 am back with my very first tutorial of 2020. Tutorial 2020. Maybe that's something I can work with. Sorry. And today I want to teach you how I get the perfect pockets in my dresses. If you remember from my holiday outfit, here's the dress that I made and it had the coolest little pocket feature and that is like this thing called they call a pocket facing. So you have your pocket lining bag and you have a little pocket facing so that when you're wearing the dress, this is the front, when you're wearing the dress, wait, where's the front? When you're wearing the dress, all you see is the facing and you don't see the lining, but you also don't use a whole lot of your fashion fabric to make that pocket bag. So the pocket bag is not heavy, you're not spending a lot of money on fabric that no one will ever see, so on and so forth and this fabric is quite expensive. So I was ready to save as much as I possibly could. The only downside to this pattern was that the original pockets were teardrop shaped pockets, which I absolutely hate because when you're wearing the dress, they just flop around. They have nothing to hold them in like toward the front of your body. So they flop to the back, they kind of ride up. It's like this whole really annoying thing. So I always, always like to convert my pockets to this kind that's like a teardrop shape like a pocket, but it is actually sewn into the waistband. And I can show you that here on this guy, what that looks like when it's inside out. I think yes. Okay, so here is my pocket and you can see it's sewn into the waistband, sewn into the side seam and stays where it needs to go. Cool, right? Super cool. So it's incredibly easy for you guys to do this yourself. And bonus, once you do this once, like with one pattern piece, you can kind of use the same one over and over again, assuming that your waistline, your waist seam is in the same place pattern to pattern. It's pretty close every time you don't have to do this over and over. But even if you did, it only takes a second. So let me turn the camera facing down and I can show you how to draft this new pocket bag. All right, you guys are going to just love how simple this is. Okay, so here are the materials that you need. You need to find your skirt back or front. It doesn't really matter. You can see the side seams here. You need your original pocket piece. And then I'm going to talk you guys through how to draft a pocket facing if your pattern doesn't come with one because I'm probably going to start doing this to all of my dress pockets too. Then you also need some tracing paper. I use for projects like this anyways. I use just the medical exam table paper. It's very, very affordable and it's such a small piece that I'm not worried about it tearing or ripping or holding up over time really. It's no worse or better than this. Then you need a little ruler. So I have a couple here from Stitch Buzz. I just keep those on hand and something to draw with. So I will just use this purple pen. Hopefully that will show up for you guys. Okay, so essentially how the skirt is constructed is you have your pocket bag that is made out of lining fabric. Then you have your pocket facing and that is made out of yourself fabric. And you can see how those line up perfectly here. And then once you get all of that top stitched on, then you take the little dot and the big dot and you line them up with the little dot and the big dot on your skirt pieces. So it ends up looking something like this. This is how a traditional skirt, this is how this one was drafted. This is what your pocket would look like. This would be your waist seam line and this would be just flopping around. So really all we're doing here is redrawing this so that it has a bit of a hat. So it comes around this corner and up into this seam here. So we're just filling in all of this with what will be lining fabric. So you can pretty much assume what's going to happen next is we are going to get some pattern weights and just kind of hold this down where the little dot and the big dot are. Then you're going to take your tracing paper like so and make sure that it covers the bottom, the side, and the waist seam. And then take some more pattern weights and just, you know, hold it down so it's not going anywhere from the top and then you can do the ones you already laid down. So now you've got this nice little system here. I like to go ahead and draw most of this. This is where I use my little straight ruler because it makes really quick work of it and then draw in, I don't know, four inches or so of your waist seam. All right, so now we are just going to, you know, connect the dots from here to here. We're just going, you can feel free to get some kind of like curvy ruler if you're not the kind of person that just will willy-nilly draw something, but I'm just going to kind of go for it using this straight ruler. You can match it up just like you would, you know, when you're grading side seams. It's no big deal. Nobody's going to know if your pocket bag isn't like the most perfect teardrop of all the teardrops. All right, so fill in the rest of your pocket piece. Don't forget your notches. There's a notch here and then obviously draw back in your little dot and your big dot. And when you do that, oh, the grain line too. Don't forget the grain line. That's also very important. Okay this ruler. So we have the grain line like so. Perfect. And then I go ahead and write on the pattern piece number, the name of it, and then the pattern number as well. So feel free to do that. Okay. And if you are going to make your pockets like the way that most pattern companies have, you do it, where one pocket piece is lining and the other pocket piece is your main fabric, then you're ready to go. You don't need to do anything else. But if you want to try out this pocket facing situation, then you've got one more step. So put all this to the side, this to the side, you don't need this anymore either. So as I showed you before, the pocket facing is the exact same shape as the pocket bag, but it's only three inches wide, only three inches of it. So basically we are going to take, gosh, I don't even have any scissors over here. Hold on. So basically we're going to take our pocket bag as we just drew it and we are going to put the side seam on one of the lines of our gridded mat and then we're going to come over three inches. So it'll be along this line and then one, two, three along this line. And then we take our tracing paper again, we're going to lay it over top of this, same thing with the pattern weights just so they're, they're sort of out of the way. And then I probably would take a longer ruler. Oh, here we go. Like this. And I would place it on my side seam, like so, draw that in, then come over three inches and draw that in like that. And then fill in the rest according to your new pocket bag piece. So you've got that and you've got this little curved piece over here, like so. And again, you need to draw in your circles. You also need to draw in your green line. And then again, whenever I made mine, I went ahead and put in the pattern number, the pattern name, and the sorry, the pattern piece number, and then the pattern name so that I would know what it was. But once you get all of these, these two new pieces cut out, you have your new pocket bag that is going to fit into the waistband of your dress. And you have your pocket bag facing so that you can cut all of your pocket bags out of lining fabric. And only this little bit gets cut from your main fabric. So if you're using an expensive fabric or one that you have very limited quantities of, you can see how much smaller this is than this. Basically, this entire chunk over here, this odd shape is not included. So yeah, I just think this is a really, really great, very professional looking way to finish off your pockets. And I know we all love pockets. So let's make them as beautiful as they are functional. All right, so like I said, I do this always with any pattern that has a waist seam. So that's all my dresses, any cardigans or jackets that have it, any jumpsuits or pants patterns, I hardly ever do the just the regular teardrop. I am always trying to sew it into the side seam wherever I can. And I think that you guys will just find this, like I said, really easy to do. And I think that you'll find your garments are more comfortable and that they might hold up a little bit longer. I mean, there's a lot of pressure that gets put on the pocket itself and all of those seams that hold it together. So having it attached to the waistband actually might make it last a little bit longer, but that's going to do it for me today. I really hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial. Let me know if you use it in one of your projects coming up, and I'll see you all very soon. Bye!