How Do You Dart?

I was emailing Carolyn earlier today and I'm sure I gave her a good chuckle. I can't tell you for sure how many years I have been sewing. But I can tell you that I have always, and I mean always had trouble making a decent dart. Getting it marked acurately, the whole nine yards. So, last weekend I cut out a new dress. It's McCalls 5672 and I'm making View B - the knee length floral version. Darts are pretty important to this dress and frankly after the last two dress failures - I need a winner. That means I needed to come up with a better way to mark and sew darts. On the back, I basted one layer of the dress right through the tissue. I thought this was pretty smart - until I realized I would have to destroy the tissue to get it off. So after gently removing the tissue and repairing it - I needed to find a better way. First, I used tracing paper and my rotary tracing wheel and traced the dart on doctor's table paper. Then I layed the tissue back over the front of the dress and made taylor's tacks at all the circles on the tissue. Placing the cut tissue dart between the marks. Then I took a length of white cotton thread and basted around the tissue dart. You can barely see the white thread over there ----->

After marking the dart and sliding the tissue dart out. I gently pulled on both ends of the thread, drawing the sides of the darts together! Brilliant! Then I offset my needle slightly and sewed right next to the basting thread.

After removing the basting threads - I pressed the darts, using my pressing ham. These are the prettiest darts I've ever produced. Hopefully this dress will be a winner! So far, it's working out ok. I love the fabric which is a painted linen - It's rather heavy so the sleeve lining, under collar and armhole facing were all cut from a red tonal quilting cotton.