If you sew, you have a tremendous gift that can greatly benefit the wheelchair user in your life. If you want to learn to sew, come on aboard! You’ll be glad you did.
Sewing gives you the opportunity to…
· custom-create fashionable clothing that fits just right. You can incorporate details that make sitting or stretching more comfortable, dressing easier, and managing openings simpler. You can add special details that give secret access to stomas or give tons of extra pocket access for electronic devices …you name it!
· have creative license over colors, fabrics, and details. It’s fun to design clothing that reflects the wearer’s personality!
· save a dollar or two. Sewing is not the inexpensive hobby it once was, but garments you create yourself are often considerably less costly than those sewn for the small adaptive market.
With that in mind, may I present two fabulous online resources with you in mind!
The first is Fashion Freaks, with free sew-it-yourself clothing patterns for wheelchair users. This is the go-to site for developing your own customized wheelchair-friendly patterns based on basic patterns you can download from the site. While it is designed for adult women’s (XS to XXL) and men’s (S to XXL) clothing, it isn’t too difficult to scale the sizing down for children. Fashion Freaks provides the pattern pieces and complete instructions for sewing jackets (several styles), pants, and a skirt. All are designed with a seated wearer in mind. There are some helpful tips for making clothing fit and function better. You’ll also find a great section for sewing inspiration.
The second is a fact sheet full of terrific tips brought to you from the Disabled Living Foundation in London. It provides ideas for purchasing ready-to-wear garments with a wheelchair user in mind, as well as ideas for adapting commercial clothing. There are also some tips for adapting commercial sewing patterns to make them work more successfully for people who spend their days sitting.
If you know of other sites that offer tips for sewing clothing for wheelchair users, would you please share them? It would be great to share a nice little collection for people who want to sew for their family members who use wheelchairs. Thanks!
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The AbleData site isn't specific to home sewing, but lists a great number of ready-made adaptive clothing sites you might be able to use for inspiration. Scroll down the the "clothing" section to find the categories that would be useful to you. There are some really creative designers out there!
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The AbleData site isn't specific to home sewing, but lists a great number of ready-made adaptive clothing sites you might be able to use for inspiration. Scroll down the the "clothing" section to find the categories that would be useful to you. There are some really creative designers out there!
9 comments:
Manish,
I am so glad your search lead you here. You are always welcome back!
I looked at your site and there are some very interesting and creative wheelchairs you have! I'm sure there are some wheelchair users here in the United States who would love your motorcycle options!
I am not having any luck finding an adaptive pants pattern that is open backed for my bedridden Mother. Can anyone help.
Thankyou
Anonymous, thanks for stopping by. I hope you get some good suggestions to help with your mother's needs.
This place sells ready-made garments, but by studying their diagram and excellent video, you might be able to apply the adaptation to a pants pattern or even to commercial pants. The site is Silverts.com and the specific back-opening pant is here: http://www.silverts.com/show.cfm/product/23220-womens-adaptive-pants-open-back-disabled-adults. They have a link on this page to a helpful video showing how to dress a person in these pants--clever! These look perfect for someone who is bed- or wheelchair-bound.
Does anyone else have a good resource to share?
Hmm it appears like your blog ate my first comment (it was super long) so I guess
I'll just sum it up what I wrote and say, I'm thoroughly
enjoying your blog. I too am an aspiring blog writer
but I'm still new to the whole thing. Do you have any recommendations for inexperienced blog writers? I'd really appreciate it.
my website: women's swim skirt
Thanks for your kind words, Anonymous! I'm sorry posting the comment didn't go smoothly; it's so frustrating when that happens!
I still feel like a pretty inexperienced blogger myself. The best thing I've done is to follow some of the blogging advice sites (Problogger, For Bloggers by Bloggers, Jeff Goins, Copyblogger). If you're going to do a blog heavy with pictures, such as tutorials and such, I suggest looking at your favorite picture-heavy blogs and see what platform they use. I must admit that Blogger can be persnickety with posts requiring much formatting. In fact, most of the time I compose in Word and copy/paste to get around the difficulties formatting text.
I hope those are helpful sugesstions!
Hello-
I'm an author who writes fiction that centers around characters who have disabilities with the intention of raising disability awareness. As a result, I come across lots of information in the research I conduct to write realistic and positive pieces. That being said I have a blog http://www.no-snickers.blogspot.com/ . It is a resource directory for people with disabilities and I didn't know if any of your followers would benefit from its content.
When I built my blog, I included a category for Adaptive Apparel, and I listed your blog in that category. I hope you don't mind.
Bests,
D. A. Charles
Your site is generous, lovely and practical! I would like to add a link to it on a website called suitsonwheels.biz. I haven't finished looking at all the helpful advice yet, but I'm really liking the idea of a person carrying around individualized pattern pieces already cut to fit their own personal needs. :) If you have a page for "Other Resources", I'd really appreciate it if you would consider adding this site to it.
There is an organization called SewMuchComfort.org that sews adaptive clothing for wounded American veterans.
They may have patterns available.
Thanks for sharing!
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