Hello again, sewing friends. I want to talk about ease today. Ease means the difference between your body measurements and your finished garment measurements.
I always feel a little guilty? shameful? that I just jump into my chosen topic instead of writing 6 pages of fluff about my daughter’s cat or the epic failure of my garden this year. But then I remember allllllll my frustrations at “those blogs” where you want a recipe but you first have to wade through all the details of some irrelevant life experience just to find the recipe. And I’m not a fan of small talk anyways, so I’ll continue to cut to the chase.
*Deep breath.*
Ease—what you really came here for. As I mentioned, ease is the difference between the garment and your body. Ease can be either positive or negative. For my modesty requirements, most of my garments have positive ease. Think of a Ready-To-Wear t-shirt—usually t-shirts have negative ease. If you were to measure, say, the bust on the t-shirt, it most likely would be smaller than your body measurement at the bustline. Lots of knit garments use negative ease as a fitting method. This is not my chosen fitting method.
But ease is still an important thing that needs discussing. Wearing ease, that is. Imagine if you had a woven (non stretch) dress that had a bust measurement of exactly the same as your bust measurement. How would you be able to breathe? Or if your waist measurement match the dress exactly? How would you sit down? Or even eat? I know that each person has their own preferences in terms of the amount of wearing ease, and most likely my opinions differ from yours.
There is also a sewing element called design ease. This is when a garment is designed to have a specific amount of ease for design purposes. Think of a flowing, woven dress—it has much more ease than is strictly necessary, but to achieve the look the designer wants, more ease is needed. Or a body-con dress has lots of negative ease to create the designer’s vision.
Now for some rough numbers…for knit dresses you can obviously get away with less ease than for a woven dress. Average wearing ease for knits would be 1″ extra at the bust, 1.5″ extra at the waist, and 3″ extra at the hip.
For woven dresses, you need to take your sitting measurements for your waist and hips. And so the finished garment measurement at the waist and hip needs to at least accommodate your sitting measurements. You may choose more than that. At the bust line I would recommend having no less than an inch of ease.
I hope I’ve helped make this topic a tiny bit clearer. What questions do you still have? Leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Till next time.
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