklet it gives you a layout a little illustration of what your fabric should look like so for hours it tells us that we need to fold the fabric over halfway to accommodate piece one three and four because piece one is placed on the fold and we know that because of this little bar here um the bar tells us that this entire edge here gets placed on the fold so easy peasy you just place that on the fold here and you are ready to trace now there are a couple of different ways that you can trace first of all you can just pin all around all the sides and then take your fabric scissors and cut out around the pattern piece to me that doesn't often give you a very accurate layout because the pins you have to pick up the fabric to get them on there and then you end up with these little bubbles and so it's just not exactly perfect you might be off by you know just millimeters but those things again kind of start to add up another way is to place pattern weights all along your fabric some people use soup cans or they make their own out of washers from the hardware store um you can you know make pattern weights out of whatever you want but they'll make pattern weights and then they will use a rotary cutter which looks like this and just kind of zip around the pattern like that again not super accurate because you can't totally control this tool what I like to do is I like to trace around the pattern piece and then whenever you pull it up you have your traced line and then you use your scissors to cut around that so a couple ways to trace are you can use I had um another piece of chalk here somewhere here this you can use this little guy here which is just like um a disc of chalk with bubbled edges so you get a really crisp line all although this is always only white and so is my muslin so I probably wouldn't use that for this one you can also use a marker the markers disappear with iron or washing or sometimes they just disappear with time so you can try that out sometimes these don't end up washing away or they'll leave like a white mark behind so test your fabric first with any of these tracing tools really um or you can buy a chalk pen like this one I have here and it's really simple you just lay out your pattern piece place it on the fold get everything lined up nice and even and you just follow it all the way around trace trace trace and then you'll want to mark your notches and you'll want to mark your darts um several different methods for marking darts I recommend kind of looking up one we'll probably do a video on proper ways to to do that but um for now just just do the method that that you know and then whenever you're done you can see you have your traced lines here so like so so then you're just going to take your fabric scissors and cut out around all of that as you know you don't cut out the darts you just leave the marks on there and you're going to want to make sure that you can see your notches on the interior of the fabric after you cut out that line you want to make sure you can still see those notches there so that's piece one and then our illustration again tells us to put piece two on a single layer of fabric so that's what this is going to look like here now obviously there's a lot of range that you could lay this pattern piece out you want to try and get it as straight as possible but how do you know what is straight well that's what the grain line is for so what you need to do whenever you have a pattern piece that's not placed on the fold the fold provides what you need for to make sure the pattern piece is straight if this line is straight and the fold is straight then your pattern piece is going to be straight but whenever it comes to these other pieces you know not so much so trying to straighten this out a little bit what you need to do is you know that your fabric has two cut edges on each end of the fabric where the fabric store cut it for you and then it has two selvage edges where the manufacturer of the fabric finished the edge is usually done by machine so you need to have the grain line always no matter what be parallel with the selvage so you get that line and you kind of eyeball it and then you take a ruler and you want to measure so you want to lay the ruler down and go okay that's at eight and a half inches from the selvage then you go down to the other end of the arrow and you can see I have it at eight and seven eights so that's not the same so I need to rotate this out so that it gets to eight and a half inches and just keep playing with it until you get that line at eight and a half inches all the way down or at least at the similar measurement all the way down and then again you just follow the same tracing techniques that you used for the front you draw all the way around mark all your notches mark your darts and then you cut it out the same thing goes for piece three and piece four which is our facings so piece three is placed on the center front of the fold you can see it has that trusty little arrow there so again this is piece four's grain line and the grain line is going to be placed parallel to the selvage which looks like that you might think oh you know this is kind of like a weird shaped thing how does it go well you always know that that grain line needs to be parallel to the selvage so you place your ruler there you twist the pattern around until you get it lined up to the selvage and that's how you lay out piece four and then you put your pattern weights all over it and you trace it out like everything else so after you have traced and cut out all of your pattern pieces you were going to have four pieces of fabric that are going to resemble the instructions this is what piece one will look like because piece one was placed on the fold remember so it's actually going to be twice as wide as this once you unfold it that like a like a book it'll be twice as large you can see piece two is the back pattern piece so that's what that looks like you end up sewing the back seam together like so and then you're going to place your your facings onto the fabric eventually as well so essentially after you get everything cut out you are ready to start putting together the garment as i explained i think in the second video how to find your instructions here we are skirt abc skirt a so we will follow these first instructions here and then the instructions for facing a another thing really quick is that in addition to the fabric you will also need to cut out some interfacing you can see here this says interfacing cut to when you are making a muslin you don't have to use interfacing this isn't the finished garment you don't need any stabilization you're just sewing the muslin together for fit however whenever you make it from your fashion fabric your finished garment you will need to cut the interfacing so when it comes to muslins it's really just about fitting you're not even going to put a zipper in here um you're just going to get everything kind of roughly basted together so that you can see if it fits and then once you make all of your pattern adjustments and everything else and you you cut it out of your fashion fabric then that's whenever you need the zipper and any hook and eye or any other notions that you need including the interfacing and that's it you have made it through our entire series yay good job for you hopefully you're as excited as i am because now you should be able to follow the instructions on your pattern instruction booklet and hopefully have a garment at the end of it um i really have enjoyed spending this time with you guys i would love to see whatever creations that you end up making as a result of this and don't forget today is the big day for you to start entering our contest we are going to run it um through the end of the work week um we will pick a winner on april the first and if you saw abby's video that she just posted on thursday then you know we're also doing another giveaway coincidentally at the same time for fabric so just from participating in our videos with us you could essentially win three patterns and twenty dollars worth of fabric all in one week so hopefully you'll go find abby's video and enter there if you haven't already and don't forget to find the secret words hidden in each of the four videos in this series and leave those in the comments of course also to enter this contest you will need to subscribe to us and also subscribe to mccall's pattern mccall pattern companies channel there's a lot of plurals in there um and and that's it so hope to see lots of entries below and can't wait to announce the winner on friday thanks so much again and we'll see you with our next video