An extra stitch for security
With ready-made clothes easily and cheaply available, tailoring has become a skill less common these days. But it’s still worth learning, writes Aznim Ruhana Md Yusup
IT is 11am on a Thursday and I find myself studying a scaleddown paper pattern for a tunic dress. I am at a sewing class in Kota Damansara organised by Bengkel, called Sew Senang. I’m supposed to transfer the pattern onto a piece of brown paper where it should follow my actual frame.
The class instructor, Nazreen Datuk Sheik has already taken my measurements — shoulder width, dress length, etc ― and it seems simple enough. But I still can’t imagine how a flat pattern on a piece of paper would have any correlation to a wearable garment.
Sewing is a rare skill among my genmy eration. When my mother was age, she could whip up a baju kurung for a formal function overnight. I, on the other hand, can only sew on loose buttons and replace the elastic band on my pyjama pants. It doesn’t really compare.
And it’s not like she didn’t teach me how to sew. I made a pretty serviceable baju kurung for college in cotton plaid fabric — cotton being an easy material to work with and plaid because the printed boxes make it easier to sew since you just follow the lines. But that was the only garment I have ever made, till now.
CLASS ACTION
My classmate, Nina Omar, has brought her mother’s old Singer sewing machine to class to learn how to use it. It’s missing a bobbin — the cylinder that holds the thread inside the machine — but a replacement is easily found.
“It’s been lying around at home for years,” says the stayat-home mother of two young boys. “I’ve always wanted to sew. With my sons now in school, I have time to learn and do all these projects.”
Nina’s attempting to make a pair of simple drawstring trousers. Considering this is her second Sew Senang class, she’s quicker at making sense of the pattern and transferring the measurements onto the brown paper.
Once the pattern is measured and drawn using a sewing ruler, the paper is cut and pinned on top of the fabric. Nazreen determines how wide the seam allowance should be — either 1cm or 2cm. We mark the allowance with chalk and proceed to cut the fabric.
We continue with a serrated roller or tracing wheel and tracing paper, running it on the edge of the paper pattern to mark where we need to sew on the fabric. I remember all these tools from my mother’s sewing box, but I never really knew what they were for.
SEW FINALLY
Once the preparatory steps are done, we can finally begin to sew. I pick a bright orange thread to go with my bright orange
With the current economy, I feel that it is important for us to have another skill. If you can sew, paint or do woodwork, then you can at least try to make money out of it.
Nik Intan Rashid
and pink polka dot fabric. The thread in the bobbin is white, but it should be alright since it would only show on the inside of the garment.
My dress comes with a zip opening, and now I need to sew the zip onto the garment. This requires a change of feet on the sewing machine. A “feet” is a changeable attachment that is used to hold the fabric flat as
it is fed through the machine to be stitched. Because a zip is not flat, it requires a different feet so that the zip can go through the machine.
We use a hidden zip, and I had to attempt the sewing a couple of times because the stitches weren’t close enough to hide it. The other tricky bit was sewing the sleeves — there’s not a lot of space to work with, and you have to allow for a little bit of “give” so that the attachment comes together.
In four hours, Nina has pretty much completed her trousers, even though she still needs to ask a professional tailor to seam the frayed edges of the fabric. She’s using an elastic band instead of drawstrings on the waist. These are not fancy trousers, more like fancy pyjama pants, I tell her.
“These are expensive pyjama pants, considering the price of the fabric!” she says. But she’s excited to see that with the remaining material, she can make several more pairs for her husband and sons, especially since she now knows how to use her mum’s sewing machine.
Meanwhile, my dress turns out okay, though I will be the first to admit that it’s not going to win any prizes for style or neatness. But I feel satisfied seeing it completed. It’s easier and perhaps even cheaper to buy clothes off the rack, but you won’t get the same kind of pleasure with that.
Sewing itself, with the rattle of the sewing machine and working with your hands, feels therapeutic. You focus on the task in front of you and time just passes by. I’m seriously considering making my own baju kurung for Hari Raya.