The Good/Bad of Doing Alterations for Friends

For a 3 piece project I aced 2/3 garments so... 66% accuracy

I always offer my services when friends are in need of alterations. I like helping out and in most cases I’m saving a garment from the trash or at least a life in the back of the closet. So when a friend came to drop off some garments that needed altered I was more than happy to help. Three garments were dropped off, 2 pants and a shirt, and the process and of altering them had me questioning whether I should really be doing this.

The first repair was easy enough, just raise the hem on some wool dress pants. Only tricky part about this is the blind hem which I always do by hand. I know you can get your machine to do it but that has always ended in disaster for me and I don’t mind the hand work. At first I folded the cuff in twice (left leg above) and hemmed it which was a diversion from how the factory had done it which was one turn with a surge edge (right leg above). I got self-consciousness about how bulky the double turned hem was so I ended up ripping it out and doing the factory method. In the end it really made no difference and I probably should have left it since a double turned cuff in my opinion is a nicer finish.

Here’s where I start questioning everything. When beginning the work on the second pair of pants I started to cut the hem in the wrong spot. I had just woken up, I was groggy and I really don’t have a valid excuse for this. A mistake so dumb I started questioning everything, mostly “what am I going to tell my friend?”

After panicking I finally came up with the above solution. I cut the spot out and sewed in a panel. Not particularly flattering and my friend definitely intends to wear these without a cuff or any breaks so it will probably be very noticeable. If this were my own pair of pants I wouldn’t have honestly cared that much. In fact for me it just adds character to a pair of pants thats now “customized”. But for my friend I knew this wasn’t what he was expecting. Luckily the pants were just American Apparel pants so I figure worst comes to worst I’ll just buy the pants off of him and use them in another project. So there is one benefit of most clothing being cheap and disposable 🙃.

I think its important to note that I do not charge my friends for alterations or mends, its pretty much all free. There are a lot of ways to approach this subject, but for me it just doesn’t feel right. I’m not a professional and my work has a tendency to go south as seen above. Also going to a tailor and getting work done is relatively cheap. In fact its a bargain considering how much work can go into some of these fixes. So even if I were to charge market rate the amount of money still probably would’t be enough to justify my time.

Now heres the big boy project that I had kind of been dreading, especially coming off of the jeans project. My friend bought this XXL Burberry shirt in the early 2000s when it was the trend to wear incredibly oversized things. He was absolutely swimming in this shirt and he asked me to take it in at the sides, shorten the arm holes, make it short sleeve, and bring up the hem. This is no easy task but it could have been worse.

As a side note, another thing that always gets me about mending for people is that people don’t really have any idea what goes into a job like the one above. To the layman it as easy as cutting a few lines and throwing some stitched here and there. Little do they know I have to draft a brand knew shirt pattern from scratch just make sure the arm holes and sleeve are correct.

As a side note to the above note people also like to ask for things that are actually impossible. One of my favorite requests that I get all the time is to turn a full length skirt into a pair of pants. Unless that skirt has plenty of volume that just is not possible given the geometry and surface area of a pant leg pattern. But to the uninitiated, myself included when I started sewing, this project seems as easy sewing a line up the middle of the skirt and calling it a day.

Back to the project above, I drafted a new shirt pattern from scratch to get the new chest, sleeve, and arm hole measurements right. Also did I mention the reference shirt that I was given for chest measurements ect. was a knit t-shirt with completely different properties as a woven. I sewed the shirt back up with flat felled seams which is going to go unnoticed by anyone who doesn’t sew but there is nothing more satisfying than pressing a nice flat felled seam you pulled off.

I would say this shirt turned out a success, which if I could have picked which project to not mess up it would have been this one. If I would have made an absent minded mistake on this shirt it would have been a several hundred dollar mess up. Alterations have a real asymmetric risk for the sewer. If I get it right my friends happy and goes about his day, if I get it wrong now I’m in a huge debacle where 100s of dollars are now on the line. It also not uncommon that the garments your tasked with altering are a persons favorite, most expensive, and irreplaceable garments since thats what they care enough about to actually get altered.

Although I like to complain I’m glad I took on the project and I’m happy my friends trust me enough with things like this. As difficult as the shirt was to get right it was some good practice. Ultimately when my friend came to pick it up he was super happy with all of it and the shirt fit perfectly. He also didn’t even really care about the jeans and was pretty satisfied with how I repaired it so a lot of worry over nothing. I also have some nice Burberry scraps to use on another project.