Japanese Craft Books: Sizing and Supplies

This is the second installment of my, how to sew from Japanese craft books, series. In part one I talked about how I find projects to make and where to buy books. This post will be about sizing and supplies.

If you don't want to read through to see how I do things, here are some Japanese to English translations of sewing terms to get you started.

バスト : bust

ウエスト : waist

ヒップ : hip

材料 : materials

布 : fabric

幅 : width

接着芯 : interfacing

ゴムテープ : elastic

ボタン : button

木綿 : cotton

麻 : linen

ファスナー : zipper

バイアス布 : bias fabric

糸 : thread

カギホック : hook and eye

I hope you can see the Japanese characters. If not, here is a picture.

Ok, for the rest of you, here we go, let's start.

When I sew from a Japanese craft book, I use a lot of guesswork. Looking at the pictures I can usually figure out what I need. If that doesn't work I frequently make a guess about the word, type it into Google's translator, then verify if the Japanese characters match. Or I look at other people's translations. I've used My Little Mochi's pdf, Japanese pattern help, or batty chan's, understanding patterns in Gosurori. New to me, is Jennifer at moving hands, Japanese sewing and pattern terms.

It may be a little slow going to figure it all out but it's nice to have everything in place when you're sewing. That's something I'm usually terrible about. I frequently start with just the fabric. I get as far as I can go and then find myself stalled because I don't have something on hand. But I want to teach you the smart way instead of the Korallin running around like a chicken without a head way. But of course there's no rule that says, you can't do it the headless chicken way. :)

Sizing
The first thing you need to figure out is sizing. There should be a chart somewhere either in the book or on the pattern paper. It looks something like this:



It's laid out like a regular size chart and the measurements are in centimeters. If you want to know what that is in inches and you keep misplacing your measuring tape, like I do, then you can go to Google for unit conversions. All you have to do is type 'number' cm in inches in the search bar and it converts it to inches for you. For example if I put in "78 cm in inches" I get the result "30.7086614 inches". Go ahead, give it a try. I even use this to do math calculations. IT'S FREAKING AWESOME. No opening a calculator tool or tedious figuring out in my head.

Ok, back to the chart. It has sizes 7, 9, 11, and 13. Looking at size 7, for example, these are the measurements:

バスト : bust 78cm

ウエスト : waist 59cm

ヒップ hip 86cm

I haven't quite figured out what that last line means but it's 160 all across. It doesn't change between the sizes so I'm not too worried. Anyone out there happen to know what those characters mean? Should I be worried? :-D *EDITED - The 160 is for height. Thank you everyone for your comments! *

Now with this information you can figure out what size to make and you're WAY ahead of where I was when I started sewing Japanese clothes. If I had known to look at the size chart I would have realized that mostly everything I sewed for my daughter would be too big and things for me, too small.

Now what if you're like me and outside the range of these sizes? Well, I've just figured this out recently. You can resize the pattern. This page, on Sense and Sensibility, is where I learned how.

Supplies

Now it's time to make sure you have the necessary materials for your project.

Let's look at the first page of directions for the wrap dress as an example. Here are the characters you want to look for to find the supplies list. They are usually located at the top of a direction page. These characters literally translate to "materials".
材料

Now there are four lines after that, so I know I need four items.

So at the top of the list, using that guesswork, verify method, I see I need fabric. And the "m" for "meters" is a dead give away. The character "cloth" is what you want to look for:
布

I need 3.5m of 110cm wide fabric. "Width" in Japanese is:
幅

And crap, using Google to convert that to yards I see right away, I don't have enough fabric. I'm short about 10 inches. Ok must use different fabric...

Next on my list is interfacing:
接着芯
Looking at the pictures I figured I would need interfacing because there are some pieces that are shaded differently. But I had to search and search to verify this definition because these characters translate to bonding wire.

Then we have elastic:
ゴムテープ
If you look there are 4 different numbers at 80cm, 85cm, 90cm, and 95cm. They correspond to the different sizes: 7, 9, 11, and 13.

And looking at the pictures I know I need buttons:
ボタン
four of them, sized 1.3cm.

See what I mean about guesswork. :) Ok let me stop here. I think I'm getting into information overload area again. You can scroll back up to the top to look at some of the translations and check out the links.

The next installment will be on how I trace out the patterns.