One of the short cuts to create an elegant garment was introduced by a fashion designer named Julian Roberts (who isn’t related to Julia Roberts). At present he is a tutor at Royal College of Arts in London teaching and spreading this form of designing. It might drive the pattern masters crazy and they might even kill you for doing what Julian Roberts does to the patterns, but again you can achieve silhouettes that normally seems impossible to make.
The flow, volume, hollow construction etc. is achieved effortlessly by this method and it’s appreciated all around the world! The method is simple and I am sure not so complicated to sew, too. Here I’ll demonstrate step-by-step what I did in various experiments that we were supposed to do for a week to understand the concept better.
Take 2 fabrics (the longer the fabric, the longer your garment will be and visa-versa), place them right sides facing and stitch the two selvedges together. Easy-peasy, right?
Placing the basic bodice pattern, we can then start with the actual process, just as shown bellow:
Place the patterns as you feel fit, keeping in mind that the front pattern’s waist should be facing the open end of the fabric if you want the front to be short and normal and not very Septa like long. Chalk out your patterns and stitch 2 other sides of the fabric leaving the side that is facing the front open, unless you want a garment which you can not get in to (such a waste that would be would’t it?). After stitching the fabric on a flat surface and decide if you want edges and points or curves and flow. I decided on points and hollows, and made a semi circle that ends in points at the base/midway of the pattern as shown in the image.
Next part of the process is easier than any, CUTTING!! off you go chop chop the insides of the pattern leaving only this cut out:
It just looks like an organ but it isn’t, though it is as important to the design as any organ is to the human body! If you loose this and forget the way you placed the patterns and drew the circles, then it would become impossible to achieve the same silhouette.
Final Few steps and you’ll see a complete garment, cake walk right? Next is sewing in the shoulder seems and side seems as the fabric creates after cutting in the fabric:
Voilà, Look 1 achieved from my light weight cotton fabric. Look 2 is simple if you love circles! As shown in the image cut 2 equal or 2 different sized circles/shapes and stitch them both together to make a more elegant form of the top.
And what you’ll see after stitching is something like this:
Interesting isn’t it? How a piece of fabric is made into a garment with the help of minimum cutting?
A light weight satin was my 2nd fabric for subCut and the process remained the same while the placement of my patterns and the circle after was changed giving the garment a completely different look.
At the end of the week we were given the choice to make a garment piece of our own choice to make and as I had done a dress and a top, i decided to play my hand at skirt and so i took a basic skirt pattern and repeated the steps. To my joy i loved the design that came about, though the only difference in this was that out of the sets of cut outs one was a square set while the other two were circles.
with the help of a circle stitch in the side seam, one in the back while the square one in the front the look achieved had number of drapes, though the fabric prints used could have been better as both of them were floral print reminding people of curtains (really so “DRAPEY”?)
