How to remove pintucks from a pattern

We LOVE pintucks at M4M! We have several patterns that include pintucks in girls, women and even boys; Lauren, Harper, Charlie and Mama Lauren. However what if you don’t have time to do pintucks? The fabric you LOVE really won’t go well with pintucks?? Or you just don’t love them like we do 😉 This blog will show you how to easily remove the pintucks from the pattern before cutting out. I’ll be using the Charlie Button Up for this example, but you can use the same method on any pattern.

First look at your pattern piece and see how many pintucks are on your piece. There are 3 on my front shirt. Next look at your tutorial and see what size pintucks you would normally create. The pintucks in Charlie are 1/4″.

Now you need remove the pintucks from the piece. How? There are a couple different ways. First you can fold each tuck out. So fold along the pintuck line (just like you would with your fabric in the tutorial).

Then fold 1/4″ again to replicate the pintuck. Repeat on each tuck.

Instead of folding each tuck out… because let’s be honest that can be time consuming and hard to be accurate the smaller the pintucks are, you can fold the entire pintuck amount out of one spot. Stay with me 😉 Multiply your pintuck size by two (to account for sewing on the fold). 1/4″ times two is 1/2″. Now multiply that by how many pintucks are on your pattern. I have 3 pintucks on Charlie; three times 1/2″ is 1.5″. We need to remove a total of 1.5″ from the pattern.

Simply fold out 1.5″ from your pattern before you cut. Now you will need to true up the neck when you fold out this way. As you can see on the pattern the pintucks are placed in and the neckline will be smooth once they are sewn in (it looks bumpy along the neckline), so you will need to cut the neckline smooth. Note I slid my pattern piece down to take that picture.