Letting out the waist

Clients ask me to do a lot of size adjustments on pants, skirts, dresses, etc. Sometimes I have to let them know it is not possible because of the physical limitations. 

Taking in a waste (or making the waist smaller) is so much easier than letting out. 

Letting out the waist or other areas requires that I have enough materials to move the seams. Let me show you. 

This is a black dress flipped inside out:

The seam allowance is shown with the red arrows below, and that length of the red arrow is about 1.2 cm. 

This dress has three seams (two side seams and one back seam). At each seam, I can take out 1.2 cm x 2 = 2.4 cm. Then, there's three seams, 2.4 cm x 3 seams = 7.2 cm. This means, I can make the circumference larger by 7.2 cm in total. 

This below is the inside of a pair of khaki pants. 

The red bit of line indicates the room I have to play with, and it's about 0.2 cm in length. The math: 0.2 cm x 2 x 3 seams = 1.2 cm. That is not very much addition. 

I suppose one can always try to add contrasting fabrics in the side seams and back seam to add more length for the circumference, but it would look odd in my opinion. 

So, when you wonder if you can something larger, look inside of the garment and check if there's a lot of fabric like with the black dress above. 

Unfortunately, lots of ready-made garments are made like the khaki pants. This means there is not much room to play around in when you want to let out a waist, etc. This is too bad because we as humans do fluctuate in shapes and we may want to keep on wearing the same clothes. 

The black dress is a well made dress that was manufactured in Japan. There was no shortcut in the construction of this dress. The hem was sewn by hand, and the lining was fastened with this hand sewn stay. I rarely see a well-constructed garment like this these days.