This is all good information, but fails to address why people associate homemade clothing with looking like shit: poor fit.
You can make stunningly gorgeous and fashionable pieces of clothing with the basic straight stitch that used to be the only stitch sewing machines can do. Maybe a little strategic hand sewing just to tack some key points down. Fancier stitches can do some nice things, but they’ll never make a garment look better on you. That’s all in the fitting. Fitting is the real skill.
That’s good news if you’re thrifty because fitting a pattern takes only low cost tools and materials. Straight edges, measuring tape, adhesive tape, children’s washable markers, tracing paper, and cheap test garment fabric. You can get books on fitting at libraries, online archives, thrift stores, magazines, and online tutorials. Personally I’m a fan of In-House Pattern Studios.
Sewing pattern sizes and proportions are not based on actual human proportions, they’re based on standardized pattern blocks that make the sizing math easy. You will not get a garment that looks good by picking a pattern + size and making it without alterations. There’s nothing wrong with your body, and there’s nothing even really wrong with how random the pattern sizing starts as, there’s just no standard body shape to begin with so anything would be wrong for most people.
You need to find what your key measurements are, cut apart a traced copy, and move the bits around so it’s your proportions with your desired ease. There are as many different opinions as there are sewists on what those measurements are, how to move them, and how to figure out if they worked. That’s why library books are helpful to get a lot of perspectives from people teaching you a whole method, not One Neat Trick with no context. I like the In-House Pattern Studio method the best and the most important 80% you can get free with the newsletter signup (she doesn’t sell the information and only sends things occasionally after the initial tutorials).
This is how important fit is: about 4 years ago before top took off literally 10 pounds of boobs but while I was binding, I made a really cool shirt with rainbow skulls and floral collar + placard. I did give it a lot of ease, but never so much that it looked baggy. I agonized over the fit, and it was fit to my body as it was at the time. I ended up getting top surgery like a year after that and was bummed my shirt wouldn’t fit me right. But it did. It fits my body so well even with a smaller chest and still looks very masculine on me.
I’ve also gained a bunch of weight and am frequently very anguished about my clothes no longer fitting. (I don’t care what weight I am, I just want it to stay there.) Most of that agony is that the way our clothes are cut is deliberately hostile to weight changes in ways our ancestors clothes were not, but that’s a different rant.
But! My cool rainbow skull shirt still fits! It still looks good on me. It doesn’t pull in weird places or restrict my movement in ways that set off my skin sensitivity. Because it actually fully fits my proportions. Something no purchased clothing has ever done, and can never do.
People complement it and I get to tell them I made it and they’re blown away. I could have made the whole thing with straight stitches. It’s the fit and creative use of fabric (pattern matching problem solving) that makes it look like it’s a designer shirt.
It’s not the tools and it’s not the machine that make the garment good, it’s having the knowledge and willpower to confront the exact shape of your body and fitting it.
