Part of our business is to alter clothes for our customers. Some of these are straight forward, and others do take a little bit more time, like this vintage pair of wool trousers. It was dropped off at our studio with instructions attached.
After some investigation we worked out how the alteration could be achieved. In this case we needed to gain 4 inches around the waist area. Usually this is quite a difficult alteration because there is rarely any excess fabric anywhere in a commercially made garment.
This vintage piece was rather different as it had a lot of fabric hidden in a pleat and also some on the back seam which we could glean from.
We did need to add something on the facing but that is a place not seen from the outside. Usually we are not that lucky.
We found that most of our time was spent carefully unpicking all relevant seams. That’s a job and half when you have a black thread used on green and black patterned wool cloth. All in all we think the alteration was a success! What do you think?