Not that it would be near as much fun but my hobby business has been making hang-gliding harnesses for years so I know my way around a sewing machine.

Just like programming the key is the algorithm, or in other words there is generally an easy way and a hard way to do it.

Consider sewing the sleeves on a shirt. You can do it two ways:

• The hard way - by making the vest part and the sleeve tubes and then trying to get the two to mate. In this scenario you are trying to get an exact fit for your sleeve tubes in your vest holes. A few mm off and you either have too much or too little fabric in your sleeve tube
• The easy way. Sew the sleeve to the unjoined body then run a stitch along the sleeve and down the vest in one pass as shown:

--------------------------------------------------
                    \\     //
---sev-sew-sew--+    ==   ==    +---sev-sew-sew---
                |               |
                s       o       s
                e       o       e
                w       o       w
                |       o       |
                s       o       s
                e       o       e
                w               w
[download]

Sometimes you do have to fit a tube into a hole or similar. To do so you would mark 4 quadrant points onto your two pieces to see how you are going. The way you fudge is to cut corners as it were - a little wide gives you extra length on on curve, the inside line is shorter.

An important point to remeber. Depending on the fabric and stitch tension you will get a real shrinkage along the stitch lines. This can be up to 5% so if it end up just to small to fit don't say you were not warned!

cheers

tachyon

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