I was doing some custom flare darts tonight on some tricky fabrics that was slippery and smudged chalk well, when I got fed up with the methods I was taught. So what did I do? I thought about how I could do it in a better way and here was what I came up with. I’m not saying this is new or unique. I just haven’t seen it or taught it, and I came up with it all on my own. Works like a charm, I’m happy to report! Why didn’t anybody ever teach or told me about this??? This is the way it SHOULD be done, not to sound arrogant or anything! It is just that much better!

What I’ve been taught to transfer darts mostly involved transfer paper that is chalky on one side. You put that side down on the fabric, your pattern on top lined up with the fabric piece, and run a pointy wheel thingy over the dart lines. The chalk gets pressed to the fabric where your wheel runs and when you lift everything off your fabric, your dart line remains. You shred up your pattern a bit. You have a mess on your hands with the chalk paper, as well as in whatever you stored it in. And you hope it all transferred well. Straight line darts work reasonably well. Curvy flare darts, or anything else you have to trace with curves in it, probably only sufficient.

It didn’t take me long to toss that method out. Too messy and inefficient. I’ve recently been cutting out the darts like a hole, leaving a bit left on the edge of the pattern so as not to lose the shape of the pattern. Think of a dart to the edge and basically cutting it out, then putting back a strip so your pattern edge is maintained all the way around without breaks. Same result, except I use an X-acto knife to cut the dart to the buffer strip, then across, so I have a hole in the pattern. Then I draw it in with chalk along the edge of the hole. I imagine” or continue the dart line to the edge on the fabric after I lift the pattern off the fabric. Not hard, but curvy darts and such were still a bit of a pain.

That was when I came up with the idea of going the other way. Tonight, I traced the dart on a piece of tracing paper so I had it like a little triangle in my hand. With the edge of the pattern where darts are found often having a point and two sides from that point, it’s easy to line up with my dart piece on the fabric to where it should be. Then I just trace the beautiful little thang and voilà! J’ai mon dart!!!

If the dart is on the inside of the pattern away from the edges, you can cut away a hole where the dart is, or you can use this method with a different way to line up the darts. Trace the dart as before. Put the pattern on the fabric to line things up. Put pins from the under side through the corners of the dart. Pin around it first if you need to keep the pattern from slipping like on big pieces or slippery pieces. With the pins sticking through, lift the pattern off the pins. Line up your traced dart corners to where the pins are. Can you get more precise than that? Pin the dart piece down, remove the other pins. Trace your dart and remove it all.

Darts have never been so easy!!!

I save tracing paper. I save a mess. I save damaging my pattern. I do it faster. I do it with the greatest of ease and just as good precision! Are those are enough reason to justify I’ve got a better way without sounding arrogant to centuries old tried and true methods???

To be honest, given the simplicity of this technique, I’ve got to say I’m disappointed that if this method were known, it’s not more widely taught. I mean, c’mon man!!! 🙂