Fixing the shrink

Preshrinking material is important, I tell ya. Most people try to skip this step and continue on with cutting out fabric and sewing. But what will you do when you first wash the material and it shrinks? You're stuck with a beautiful garment that only a child could where.

But what do you do if the fabric shrinks and you don't have enough material to cut out the all the pattern pieces?

As I was cutting out a skirt pattern in a recent sewing class, I found my material had shrunk from 45 inches to 39 inches wide. This left me with about 3 inches less than was needed to cut out the back section of the skirt. What to do, what to do?

Class instructor Margaret Christie came to the rescue. She attached more material at the end, as seen above. You can see the seam above my thumb where material was added on. The seam was used as the fold for the hemline. The skirt is now a little bit shorter than I wanted it, but it would have been 2 inches shorter if we hadn't added on material!