How to resize a tie

One of my favorite activity as a family is thrifting.  We all go and look around for as long as our little guy lets us.  He usually gets pretty restless after a few minutes so we only manage to look at the essentials, one of which is ties and belts.  The ties are always hit or miss because the designs are outdated (not in a good way) or it's a nice design but its always super wide.  What's crazy is that after all of this time, I never once thought to resize the nice ties.  Why not right? They are only a buck and change most times.  So I did and I (and my lovely) are quite happy with the results.

I put together a sort of tutorial for you if you are interested in also trying this out. 



I hope its pretty easy to follow.  I would recommend trying a practice tie at first.  Especially if you know you will be working with silk.   You want to make sure that your machine will be kind and not pull single threads out of place on the silk design.  If you find that it does you will probably need to get a needle for silk, or just hand sew when you need to sew.  It's actually not a lot.

I didn't take very good pictures of the first tie, so the tutorial switches to the second tie for pictures.  If you are trying this, please feel free to send me a message if something is not clear.  I will happy to provide additional instruction. 

The first tie took, I am not sure how long because I added extra steps for myself while resizing.  I don't know how but on the second tie I was able to get it done in a little over an hour with a more streamlined method. 





This is where the sewing comes into play.  It's actually not much and since you don't sew exactly on the crease the stitches are not visible.  If you have to hand sew, it's no biggie. 
The picture on the left is the me sewing the lining to the tie.
The picture on the right is to show what my sewing looked like.  The sewing did not intersect.  Notice the brown stitches.





Also, make sure not to forget to sew the little tag back in to the lining and tie.  You will just nestle that right back in before sewing the lining back to the tie.  I double checked my placement because I didn't want to have to open it up again once I just finished it.  I wanted to sew the silk as little as possible so make sure that there was no option for the threads being pulled out of place, which would ruin the whole design.

This last part is the easiest and most tedious part, in my opinion.  You just have to catch the inner layer of fabric while making sure the tie is taught around the inner structural piece.  You know that one you traced on in the first picture.  If the tie is not pulled taught around that structural piece the tie will not be creased properly.  I learned this on my first attempt.

That is all!  Now you have a nice thin non 90's tie! 

Also, if you couldn't really be bother to go through this or don't have an hour per tie.  Send them to me! I can even do a thinner tie! I can do $5 per tie or a multiple item discount.  Please email me at n.andujarfrancis@gmail.com for questions and details.  Make sure to write "Tie Resizing" in the subject and mark as important. 
Cheers!