How to Take In a Blouse

Elaine Terrell: Hi, I am Elaine Terrell, owner of Elaine Terrell's Dressmaking and Alterations. I am going to show you now how to take in the size of a blouse. This happens to be a sleeveless shirt and again I have marked where I want to take it in with pins. So what I am going to do is turn this inside out and again, I am going to lay it use by sleeve board. I am going to lay this side seam right down flat on my board and I am going to press it flat, like this. That makes it easy to sew. Then I am going to take my marker and again I am going to just make little marks. This is a water soluble marker, marks comes out with water. Mark where my pins are. Then I am going to remove these pins. Again, it's nice and flat and I am going to put them in going horizontally down the line where my new seam is going to be and this is the new seam. We are going to start up at the top, take it in here and end up basically pin those close to the bottom probably as we can get.

Alright, again I am going to put it in the machine. A little ways up from my last mark because I am going to blend the seams really like connecting the dots. You want to make sure that your fabric underneath where you are sewing so you don't catch anything in there and again up here at the top, I am going to blend the new seam end with the old one. Take it out. We are going to clip the threads. Remove the pins. Now we have stitched that seam right along the marker and the only thing that needs to be done is to remove these marks with a wet Q-tip is what I used and then press the seam flat and then you have taken in the size of a blouse and the next thing I am going to show you is take in the center back seam on a pair of pants.