September 11, 2026 You can mend your clothes and make them fit!

Radical Sewing is a guide for learning how to make and alter clothes that fit and feel good. Kate Weiss introduces you to the basics and best practices of garment sewing for yourself at home, as well as advice and info on things you wouldn’t even know to ask about sewing. Topics include hand sewing, picking out a sewing machine, adding pockets to anything, sewing a button so it stays on, altering your clothes to fit your unique body, upcycling, darning and mending, and so much more!

If you’ve had a change in your body size, need clothes to suit wheelchair life, or are changing your gender expression, you don’t have to buy a whole new wardrobe! Regardless of your sewing experience, gender, or body type, this illustrated guide will empower you to alter your clothes your own as well as making new clothes from scratch. With loads of encouragement to try things out, all you’ll need to do is experiment and break the rules to create the clothes and outfits that you’re excited to wear every day. 

Projects included:

• Modify trousers to fit your body
• Clone a t-shirt
• Make a circle skirt
• Darn a hole in knitted fabric
• Make a scrunchie

…and more!

Begin your DIY closet journey with the following excerpt from the updated new edition of Kate Weiss‘s Radical Sewing: Make, Alter, and Mend Clothes to Fit Any Body, available NOW from our site or landing on a shelf near you November 3rd.

Introduction

When I was in my early 20s, my aunt passed away after a difficult illness. After her death, I inherited her old sewing machine. The heavy taupe beast was difficult to get from Minnesota to Kentucky, where I now live, but it made it home in one piece. This sewing machine was the first I ever owned myself. It was the machine that taught me to sew and allowed me to produce the first clothes I ever made and wore. I nicknamed her the Rocketeer for her space-age lines and slanting body. The old girl is solid and confident. She still has a reliable and steady disposition—a workhorse after more than fifty years of sewing seams and making clothes. My particular model was produced between 1960 and 1962—this was back when most sewing machines were made entirely from metal, domestically, and built to last beyond the lifetime of their owner with proper care and the occasional drop of oil.

When I inherited the Rocketeer, I had only sewn two things in a middle school home economics class: a small, lopsided patchwork quilt and a single pair of horrendous boxer shorts. The boxers were awful, they didn’t fit, and I wore them only once—to school over a pair of pajama pants. The thing I remember most vividly about those first sewing lessons wasn’t my experience learning to sew. It was my classmate sewing right through her finger. She was sewing along and just didn’t stop. The needle went through her fingernail and broke off in her index finger. She screamed. She bled. And was rushed to the nurses’ offices. Someone might have fainted. It was not an auspicious introduction to the world of sewing.

If you’re one of those folks who can dive right into a new thing with confidence or you’ve been sewing for years and can’t remember a time when you didn’t sew in your spare time, you can probably go ahead and skip the rest of this introduction. But if you’re like most of the people in my sewing classes, or that I talk to about sewing who have always kind of wanted to learn to sew but are intimidated, this note is for you.

It can be intimidating to begin practicing a new craft. Insecurities come up, frustrations bubble up, that little devil perfectionism gets in the way (for some of us more than others). First projects that go terribly wrong because of a horrible AI sewing pattern or a cheaply built, half-working sewing machine can turn people off sewing forever. Or maybe you never found the time or had the resources to try. Or perhaps you haven’t known where to look for a design that really speaks to the style and type of clothing you want to wear.

But when someone notices lovingly homemade clothes, it can spark something inside them. I watch the thoughts turning in their mind when they say they really like my purse or jacket and I let them know I made it myself. They have never tried, they tell me. It seems too scary, like visiting a different country and not speaking the language. It’s just not a place they can go, they say. Here’s the thing though. Sewing is for everyone. Sewing is a superpower, and I want everyone to know it and get to experience what it feels like to wear a pair of pants you made yourself. It is magical. It will make you stand or sit taller—I swear it.

It can feel like some people are born with the ability to create clothes from flat pieces of fabric. Maybe it’s Grandma, Mom, Dad, or a friend. It may seem that they have an intuitive understanding of shape and
grading (we’ll get into all the sewing lingo soon) and how to go from point A, a tube of knit fabric, to point B, a cute T-shirt. But that’s not how craft works. A to B is not a single ruler-straight line and it never will be. There are hundreds of steps and missteps, zigs and zags in between. Some projects will go great and others won’t go well at all even after you’ve been sewing for years.

Sewing, like all craft, is a practice one where perfection is a nice thing to aim for but wholly unnecessary and usually unachievable. And that’s fine; it’s OK. Most of us aren’t the women from Playtex in charge of sewing spacesuits that would go to the moon, working under a 1/64” (.39 mm) margin of error and without the ability to rip out the seams and start again if they messed up. (True story.)

When it comes to clothes, imperfect garments will still do their job: covering and protecting our bodies. while also projecting an identity. Clothes can fit well, keep the rain off your back, and keep all your private bits covered even if they have slightly wonky seams or mismatched plaids. We all must begin a practice from a place of unknowing. There is no passport or paperwork or permission required to begin to sew. Like with grammar and learning a language, knowing the rules can be helpful, but that’s also not the only way to learn.

You can physically take apart a pair of pants seam by seam to see how all the pieces fit together. You can make one sleeve short and one sleeve long because that works best for you. You can sew an entire dress by hand for the meditative quality of handwork. You can make a regency petticoat or a loud and proud bedazzled outfit for your drag show. You can embroider your back pockets with political messages. You can hem one pant leg shorter than the other because you ride your bike every day and are tired of rolling it up. Or use Velcro or magnets instead of buttons because different closures work better for you and your body.

Don’t be intimidated. Sewing has the potential to bring so much joy into your life. Sewing puts you in control of the garments and fabric that cover your body every day. You make the choices for yourself, not someone in a big corporate office that is beholden to shareholders and corporate bosses. You can make things in a way that doesn’t make sense for big companies, in ways they would never dream of making clothing, one piece at a time for one person in particular—you.

At its heart, this book is about trying things out, learning, experimenting, goofing up, and making things work for your body. It’s a book about our clothes, ourselves, our unique and infinitely varied bodies and how we want and need to dress those bodies every day. This book isn’t chock full of patterns and that’s by design. I don’t know the kind of clothes you have or what you want to make and wear, but I do know a few of the tools and skills you’ll need to make whatever it is that you want.

By making your own clothes you are saying you want your clothes to actually fit your specific body. That your body is right and the starting point of design and that clothes should fit it, no matter your shape and size. Clothing touches our skin and our lives every single day. Making clothing at home is no small act of defiance to the established order of things. You are declaring that you want to know who made your\ clothes and under what conditions. That you will be responsible for the waste you create and the fiber you use.

Making and modifying your own clothes will change the way you relate to your wardrobe; it will change the way you see style and fashion and allow you to see your own body with fresh, more objective, and even grateful eyes. And who among us couldn’t use a little bit of that?

Join the sartorial revolution with the updated new edition of Kate Weiss‘s Radical Sewing: Make, Alter, and Mend Clothes to Fit Any Body, available NOW from our site or landing on a shelf near you November 3rd.