Making slopers (or sewing with cats)

From the wonderful world of Youtube, I learned the value of making slopers. I happen to have starting points. I made a bodice sloper a few weeks ago and this week-end, I cleaned up my skirt sloper. Without knowing that that's what I was doing, I actually used my skirt sloper to resize a plaid skirt over the winter (oops, never made a blog post and I see that I lost all the pictures detailing the process). It was the blue plaid skirt from a thrift store overhaul last year. Being a lined, wrap skirt, it was quite a challenge. 

A sloper (or block) is a pattern for a basic, fitted, part of a garment that is designed to fit you as perfectly as you can get it. Then instead of following a standard size pattern and modifying its fit as an after thought, you take the sloper pattern and modify it to look like the pattern piece. That's the theory anyway, but it seems like a good one. The following video discusses this better than I can. And on her channel, there are instructional videos. 

I won't share pictures of my slopers, they are boring. What is less boring is pictures of how the process went for my skirt sloper. I used an old bed sheet to make the shell and check the fit. One tip: use exclusively basting stitches when doing this, and resist the urge to lock stitch anything. If you have the heart, lock out the kittens. I don't have the heart.