When I wrote here more frequently, one of my inspirations was watching the interaction between management and workers. My first work for hire was alongside workers, and the cultural background of my family would have a blue collar if it wore collared shirts at all. But I have always favored ideas that look neat on Click Here to continue reading.
Bernice recently left a comment on my “Crash Course on Dart Moving“.
Hi,
lOVE YOUR EXPLANATION ON ROTATION DARTS. I WAS WONDERING HOW YOU ACTUALLY PUT A DART IN A DARTLESS PATTERN. HOW TO MAKE THE DART WIDER SO AS I CAN THEN ROTATE THE DART TO THE WAIST AND SHOULDER TO ADD WIDE PINTUCKS AT SHOULDER AND WAIST.
THANKS
I like taking questions from the audience, and I like being able to help people who are struggling to figure something out. If anyone out there has questions, please ask them. It may take me a few weeks for me to get back to you, but I will get back to you. I can’t give a 100% guarantee that I know the answers to everything, but I have to be getting close to knowing everything. (Right? Right? C’mon, somebody back me up here!)
Okay, this explanation is going to be on the long side, so bear with me. Because the first thing I’m going to talk about is the whole reason or purpose for darts.
Here’s a sheet of paper. We’re going to pretend it’s fabric, because like fabric, it is flat.
(That’s my brother’s mouse, and my brother’s speaker.) And here in this next picture is a can of Parmesan cheese.
(And that’s my brother’s mess. I take absolutely no responsibility for that mess. It’s all his.) The poor, abandoned cheese container has no clothes. But we’re going to fix that.
So we take our fabric and wrap it around the container. Perfect fit, right? And no darts! This is our “guy” example. His clothes need no shaping. He doesn’t understand why you always get so grumpy about clothes not fitting, because how complicated can it be? You just wrap some fabric around yourself, and you’re good!
We will try not to do violent things to our guy example, even though he has no empathy or understanding and thinks everyone in the world is just like him.
Here’s a girl example:
She has curves.
If she takes a piece of fabric and wraps it around her, it’s not going to fit her the same way it fit the guy. Here’s a cutaway example so we can see what’s happening:
The fabric fit our guy example the same way all over. There was nothing complicated about that situation. But in our girl example, the fabric covers her just fine at the largest point, and it’s loose everywhere else. In order to get the fabric to fit her the same everywhere, we need to do this:
We’ve pinched out the extra. What does this look like when we take the paper off?
Darts!!
So, darts are shaping that is made by taking away fabric where it is too loose. Generally speaking, anyway. That’s the idea; tuck it away in the back of your head for the moment—we’re going to talk about something slightly different now.
Here is another mild-mannered piece of fabric/paper:
Hello, fabric. This fabric has no shaping. It has no darts.
Here I’ve drawn on a 1″ dart. So now this fabric has a dart, but it is an “unsewn” dart, so there is still no shaping. Let’s “sew” this dart.
Now instead of laying flatly on the table, this fabric has some shaping.
See what I mean?
Now what happens if we make the dart bigger? Here I’ve made the dart into a 2″ dart.
And when we tape it up, the shaping is even greater.
The larger we draw our dart,
The taller our shaping becomes.
Some people phrase this as “The bigger the bump, the bigger the dart.” I think of it as simply the difference between two measurements. You have to take as much as necessary out of the bigger measurement to make it equal the smaller measurement.
Now let’s move on to a real life example. Here’s me. In an old t-shirt. A Land’s End boys’ t-shirt, to be exact.
(The mess is all mine, but I still don’t take any responsibility for it. I have lots of good excuses, but they take too long to type.)
Since it’s a boys t-shirt, it has no shaping whatsoever. Somebody has sewn together two flat rectangles, and put sleeves on it. It’s meant to fit our cheese container, which needs no shaping. It’s all the same anyway on a boy. But I am not a boy, and this means it doesn’t fit me the same everywhere.
What this means is that there are darts when I wear this t-shirt, but they are un-sewn darts.
Remember in our examples? When we put the flat piece of paper on the curvy speaker, suddenly there were these big gaps that weren’t there when we put the same piece of paper on the cheese container. And do you remember in the second example, when we drew the darts but didn’t sew them?
Well, this is what happens when you put the unshaped fabric on a shape. It tries to make darts.
Did you see them before I pointed them out to you?
This is what we call “un-sewn darts” or “fullness” or “extra fabric”. If you put an un-shaped piece of fabric on something that has shape, there is “leftovers”.
So here we “sew” the dart. I’m pinning out the fullness; I’m “creating” a dart; I’m shaping the fabric.
And in this extremely blurry picture, you can see it’s still all loose and unshaped on the left side.
So that’s what you call a bust dart. This is what happens when you put in a waist dart:
Since my nickname is not “Miss Skinny Through the Middle”, I find these waist darts to be hugely unflattering, and in real life I’m not going to use them. But if you were a guy, “waist darts” are the only darts you’d ever use, and even then, probably only if you were working on a jacket/sports coat/etc.
So shaped on the right side,
unshaped on the left. The shirt is the same. It’s just that one side has “unsewn” darts, and the other side has “sewn” darts.
You can also shape the side seams. Notice the unsewn darts on the left?
In real life, I would use the bust dart and shape the side seam, but I wouldn’t use the waist dart. This is now seriously into sausage-casing territory, which I call “Not a Good Look.”
In general, you can always use smaller darts. It just means you will have “less shaping”, or your garment will look more like the paper on speaker. But you can’t really make darts bigger, beyond a certain point. Could we have made the darts bigger on the paper on the speaker? No! Could have we made them smaller? Yes, but it would have been a looser, less shaped fit.
So what does any of this have to do with anything? Well, to answer Bernice’s questions:
(1) Your pattern probably does have darts, they’re just unsewn and undrawn. You can put them in. Probably pin-fitting a muslin would be the way to go (just as I pin fit my t-shirt), simply because it’s the most straight forward. Putting in darts will change the fit, though, so if you already like the fit, don’t bother with the darts.
(2) Once you “put your darts in”, you can’t really make them bigger. That’s just the shape you are. But you don’t need to make your darts bigger in order to put in pintucks.
All darts disregarded (either sewn or unsewn), all you need to do to add pintucks is slash-and spread.
Let’s move on to little pattern examples, of which mine are unfortunately very poor quality. I apologize, but I’m running out of steam here, and I really want to get this answer to you this weekend. Otherwise it’s anyone’s guess when I’ll finish it.
If I had a “dartless” pattern that I liked, and I wanted to add decorative tucking down the front, I’d mark off the section I wanted to tuck, like this:
Then I’d slash right up the middle of that section, and spread it apart as far as I needed it,
and tuck it.
Now if I had a shaped pattern, and I wanted decorative tucks down the front, I’d arrange my darts like this:
Mark off my area I wanted tucked, like this:
Slash right along the straight line and add my extra fabric, and tuck:
Now I think what Bernice was talking about was doing “functional” tucks, using tucks to take in the fullness instead of darts. In that case, you can leave the darts without having a perfectly vertical line, and simple tuck out the fullness at the top and the bottom. This will mean the tucks won’t make as straight line down the front of the shirt, but rather will end before reaching the bust.
And that was my rather pathetic illustration of the origin of darts, where they came from, how they got there, what they’re doing there, and what happens when they leave. If I was being paid to do this kind of stuff, I would have taken the time to actually have unblurry, focused pictures. But as it is, it has taken me 5 hours to do all of this, and everything else I was supposed to do this weekend is calling my name. So as far as picture quality, I guess you’ll have to take what you can get. As far as understanding it, however, please let me know if you have any other questions. I will keep working at it until it makes sense for you!
A mysterious illness is causing calves to bleed to death on German farms. Veterinarians are stumped over what is causing the deaths: vaccines, genetically modified feed or perhaps even the first mother’s milk?
What can a cattle farmer do when he sees blood running from his calves like water, when they become lethargic and febrile and, by the next morning, are lying dead on the floor, their coats covered in blood?
“Our calves from last summer looked like they had been beaten,” says farmer Robert Meyboom, who is still shocked and perplexed today. “The animals’ bodies were covered with drops of blood, and their eyes were bloodshot.”
Half a year after the government seized Freddie Mac, confusion about its role is stoking tensions between the company and its regulator, including a dispute this month over how much the mortgage giant should reveal to private investors about its financial troubles.
Federal officials who took over Freddie Mac stopped short of nationalizing the company, leaving it partly in private hands. This means Freddie still has to answer to investors and file financial disclosures.
But when Freddie Mac’s executives concluded a few weeks ago that they had to disclose that the government’s management of the McLean company was undermining its profitability and would cost it tens of billions of dollars, the firm’s regulator urged it not to do so, according to several sources familiar with the matter.
Freddie Mac executives refused to bend. The clash grew so severe that they threatened to go to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees corporate disclosures, to secure a ruling that the regulator’s request was out of line. The company’s regulator backed down, the sources said.
This is why government involvement in the economy is bad news.
Just watch this video for long enough to get to the end of the sheep story if you want a good laugh. Anyone who knows anything about sheep knows those stupid rubber bands are inhumane. But there are other ways of castrating sheep besides the way that he was taught to do it. After you get past the sheep story, the rest is just blather.
I already know that white collar people don’t know much and yet think they can tell us how to do our jobs. I already know that most safety regulations can’t be followed in the real world. And as far as a PR campaign for work goes, give me break.
Cute fury bunny rabbits using semi realistic tactics. (Hard to tell from the trailer, but the switch to the backup weapon looks right. But rarely will you see people working alone like they do).
Something is up. It seems that people in the highest levels of the US and Pakistan governments have decided to tell the New York Times what everyone basically already knows. Pakistan is supporting the Taliban militants who are fighting US soldiers and they have no intention of ever stopping that support. A short quote from the article….
Details of the ISI’s continuing ties to militant groups were described by a half-dozen American, Pakistani and other security officials during recent interviews in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. All requested anonymity because they were discussing classified and sensitive intelligence information.
The American officials said proof of the ties between the Taliban and Pakistani spies came from electronic surveillance and trusted informants. The Pakistani officials interviewed said that they had firsthand knowledge of the connections, though they denied that the ties were strengthening the insurgency.
And later on in the article, American officials say what everyone knows….
Top American officials speak bluntly about how the situation has changed little since last summer, when evidence showed that ISI operatives helped plan the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, an attack that killed 54 people.
“They have been very attached to many of these extremist organizations, and it’s my belief that in the long run, they have got to completely cut ties with those in order to really move in the right direction,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recently on “The Charlie Rose Show” on PBS.
The Taliban has been able to finance a military campaign inside Afghanistan largely through proceeds from the illegal drug trade and wealthy individuals from the Persian Gulf. But American officials said that when fighters needed fuel or ammunition to sustain their attacks against American troops, they would often turn to the ISI.
When the groups needed to replenish their ranks, it would be operatives from the S Wing who often slipped into radical madrasas across Pakistan to drum up recruits, the officials said.
The whole article should really be read by everyone. The most interesting thing about the article is that is was high level Pakistan officials who talked to the New York Times reporters. I wonder what caused them to decide to talk? It seems like this article is designed to set the stage for something but I am not sure what.
Regardless, the article highlights the problem with America’s ruling class. They are so degenerate that they are propping up a regime that they know is complicit in ongoing attacks on American soldiers. They do this not because they want American solders to get killed but because they are afraid of what will happen if they stop the support.
They can’t make hard decisions. They don’t have the guts to do anything that might have real costs. And this can not be blamed solely on Obama. These problems were already clear when Bush was in charge. Nor is it solely a problem with the White House. Everyone who is informed in this country already pretty much knew everything in this article. But no “serious” pundit has been willing to lay out the true choices facing America.
The truth that nobody wants to admit is that we have only two choices. We can swallow our pride and leave Afghanistan with all the catastrophic implications that choice has. Or we can give Pakistan a true “us or them” ultimatum with all the catastrophic implications that such an ultimatum would necessarily entail.
What we are doing right now is not a sane choice no matter what your ideology is. We are sending Americans in who will die trying to create a stable Afghanistan when we know they can never succeed as long as ISI is supporting the other side. We are wasting blood and money simply because our political caste is composed of cowards who want to kick the can down the road until a solution magically appears. In the end, though, we are either going to have to leave or else fight Pakistan. All the money and blood that was spent to try to avoid that choice will have been wasted.
In a way, the New York Times article is almost a good sign. At least the political caste is starting to go on record as admitting to things that everyone already knows to be true. I don’t know what they are trying to set the stage for, but acknowledging the facts is a move in the right direction.
An auction of government-guaranteed bonds failed for the first time in seven years today.
The Debt Management Office (DMO) – which sells gilts to raise money on behalf of the Government – said it had attracted bids worth only £1.63 billion for a tranche of gilts worth £1.75 billion.
The Treasury gilts are due to mature in 2049.
But the Treasury moved quickly to dismiss claims that the appetite for Government bonds was falling amid concerns about public debt and worries that the Government may be forced to step up the number of gilts it issues.
Edit: This too….
March 25 (Bloomberg) — U.S. stocks retreated after a Treasury auction of five-year notes drew a higher-than-forecast yield, spurring concern government attempts to lower interest rates will fail amid record sales of bonds.
Today it is supposed to get up to high in the lower 40’s. Tomorrow, up into the fifties. This morning it started out with a sharp chill, but now as the morning wanes toward noon the temperature is around freezing. The sky is crystal clear, an azure blue with the sun brightly shining. It is […]
Someday I want to learn all about lock-picking. I think it would be terribly fun.
Actually, I will try to be sure never to learn more about lock-picking because I am not sure I could stop from picking locks once I knew how. Just for fun.
H/T Hip And Thigh.