Taking in a Shirt

There's nothing worse than pulling your favorite outfit out of a closet or finding the perfect thing off the rack, and right before you put it on to go out with your friends or to attend the wedding, you realize it doesn't quite fit. It's a little too big and it needs to be taken in. Now there's no time to go to a tailor, dress forms can be expensive, and if you don't have one, it can make tailoring an outfit to your form a little bit difficult. So, I have a quick trick for you. Notice I'm wearing my shirt inside out, yes, this is on purpose. The reason is that if I am in a hurry to fix something and I don't have a dress form, I like to try it on inside out. that way I can see my raw seams, and then I'm going to just do what I call a quick and dirty pin to try to get it to fit, okay? So, let's say I want to take this shirt in a little bit on the sides because it's too baggy, I would prefer that it be a little bit more fitted, okay? Instead of guessing where I would like it to be pinned, I'm actually just gonna try it on inside out, I'm gonna stand in front of a full length mirror and I'm gonna pin it. I'm gonna start with this side here. I'm gonna make sure this is nice and flat, and I just wanna bring it in a little bit on the side, just like that, okay? Now the easiest way to do this is to start when you do this, make sure your seam comes from an existing seam and ends on an existing seam. That way you can back stitch on the existing seam, sew across where you want to sew, and then end. So, let's finish doing this. So I want to kind of aim my pins back toward this seam like this, okay? Now, even though I have all of this extra fabric sticking out, once you pin both sides and you stand in the mirror, you can really see the change that it makes. So I'm gonna finish pinning the bottom here, okay? I'll go like this. And we want it to flare a little bit at the end, so I'm gonna put my last pin here so that it kind of ends on a seam. See that? Okay? Now if I pin this other side, I'm just going to hold it, look how much better that line looks along my waistline. So now it actually fits my form just a little bit better, just like that, okay? So you can see, when I hold this out, these pins are kind of jaggedy. Because I'm not really paying attention to what I'm doing, it's not going to be a perfect line. So what I'm gonna do is, being very careful not to stick yourself, you're going to take the shirt off, you're going to lie it on a flat surface. I have an iron off pen here, I'm going to use my pins, almost like a dot-to-dot, and you might have to sketch several different times, but you're basically just going to sketch a nice curved line right on the outside of those pins so that you have a nice smooth line to sew from. So what you would do is you would back stitch on the existing seam, sew up the existing seam, veer off onto your very nice sketched line, sew all the way along your sketched line, end on the original seam, do a little back stitch. And then if you have a surger, you can surge the end of it if you want to cut it. I like to turn it right side out first, after I've sewn my first seam, before I cut anything, try it on and make sure it looks nice before I trim off the inside edges and finish my seam.