Why I Never Skip The Muslin
We all feel that boost of excitement when we get a new sewing pattern in our hands and feel 1000% confident the final garment will be everything we imagined. But how many times have you felt disappointment when it came time to try on that final make and it just didn’t meet your expectations? If only there was something a sewist could do to get a better final result. Oh, but there is! You could make a muslin (toile).
Even though it feels like a lot of extra work, making a muslin will more times than not save you time in the end. It will also increase your hit rate for successful makes. I’m more than prepared to receive hate mail over this topic, as I know there are many sewists who want to get right to it the second their fabric is in hand. But this is a step in the garment making process that I’m passionate about promoting. Making a muslin before cutting the final fabric was something I emphasized during our class at Penland School of Craft in 2024, adding more fans to “Team Muslin”. Even so, I know how easy it is to talk oneself out of this crucial step in the garment making process because I still do it occasionally. I always regret it. Hear me out on the reasons why you should never ever skip making a muslin.
There is no perfect sewing pattern
The necessity of testing a pattern in muslin before sewing the final piece doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the sewing pattern. Even a highly regarded clothing pattern is worthy of a test when it comes to how it works for your own personal shape. Not one single pattern is a perfect fit for every single person on the planet. It’s simply not possible. We are all different and isn’t that one of the reasons we all started making our own clothes?
Over the years of making patterns for home sewists, I’ve gotten the impression that there’s some percentage of sewists who treat the fit of sewing patterns like they do off the rack clothing. Though there can always be some alterations to clothing we buy at retail stores, it’s still pretty limiting and we mostly just have to walk away from garments that don’t fit us. But this isn’t the case, nor should it be, with sewing patterns. Pattern designers (for both home sewing and fashion industry) have to decide on a size chart and stick with it for consistency. Most of the time that chart revolves around their fit model. There is no universal fit model and there never could be. Even I don’t fit into the OSP size chart perfectly because I’m a little different than our fit model. My waist to hip ratio has changed over the years and my butt isn’t where most sewing patterns want it to be. This is what living past your 30’s does to you (aka middle age). The point is, even my OWN body has veered away from a set of measurements that used to work for the fit of some garments. I have to be able to adapt to these differences, which is why I make my own clothes.
Minor tweaks will make your garment shine
Even if there are no major fit adjustments to be made, minor tweaks could really take the garment to the next level. In my opinion, the need to change the length on areas like sleeves and hemlines are completely normal and considered a minor adjustment. I have short arms and will always and forever be decreasing the length in my sleeves by 3-4 inches. I also have a preference of where a shirt hemline lands, which is directly related to the shape of my hips. You never really know how the length of a finished piece will look on YOU until you have it on and paired with the rest of a look. Maybe there’s only an inch needing to be taken off of the side seams, but that might be hard to realize by just holding the paper pattern up to your body. Also, taking in the side seams even by a little could be a challenge if you’ve already finished the raw edges of your seams.
Pocket placement on sewing patterns are merely a suggestion. Moving a patch pocket around and pinning in a more adequate spot could be dependent on the curves of your body or just how you like it to feel as you’re reaching into the pocket. The best way to know how pockets function is to try them out. I might move an inseam pocket up a bit, due to my short arm situation. In the end you may choose to eliminate something like an inseam pocket altogether because they add too much bulk to the hips. I’ve done this with some of my Bumper Jumpers that were made of a fabric with a lot of drape.
Pairing the finished muslin with other garments in your closet is just one more test for your sewing pattern. Missing the chance to make a slight adjustment early on, ensuring the garment complements its companion pieces, is a little painful. It’s also possible you may take the muslin for a test run and realize it doesn’t harmonize with anything in your closet. There’s nothing wrong with setting the pattern aside for a while and circling back when it makes more sense for your style. Or maybe there’s an opportunity for a pattern hack.
Make the final sewing process brainless
Eliminating all questions before cutting the final fabric is essential. You can feel confident about the fit and function of the pattern after you have made adjustments, tweaked the final design elements and know exactly what you’ll wear with your new make when it’s finished. But you’ve also taken some stress out of the sewing process by getting familiar with the instructions. You may not move through every single sewing step with the muslin you are testing, but you will have taken the time to clarify any part of the process that might not make sense to you.
Or it’s possible that you have a more preferred method of assembling something like a waistband or a notched collar, for example. There is almost always more than one way to achieve certain parts of sewing a garment. This is something I talk about with our guest designer for the Choice Pattern. It’s easy to get hung up on “what is the right or wrong way” to do something, when you begin learning the skill. In most cases, there is no right or wrong way to achieve most things in sewing. It usually depends on all the variables like the fabric you’re using or how the rest of the garment is constructed. Sometimes it just comes down to how you initially learned. It can be hard to imagine the multiple ways of sewing a welt pocket until you start working around other sewists and pick up alternative methods. Whatever the case may be, if assembling a certain part of a garment with an alternative method makes sense for you and it won’t confuse the remainder of the assembly process, you should do what you know. Testing this out during the muslin sewing process is the right time to make these decisions.
Once you’re ready to take the final cut pieces to your sewing machine, you can feel more relaxed and confident in the assembly process. Things like getting your machine to sew over bulky areas or making sure the topstitching is perfect might still cause you stress, but all issues will have been sorted out.
Go Team Muslin!
I’ve been patternmaking and sewing garments as a professional for over twenty years and no matter how much experience I put under my belt, I still believe in testing commercial and indie patterns before the final assembly process. Because the additional step of a muslin doesn’t depend on how good of a sewist you are. It’s about creating efficiency and assisting you in your quest to be your own designer. It may feel like so much extra work, but it really isn’t when you think about all the time saved by incorporating all your personal preferences in advance.
