Vogue 1215 - Terminator Tucks

Tailor's Tacks - required here!

Pam Howard's class on Shirt Details starts Friday evening. Hooray! This class will no doubt be fabulous. She is the queen of top-stitching and other details.

Vogue 1215 has more details than she plans to cover in the class so it has required quite a bit of advanced planning. I completed my muslin a few weeks ago now. But I was never happy with the way the pin tucks looked. There are two down each front and both sides of the back. They are curved. One parallels the neck dart and then extends. And they intersect. Yikes!

The intersection just never looked good, IMO. I experimented - stop sewing just ahead of the first tuck and jump over it, carefully sew through it, and other variations on the theme. In fact, they more I looked at the pattern photo, the more I saw lumps in that version too. OK, you do have to look closely. I was ready to accept this little flaw, sort of.

Dart in - ready for *tucks*

At Christmas I received a lovely book called *Manipulating Fabric* with lots of technical details. The author suggests an alternative to ordinary pin tucks. It involves using a twin needle and tightening the bobbin tension. I read this while traveling and could not wait to get home and try it.

I think it's the right solution. Now it does bug me some that these are not tucks. BUT they really do look so, so much better than the real tucks.

lumpy tucks vs. twin needle

Ta-da!