 Hi you guys, Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel, Inside the Hymn. All right you guys, welcome back to Sew Along Saturday. It is week two of our Sew Along for National Sewing Month and we are using McCall 7991. If you missed week one, check the description box or there's going to be a little... I can't ever remember. On one of these corners, I can't remember if I'm backwards to you guys or not. Anyways, on one of these corners there's going to be a little doodad you can click where you can watch week one's video if you missed it and week one we talked about the pattern itself and we talked about some fabric options and the sizing for the pattern. All of that is in there. Today we're going to talk all about cutting out the pattern. So before we get over to the cutting table we need to gather some supplies. So obviously, duh, you need your pattern, duh, you need your fabric. But okay, so in addition to your fabric and your pattern, you also need some pattern weights. So I adore these pattern weights. There's a whole set, it's not just this one. There's a whole bunch of these pattern weights. They come from Nancy's Notions, again, link in the description box. I just need to preface this by saying there's always a ton of information in the description boxes of my videos including what I'm wearing if you're curious about this cute little number. But in a sew along there is even more information in the description box. So be sure to pause the video or not, check out the description box and check out all the information is there before you head to the comments to ask any questions. It just takes me a minute to get to the comments, whereas your answer might already be in the description box. So anyways, Nancy's Notions, these lovely little pattern weights, they're awesome. They have these little straight versions. There's a curved one that comes in the kit as well as a kind of right angle one. I love those. But if you don't want to invest in pattern weights, that's okay. There are some other options. You can head to your hardware store and buy a 12 by 12 sheet of these little hex tiles. I use these all the time also. You could also just go to your pantry, find some water bottles, some soup cans, anything that's going to be able to just keep your pattern pieces in place while you're cutting them. We are going to be using a rotary cutter to cut out our pattern pieces. This is just the absolute best way to cut accurately, especially if you're using a knit fabric and even more especially a lightweight drapey knit fabric. So these are from, this one's from Kai. I love my Kai rotary cutters. I have this one and a little itty bitty one as well. Again, links in the description box for these. And then you're also going to need a pair of like small scissors. You can use embroidery scissors or you can just use little, I think these are four inch scissors. Again, these are from Kai. I love these. And this is going to be to notch any notches that are in the pattern itself. And then finally, well, pen ultimately, you're going to need a marking tool of some kind. The marking tool really depends on your fabric. I prefer for like knits, especially like drapey knits to use a marker. So that's what I'll be using. If you're using something a little bit more sturdy, you can use a pen or chalk or something like that. But I like a marker for these kinds of knits. And then finally, you need a really large, clear see through ruler. If you've been quilting and you're just trying out garment sewing for the first time, you probably already have a good jillion of these. But you need the really, really long one. And this is so that we can make sure that our green lines are all matched up and even with the selvage edge of the fabric. And I'll explain all that in a little bit. So don't stress if you have no idea what I'm talking about. Just make sure you grab one of these. It needs to be pretty wide so that you can reach the width of the fabric with like just to make it super accurate. Okay, so once you've collected all of that stuff, then meet me over at my cutting table where we are going to cut out all the pattern pieces for our cute little Dress M7911. I'll see you over there. Okay, so one of the coolest things about the Learn to Sew for Fun patterns by McCalls is that they really take a lot of time and space to explain to you all the various steps that you'll need to go through when making the dress, including all the prep work, which there kind of is a lot of prep work when it comes to making a garment as well. So if you don't remember, I am making View C's Bodice with View's A, with View A's skirt. It does make this slightly more complicated, but not that much. So don't be totally freaked out. But basically, I've marked here View C's Bodice and View A's skirt. So then you kind of look at your pattern pieces and Bodice Front A and B. Nope, don't need that. Bodice Back A and B, don't need that. Bodice Front C, I do need. And Bodice Back C, I also need. So you can take like a marker or something and go piece C. I mean, piece three, piece four. And then piece five is the band, which is this beautiful little neckline band. So I need that. Do I need the sleeve for B? No, I do not. Do I need a sleeve band for C? Yes, I do. And then skirt front and back for A, I also need that. So I know I need pieces three, four, five, seven, and eight. So I have written those down here, because now we are going to select our pattern pieces. And you're going to have the tissue paper, and it's all going to be like one big piece. So you're going to go through, find all of those pattern pieces I just called out, and you're going to cut around them all the sizes with like a border. You're just wanting to isolate piece by piece the ones that you need. Then you need to take them to your iron and press them. That's also very helpful as well, because there are going to be a lot of folds in the tissue paper. And that can cause some distortion and variation among the pattern pieces themselves. So once you've done that, now it's time to determine which size pattern we are going to make. And I told you before that they have taken the time to give us finished garment measurements for the bust line of A and B, and the bust line of C, and then the hip line measurement of B and C only. That's because the skirt of A is so wide that it's like negligible. Like I don't know of any figure that whatever size you cut for the bodice, your hip wouldn't fit in a skirt like this skirt like this. However, you do need the finished garment measurements. You need to pay attention to that. But because I am making view C, it's also very roomy. So it's not totally... What's the word? It's not super, super important that we are very, very, very accurate like we would be in a woven garment or even in this. If you make this bodice too small, then you're going to have the v-neck is going to be pulling open, which we don't really want. So what we do is we take some measuring tape and we measure our bust, our waist, and our hip. So the pattern tells me that these are my measurements. The pattern tells me that the like for up here are the garment measurements, I'm sorry, your body measurements. So if I'm 36 and a half in the bust, then I go to the bust row and then find somewhere close to 36 and a half. And it looks like it's technically in between a medium and a large. So I'm going to size down to the medium. And I know from this design and from just the wearing ease that's already built in to McCall's patterns, that a medium is going to be good for me. But when I go down to the finished garment measurements and I check view C, which is what I'm making and go over to the medium, it says the finished garment measurements are 36 and a half, which are exactly what my measurements are. And that gives me a little a moment of pause because I don't want this to be exactly my measurement. I want there to be a little bit of wearing ease in there. But if I go up to the large, then 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 and a half, that gives me four inches of ease. And that's way, way, way too much. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut the medium. And then I am going to stitch it like I normally would and use the five eighth seam allowance that's built in as my sort of safety guard. So if I find out that it's too tight around the bust, I will be able to let it out along the side seams here. And I'll be able to let it out as much as four inches, which I'm sorry, not four inches, one, two, three, four, two inches, because you have about a half an inch per cutting line. And each side seam has two cutting lines. So that's two inches of you know, wiggle room, and that should be plenty. So I'm going to kind of baste it in, do a dry fitting and see how that goes. But I do definitely still want the shoulders and the neckline to all be at that medium because I do feel like I'm a little bit smaller up in this area. So I think the medium is going to be okay. But if it's not, I have a little bit of wiggle room within the seam allowances also. So keep that in mind if you're in between sizes. Okay, that's a lot to say for just the bust. Now we have to go to the waist. So my waist is 33 inches. If you go to the body measurements and go to the waist row and go over to 33 inches, that puts me again, wait, let me make sure I'm reading this right. Waist puts me, oh here we go, 33 inches, that puts me between a large and an extra large, right smack dab in the middle. So again, I'm going to err on the side of caution, size down, and I'm going to cut a straight, I'm going to cut a large. And the waist measurements finished are not on the envelope. But like with most big four patterns, they are going to be on the bodice. So this is the bodice front. And right here are our waistline measurements. So these are the finished garment measurements. And the waist of the pattern is sort of fitted, is sort of close to the body. So you're not going to need a ton of wearing ease there. So if we go to a large, it's 34 and a half inches, I am 33. That gives me one and a half inches of wearing ease, which is good. Also, the waist has like an elastic casing. So there's some wiggle room in there as well, where I can kind of pull in that elastic if I need to, and make it a little bit more fitted. If I feel like that one and a half inches is just a little bit too baggy. The thing that I want to also check is if I size down to a medium, that would be 30 and a half inches finished. And my body will not fit in 30 and a half inches, even if it's a knit. So it stretches, you know, it's not going to stretch that much and still be comfortable. So I'm definitely going to make a large, maybe possibly take it in at the waist if I need to, or at least use that elastic as some help to like reinforce a tighter fit. Okay, for the hip finally, what am I? So my hip is 46 inches, we go to the body measurements and go across the hip column to find 46. And that's putting me at the big range of the upper range of extra large. But like I said, the skirt that I'm making view a skirt is so voluminous that it's really negligible. So I'm going to make it easy for myself and just make a straight large cutting from the waist seam all the way down to the hem one large. And that is going to be just fine. Because like I said, the skirt is very voluminous. And I don't need to necessarily cut the extra large. Although if you wanted to, you could certainly grade out from the large to the extra large. But I am going to be grading from a medium at the bust to a large at the waist. And let me show you how I have done that. So here is the front bodice piece. And it's very helpful, especially if you're new to garment selling to go ahead and draw out, here's my medium, right? This is my medium cutting line. And then there are a couple of places where you need to grade out. And that is from this high point shoulder. This is the top part of your shoulder kind of where your neck your neck would be like right here. And this is the waist down here where the waistline is marked. So see if I can get all this in. Probably not. These are very big pieces. Here we go. So I'm at a medium here. And I need to be at a large down here. So simply take a ruler starting at this intersection of the medium and ending at the intersection of the large. And you just draw a straight line between the two. That one's nice and simple. This one, however, is a little bit more tricky because there's a curve. So you find the intersection of the large down here. And then find the intersection of the medium up here. And I kind of just draw in a few inches here and draw in a few inches here and then use a curve ruler, which is right here. And this one comes from Stitch Buzz. It's really nice because it's see-through and because this here is 5 eighths of an inch. Not that that's really important for this project, but it's nice to have. So basically I'm trying to connect somewhere around here to somewhere around here. And you can kind of spin this little circular thing around until those two things kind of line up. Do you see how that's coming together there? Maybe spin it, spin it, maybe... There we go. Something along this. And you connect from here all the way through to here. And now you have graded out your side seam from a medium to a large. Now remember to do this on whatever alterations you make to the front bodice. You also have to make to the back bodice. So be sure to find that pattern piece and do the same thing to the side seam here, which I've done. But this center back is cut on the fold. There is no like neckline. So you don't have to grade the center back. You just cut the medium neckline and then all of the sizes finish at the same waistline down here. Capiche? Does that make sense? All right. So that's grading. That's picking your size and grading. Moving right along. So now you can also make some pattern adjustments. If you know that you are long-waisted, short-waisted, petite, whatever it is, you can lengthen and shorten the pattern pieces by simply cutting across this line and either adding space or taking up the space like so. Very simple. It's all drawn on easy peasy. There should also be one for the skirt. Usually it's at the hem. Yes. So lengthen, shorten here. So anytime I see a length and shorten here, if I'm considering shortening it, I will wait to do that until after the garment is made because it's easier to shorten on your body than it is by kind of, I don't know, I would just rather have the extra fabric and be able to cut it after I see how long it is on my body. If you know that you need to lengthen it because you're a very tall person, then obviously you need to go ahead and do that now. There is a way to know how much you need to do. So there is a back length from base of neck. So basically, that is going to measure from this point all the way down to the hem. And the best way for you to check that on yourself is to put on a necklace, measure, have someone else help you measure from where that necklace hits your neck all the way down to where you want your hem to be. And that would be your length. And then compare that to what's going on here. And if you need to add length, you can if you need to take length away, you will have a little bit better of an idea of how much you want to do. I'm not going to make any lengthening adjustments just because I've made so many McCall's patterns. I know they're pretty on point for me. Okay, so now that we have talked about adjusting our pattern pieces like so, we are going to be laying out our fabric. And it looks like according to the fabric cutting layouts, again a little complicated for me because I'm making part of dress A and also part of dress C. But for the most part, I can tell that all of these fabrics are laid out with the right sides facing each other. Do you see how this says right side of fabric is this dark gray? And you can tell the dark gray is colored in on the inside. We've got the fold on one end and the selvages, which is the machine finished edges, not the edges that the fabric store cut, but the other edges. You know, you have a rectangle and two sides are cut sides. And the other two sides are like finished at the factory. Those are your selvages. So you fold those together like so. And you have the selvages on this end and the fold on this end. So let me clear off all of this and get my fabric laid out. I will tell you there's been a development. The sweater knit that I was going to use, the French terry, I did not have enough. So I went out to Joanne and got this double brush poly. I think it's super cool. I love the emerald green. I don't have anything that's emerald green. So I think this will be a nice addition to my wardrobe. And I love that it has pink in it because I have a lot of pink accessories and stuff like that. So I grabbed this one. I grabbed a ton of yardage just to make sure I had enough. So you might see this pop up as a top or something else later. But let me get all of this laid out. And we will talk about cutting fabric. Okay, through the magic of the internet, I have my fabric all laid out right sides together. And you can kind of tell that my fabric has an all over pattern, meaning there's not, I mean, there is technically a start and a stop of the pattern repeat, but you can't really see it to the naked eye without really studying it. So I don't have to be super, super careful about pattern placement. If you had stripes, that would be important. If you had something where everything was like evenly spaced out, like polka dots, that would be important. You would want your center front to be in a straight line down those polka dots. And the easiest way to do that is to put the the center of a column of polka dots or whatever the pattern is down this fold line. That's the easiest way for me to do it. Again, I can do a separate video on that if you want, but this so long is already lengthy. So we're going to try and just keep it moving. All right, so now we know that our fabric is laid out correctly. And now we're just going to start putting down our pattern pieces. So according to this view a, you have to lay piece eight, which is our skirt front and back, you lay it out on the fold, and then you put it on the fold again to give you one for the front and one for the back. So that takes up a ton of fabric, but it does make a beautiful skirt. So you would put that here, and then you would leave a whole chunk of space for the second part of the skirt. And then it looks like the rest of the bodice pieces they are putting 60 inches. Yeah, they're putting kind of below the skirt. So if we want to imagine the skirt's been cut out, voila skirt is cut out. And this is like a new swatch of fabric. Then we would grab our bodice pieces. And now we're kind of following this. So we use this for the skirt. And now we're going to follow this for the bodice. You're going to lay piece four on the fold, which means along this edge, it's closest to me where the fold of the fabric is. And then you're going to lay piece three right up next to that. So that goes here. Now you're thinking to yourself, okay, four is on the fold. That's nice and straight. But how does three go? Like, does it go this way? Does it go this way? And that's where a grain line comes into place. So you can see we have this lovely mark here called a grain line. And we want that to be parallel to the folded and or salvage edge. It doesn't matter which edge it's parallel to because they're also parallel, but it's in the middle of those two. So again, that's why you need a really huge clear gridded ruler because then you can lay your ruler out along the fold of the fabric. And you can see that the grain line needs to be shifted around like this. And this is how you know when you put it on your body that the pattern of the fabric is going to be going in the direction that makes most sense for how the garment is designed. So for me though, you guys can't see this, but this sleeve over here is hanging off the edge. So I actually need to bring it back like this and down to keep it out of the way of this guy, measure the grain line again, which you guys can barely see and then adjust accordingly. So I just put the ruler down and then it kind of floats and I'm able to shift the pattern pieces around. So now I've got enough space for my large right here and enough space to come down and cut this. Another good reason why you draw in your cut lines because it makes it nice and easy to lay everything out. Okay, so again, that takes up a ton of fabric. Can you see why I wasn't able to use the French cherry? I definitely didn't have enough for this full bodice, full skirt design, but let's pretend that the bodices are also cut. Ta-da! And now we've cut out our skirt, we've cut out our bodice, and the last little bit of fabric that we have left is for these bands. So we have a band for five and a band for seven, which is right here. And it looks like none of them are on the fold. So I can put seven like anywhere I want. Seven's grain line is right here. So you know that that's going to be parallel to the folded edge, something like this. And then piece five's grain line is right here. So piece five does not go this way, it goes this way. All right. And after all that cutting, we should have all of our pattern pieces cut out. So, so far the pattern layout and how you lay out your fabric and everything is very much still like a woven fabric. You're wondering, what do I have to know about knit fabrics in terms of cutting? Well, as you can see, and maybe as you can figure out when you went to lay out your knit fabric, it's a little bit clingy and a little bit lightweight and airy. And you can see when you go to cut here, when you go to cut knit fabric, you see how your scissors make it lift up every time the fabric lifts up, you're skewing sort of where the patterns are laid out. So I don't like to use scissors. I don't even like to use pins because when you get this laid all out pretty again, when you put your pins in your fabric, let's assume this is all in the right place, and you go to do this. Can you see how it's causing little ripples? There's a some tension between the needle and the fabric. And then you have to lift it up and you can see there's a little bubble that just appeared right there. So I'll mess around with any of them. I get my pattern pieces laid out exactly where they need to be nice and flat and pretty. And then I use pattern weights. So I have a whole collection. I have these that I got. These are things I made this, link in the description. These are hex tiles from the hardware store. And these are the pattern weights from Nancy's notions, which I love because they come in different shapes. Like this curvy one is really good for like a section like that. See how perfect that is. Okay, so you have all of these depending on what you've got. You can also use soup cans. Oh my gosh, it's pouring rain. You can use soup cans, you can use anything that you've got that's real heavy wine bottles, whatever. And so you get your pattern laid out where exactly where it needs to be, where the grain line is parallel and all that. And then you start laying these guys along the pattern piece like so. Then again, we're not using scissors even with the pattern weights because the scissors are going to inevitably lift up the fabric as you cut. And we're trying to keep everything nice and flat. So instead I use a rotary cutter. And I also find that when your fabric is shifty whenever it likes to move really easily, cutting through paper on top of the fabric helps ensure that even more it stays where it's supposed to stay. So let me get all of this fabric or all these pattern pieces laid out for real. And I'll start cutting them for real. And then I'll give you some tips on how to do all of these pattern markings that are kind of all over the place. And then I think that's going to be it for today. It needs to be because this is getting kind of long. Okay, let me cut out all this stuff. It's getting very exciting though. Okay. Cutting actually went that quickly. Am I right? Okay, so next up is marking. So you can see we have all these little notches. And then we have these like little triangle thingies. And I was paying attention to the other pattern pieces as well. And I didn't see anything other than these. I didn't see any big dots or little dots. But if you come across those in this pattern or any of them, marking them is the same way as you will for this triangle. So when it comes to marking, you have stuff like this, you have chalk, you have pencils, pens, and you have markers. So I much prefer the marker to any of the other marking tools for knits, because as you can imagine, and we'll peel this back a little bit, when you're going to draw on a knit, you can see how it's like pulling and creating like a lot of weird tension even with the chalk. It's like really hard to like make an actual mark without moving the fabric around. But whenever you've got a marker, it will just sort of glide on and you can see your mark that you made nice and simple. So when it comes to triangles, big circles, little circles, I do it the same way for every single one. I will take a pin and I will poke a hole right through the center of the triangle. Same thing for this center of the triangle. And I will move those out of the way, turn these around and flip this, flip this back to expose where the pins have gone into the fabric. And then the point of the triangle points toward the raw edge. So I just draw a triangle around the center of the pin, like so. And then just to make extra sure that I've got it in the right place, I will also take my embroidery scissors, like these really little itty bitty ones, and I will cut an itty bitty notch right into the fabric. So that way I know that that's exactly where the point of the triangle is pointing. Then you need to make sure that you do drawing the triangles on the back side as well. So you get both layers of fabric. Again, the point goes toward the raw edge. Sorry, I can't draw and talk apparently, not at the same time. Okay, so now that those are in, like so, put these away. And then you have all these notches. So I snip all my notches, snip right into the center of them. I have made the band a large to accommodate the grating that I did. So I will snip a large into both layers of the fabric as well. I also have one here on the arm band. So I'll snip actually, dope, the arm band is a medium, my bad. So I'll do that. If you make a mistake, like we always do, I'll come in. And where the mistake was, I'll draw a little X and another little X. And that reminds me that's not the one. It's the other one. And snip the medium like so. All right, so you're going to go through all, I mean, I know I've moved all my out of the way now, but you're going to do this as you're cutting all of your pattern pieces out. Before you take them up off the table, you will transfer all of the markings. And believe it or not, I think that's going to do it for us. You probably saw me folding the fabric with the tissue paper still on it. I like to do that for a couple reasons. One, it's the same kind of concept as when you go to a store and a men's shirt is folded with tissue paper in it. It just helps it from getting super wrinkly, kind of keeps everything intact. But it also helps me know which pattern pieces are which, for example, the front and the back bodice of this pattern look a lot alike, you know, in the drawing. And do this all as you're cutting it. You never know what's going to come up in your life. You might have to put this project away or any project for that matter for a couple of days, couple weeks, couple months. And so it's nice whenever you come back to it to be like, still organized and you know what's what's going on, what's what. Okay, so we have all of our pattern pieces cut out. Isn't that awesome and exciting? I'm sure all of you are just like dying to get to sewing, but you're going to have to wait a week because that's how a sew along works. Next week, meet me back here next Saturday, where we will be sewing the entire dress. We're going to do the bodice and the skirt all in one video. It might be kind of lengthy, but we're trying to get all this sew along done in a one month period. So feel free to start and stop the video as you need. But next week, we're going to sew the dress. It's going to be great. So I will see you all here then. And until next time, I will see you all very soon. Bye.