I sew because ready-to-wear trousers never fit my waist to hip difference. My last pair took three toiles and a good chunk of money in fabric before the real ones existed, and I could have paid a tailor twice over for that. Does the maths ever work out, or is cheaper simply the wrong reason to be doing this?
I do both - I buy trousers that fit my hips and pay for a waist alteration, and I sew the ones I want in specific fabrics. The alteration route is genuinely cheaper and faster for basics. Sewing wins when what I want does not exist to buy: unusual fabric, pockets that fit a phone, a length that suits me. Cost is not the axis where sewing wins.
I will say the unpopular thing: it is not cheaper, it will not be cheaper, and telling yourself it is cheaper leads you to buy fabric you do not like because it was reduced. Every garment I regret was a fabric decision made on price. Once I accepted the money was going anyway, I started buying two metres of something good instead of four metres of something adequate, and my hit rate went up enormously.
The reduced-fabric trap is real and it also wastes the expensive input, which is your evenings. Twenty hours on cheap poly is a worse deal than twenty hours on good wool.
Where my money went wrong was toiling in whatever cheap cotton was on the shelf when the real fabric was a drapey twill. The toile fitted, the trousers did not, and that was a fourth toile I should not have needed. Match the weight and the stretch of the toile fabric to the real thing or the toile is telling you about a garment you are not making.
Count hours at any rate you like and it is never cheaper. Count fit and it is not close.
@muslin_mira · 4mo ago · 2 replies
The maths works out on the second pair, not the first. I spent an absurd amount of time and calico getting one trouser block to fit, and since then every pair has cost me fabric, a zip and about six hours, because the fitting is already solved and I do not toile any more unless the fabric behaves very differently. Pair one was terrible value. Pairs two through nine were excellent value. If you stop after pair one, sewing is a hobby you paid for, which is fine, but do not judge it there.
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@milkcratepress · 4mo ago
This is the whole answer. The fitting work is a fixed cost you pay once per body and per style, not a cost per garment, and almost everyone accounts for it wrongly.
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