Making your own clothes?

bigpinkelephant

Hi,
Does anyone make their own clothes?
I look at designer dresses and stuff and think, would it really be that hard to learn to make dresses etc?
Does anyone know if there are any good night classes or anything around where I could learn?
I saw a gorgeous T-shirt in A-Wear yesterday. A regular cotton T-shirt with black lace on the shoulders. €26 :eek:
Going to try and buy some black lace and try and make something similar with an old T-shirt.

Part of this comes from the fact that I am spending half my salary on clothes and it is just getting ridiculous. It would be great to be able to copy the nice clothes myself and have them exactly as I want them and fit perfectly.

TheKBizzle

I once fashioned a costume out of a bin liner at Hallow'een as a child.

Quite stylish;)

Caychadh

I'm not very good at sewing etc but I will sometimes jazz up clothes a bit, like your example of the T shirt and the lace. Sometimes simple things such as changing buttons, adding a different belt can really change the appearance of your clothes. I got a plain pink penneys cardigan which I bought a black woolen wrap-around belt for. I also took the buttons off and sewed on some great big black buttons and it looks so stylish. Plus, I've seen lots of people wearing the penneys cardi and mine now doesn't look anything like it.
If you do some googling you could probably find some night classes, a lot start around September and there must be some basic dress making ones about!

sunnyside

bigpinkelephant wrote: »

Hi,
I saw a gorgeous T-shirt in A-Wear yesterday. A regular cotton T-shirt with black lace on the shoulders. €26 :eek:
Going to try and buy some black lace and try and make something similar with an old T-shirt.

Part of this comes from the fact that I am spending half my salary on clothes and it is just getting ridiculous.

I don't mean to be negative or discourage you, sewing is a very useful skill but dressmaking would definitely not be cheap. It would cost more to make your own clothes than to buy clothes in A-Wear. To buy a zip or a few buttons would cost you nearly €10. Fabric and patterns are expensive too.

I would highly recommend it if you have a real interest in it. What would be better than having someone admire your dress and for you to be able to tell them you made it yourself. It would be a fabulous hobby but I can't see it saving you money.

Pythia

The Grafton Academy does dressmaking classes
http://www.graftonacademy.com/index.htm

Léan

sunnyside wrote: »

I don't mean to be negative or discourage you, sewing is a very useful skill but dressmaking would definitely not be cheap. It would cost more to make your own clothes than to buy clothes in A-Wear. To buy a zip or a few buttons would cost you nearly €10. Fabric and patterns are expensive too.

I would highly recommend it if you have a real interest in it. What would be better than having someone admire your dress and for you to be able to tell them you made it yourself. It would be a fabulous hobby but I can't see it saving you money.

I disagree.
It all depends where you buy the fabric, buttons etc.. A lot of the time you can pick up all of these things in Guineys/Lidil/Aldi for next to nothing. Then again it depends what you're making.
I make and alter a lot of my clothing, probably about 70% of it and it definitely costs me less then buying the same things on the high street.

Semele

Hmm...would also be interested in this. I have a terrible habit of buying things that I don't really like or that don't fit all that well, just because they're cheap (ebay is a tool of Satan), with vague intentions of "taking it in a bit" or "changing the buttons and taking off the sleeves and shortening it". Obviously I either then never do it or realise that it's not as easy as it seemed in theory. The result of all this is that I have many items of clothing with great potential that I never wear.

Also I left a lot of skirts to a dressmaker a year ago to get altered after I lost some weight (saw sense with that one!)- my mum went to pick them up and pay her as I was out of the country at the time and they cost a fair bit. When I tried them on though they were all still too big! Now my dressmaker has moved away so I can't complain and I'm not prepared to pay the same price again for them to be done somewhere else- so they're still unwearable. They are now on my list of things I will eventually attempt myself but since I really love some of them I'm too terrified to touch them.

I need some sort of evening class that would deal with pretty basic alterations as even my more successful attempts look fine from the outside but are generally a botched mess on the inside!

littlesurfer

This is something i'm really interested in too. I'm moving to galway so if anyone knows of a good class there that would be great. I do a lot of alterations to cheap pennies and second hand clothes....but starting from scratch would be way above me...i wouldnt know where to start. I dont have a sewing machine either...or know how to use one