What is Pattern Making?

Pattern making is the process of creating a blueprint of your garment. A pattern is used as a
template to cut out fabric that matches the required specifications to sew a garment. It factors
in the type of fabric, the intended fit on the wearer, and any trims that will be used. The
pattern is used to make 2D fabric sit properly on a 3D body.

Tools required for pattern making?

The most common methods of pattern making are draping and flat pattern. Each
method requires slightly different tools to get the job done.

Draping is done by manually manipulating the fabric on a dress form so that it looks
the way you want.
To get started, you’ll need a dress form, fabric (this can be your actual fabric or a less
expensive fabric with similar weight and drape qualities), pins, pattern paper, a
French curve, and a straight ruler.
The fabric is wrapped around the form until it looks the way that you want and then
marked while still on the form. The fabric is then removed and spread flat. Lines are
cleaned up using a French curve and ruler. The patterns are then transferred from the
fabric onto pattern paper. You would then add seam allowance, notches or other
necessary markings, and true your patterns. We’ll discuss what all of those things
mean later on.  

While draping is a lot of fun, and can occasionally be necessary for very complex
folds, it is not as efficient, nor as exact, as flat pattern.

Flat pattern is, as the name implies, done on the flat. Manual flat pattern making is
done using pattern paper, a French curve, a straight ruler, and a pencil. Digital flat
pattern making is done using CAD software. The drafting methods followed for
creating flat patterns are the same, whether you’re doing it digitally on manually.

Using your body measurements, the necessary ease amount, and common body
angles, you build your flat pattern.

How to Create a Flat Pattern?

Learn what a flat pattern is and how to create one.

Steph ThielTechpacker Blog

How do you determine your body measurements?
Using the correct body measurements is integral to creating a well-fitting garment.
But how do you find the right body measurements? This depends on who you’re
creating for!
If you’re creating a custom garment for yourself or someone else, you want to take
actual body measurements of the end wearer and use those to create your pattern.
Typically, you would use a measurement sheet like this one to record all of the
needed measurements.
But what if you’re making garments for mass market? You need a more general body
measurement. There are several ways you can find proper body data to create the
patterns you need. ASTM body data can be purchased through several different
companies and is an amalgamation of hundreds of thousands of body scans. You can
also work with third party body data consultants, such as Alvanon and Human
Solutions, which will help you tailor your body data to your specific target market.

What are Body Measurements and How Do You Figure Them Out?
Learn all about body measurements, how to take them and how they relate to building
patterns and creating grading.

Steph ThielTechpacker Blog

What is basic pattern?
A basic pattern, also called a block pattern, maps directly back to the body
measurements and only has wearing ease. Basic patterns are really important for
creating fit consistency within a brand. Having consistency in fit means your
customer can confidently buy their size each time they purchase a product from you
and know that it will fit. The best way to create this confidence is to use a basic
pattern library as a starting point for all of your style patterns.

A solid basic pattern library will provide you with patterns that only have the
necessary seams required for fit and the necessary amount of wearing ease required
for the type of fabrics they are intended for. Design ease, additional design lines, and
other design features can be added later on at a style level.

What is Garment Ease and why is it important?

Now that you have your body measurements, you need to determine your garment
ease. Garment ease is the amount of difference between the body measurements
and the garment measurements. The garment ease will determine how the garment
fits in relation to the body. A loose garment will have more ease than a fitted
garment. Some garments, like athletic leggings, will have what’s called negative ease;
this means that the garment measurements are smaller than the body
measurements. Negative ease can only be done with stretch fabrics.
The garment ease is made up of two parts – wearing ease and design ease. Wearing
ease is the amount of ease necessary to move in the garment. For example, a woven
garment typically requires 3-4” of wearing ease at the bustline to appear and feel
fitted on the body, while a cotton knit, may only require 1” of ease and a
cotton/elastane blend knit can use negative ease at the bustline. Design ease is any
additional ease on top of the necessary wearing ease to achieve the desired design.
For example, if you want a loose woven garment, you would add additional ease on
top of the needed wearing ease.
How do you determine your garment specs?
Once you have your body measurements and your design, you can start to
determine your garment measurements, or specs. Some of these measurements will
come directly from your body data, while you’ll add the garment ease amount to
others.

We will discuss how to come up with the garment measurements for this bell sleeve
top.
We can see by the sketch, that it’s a looser fitting garment, which means it will have a
fair amount of ease, especially at the sleeve openings where it bells out. When you’re
working on a top, the key measurements for how a garment fit are the chest, waist,
hem, across shoulder, and how closely the armhole fits to the underarm.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use a woven fabric for our garment. Woven
fabrics require more ease than knits due to their lack of stretch. For a loose-fitting
woven garment, we need 6-8” of ease at the bust. Our base size body has a chest
measurement of 34”, so let’s use a 40” full chest width, or 20” half chest.

We would then go through all of the needed points of measure (POM) to create our
full garment specs.
One thing to keep in mind when creating your specs is the tolerance needed in
production. Tolerance is the amount over or under (often expressed as +/-) the spec
that is acceptable for a garment to pass quality control.

There are several things in the sewing and construction process that can cause a
small variance in the final garment measurements, so this needs to be considered in
the specs. Typically, the larger body measurements like chest or hip have a tolerance
of +/- ½” while the smaller areas like a sleeve width or neck drop will have much
smaller tolerance amounts.

One thing to watch for in determining your tolerance amounts is to make them large
enough to account for necessary variation in production, but small enough that you
won’t get any overlap between sizes. For example, if your size S has an 18” half chest
and your size M has a 19.5” half chest, you wouldn’t want a 1” tolerance because that
means that in production you could have a size S with a 19” half chest and a size M
with an 18.5” half chest. This causes confusion and inconsistency for your consumer.
By limiting the tolerance to +/- ½” you ensure that your largest S is 18.5” and your
smallest M is 19” ensuring there is no crossover.

How to draft a flat pattern

There are a couple of different ways to draft your flat pattern – drafting the basic
pattern is done entirely from measurements, while drafting a style pattern often
comes from taking your existing basic pattern and manipulating it to match your
garment specs and design.

Let’s start with the basic top pattern!

Using either your pattern paper and straight ruler, or your CAD program, create a
rectangle which matches the total length of your top from center back (CB) neck to
waist. This measurement should be taken directly from your body data. The width of
the rectangle should be equal to ¼ of the total garment chest width. You will use this
rectangle as a starting place to draft your bodice pieces. Learn the full basic pattern
building process here.
A basic top pattern on CAD
Once you have your basic patterns, you can create and endless amount of style
patterns. For our example, we’ll reference the same bell sleeve top that we looked at
earlier. If our basic pattern has a chest width of 37” and we want the full chest width
to be 40” then we know we need to add 3” to our basic pattern. When we’re using a
front or back bodice piece which is on the fold, we’re dealing with ¼ of the total
body width measurement, so that means we need to add ¾” to the chest.

We’ll start by drawing a line straight over ¾” from the underarm point.
Because another big factor in how loose a garment feels is the fit around the
armhole, we will also want to drop the underarm point a bit to create a wider
armhole and therefore be able to accommodate a wider sleeve. We will draw another
line ½” down from the line we just drew.
We can see in the sketch of our garment that the top of armhole appears to be
sitting right at the shoulder point of the body, so we will keep the shoulder the same
as our basic pattern. Now it’s a matter of playing connect the dots for our new front
armhole. We want to keep the upper 1/3-1/2 of our armscye curve the same as the
basic pattern and then change the shape of the lower portion to meet the new
underarm point we created. If you are doing your pattern manually, you’ll use your
French curve to create a smooth line.
You’ll repeat this to add additional width to your waist and hem, based on your
garment measurements, to create your new side seam.
You’ll follow similar methods to make any additional adjustments, such as neckline
shape and depth, body length, etc. Until all of your basic pattern pieces have been
adjusted to match your garment specs and design sketch. Any unnecessary lines, like
your old underarm or old side seam, can be deleted from the style pattern.

Creating a production ready pattern

Production readiness checklist:

 □ Trueing your pattern

 □ Adding notches, marks and drill holes
 □ Grainline
 □ Adding seam allowance
 □ Creating a marker
Trueing your pattern
The first step to finalizing your pattern is called trueing your pattern. This means
making sure that the seamlines on each piece match the length of the seamlines on
the piece they will be sewn to and that there are no strange angles at the top of
bottom of the seams. For most portions of the garment, you’ll want these seam
lengths to match exactly, but we’ll go over the exceptions to this later.

You will do what is called “walking” the pieces together to determine that the lengths
match and that you aren’t getting any odd angles. You’ll start with two pieces
aligned at one end of a seam – here you’ll see the side seams aligned at the bottom.

We can see that the pieces will sew together nicely at the bottom, without any steps
or sharp angles. Now we will walk the remainder of the seamline together, ending at
the top.
If we zoom in, we can see that the side seams aren’t quite the same length and that
the curve shapes aren’t matching nicely.
We will make a small pattern adjustment to correct this and make sure our pattern is
nice and trued.
Walk each seam of the garment to ensure that all of your seams are trued and
everything will go together nicely.

Exceptions to the rule:

As with any good rule, there are always some exceptions. If you have pleats or darts
on your garment, the edge of the pattern piece with the darts/pleats will be longer
than the one without. You want to close the darts/pleats as they would be once
sewn, and then walk the pieces to ensure that the seams are trued.

Another exception is the shoulder cap on sleeves. Typically, a shoulder cap is slightly
longer than the armscye you are sewing it to in order to ensure proper mobility and
shoulder rotation for the wearer. This means that the shoulder cap will need to be
eased into place while sewing.

Things like gathers, very curved design lines, etc. may also have a difference in the
pattern edge lengths as part of the nature of the design.

Adding notches, marks, and drill holes

Notches, marks, and drill holes are used during the sample making and
manufacturing process to show several different things. Notches are cut into the
fabric and used to line up specific portions of your seam lines or indicate where two
things should be matched.

In the image below, you can see that there are notches used to show where the top
of a side seam vent might be placed, as well as a single notch on the front armscye
and front sleeve and a double notch on the back armscye and back sleeve. These are
all there to help during the sewing process.
Notches are also used to align things like rib collars, which are cut smaller than the
neckline they sew to, so that the garment can be stitched evenly. You can see here
that the collar length is only about 85% of the length of the neckline. The notch
indicated where to align the shoulder seam so that the collar is stretched the same
amount and front and back.
Marks encompass a lot of different things within pattern making. You can have marks
which indicate button or snap placement, marks which indicate a graphic or logo
placement, pocket placement for a patch pocket, etc. Marks are literally marked on
the fabric, but NOT cut. The rectangular mark shown here is for screen print
placement, to ensure that the garment is aligned properly before printing.
Drill holes are another important indicator on patterns. They are a small hole created
to show things like the corners of a placket. When cutting out the pattern piece for a
Henley collared shirt, for example, the Henley placket would be marked on the
pattern with the corners drilled as holes. Later in the process of creating the placket,
you could cut to the holes.
Grainlines
Grainlines indicate the direction the pattern will be laid on the fabric to cut. It is
important to have this clearly marked on the pattern, so the fabric gets cut correctly.
The grain effects the way a fabric drapes and stretches, as well as how a print or nap
will execute when the fabric is cut. Typically, grainlines are indicated as a straight line
along the pattern piece. For digital patterns, the grainline controls how the piece will
be put into a marker (don’t worry, we’ll cover markers later on). If your pattern is a
paper pattern, the line should be annotated with the word “grainline”.
Adding seam allowance
Now that our pattern is trued, marked, and notched, we need to add seam allowance
(often abbreviated as SA) to the pattern. The seam allowance is the fabric that will be
used to sew the garment together. The amount of seam allowance used varies
depending on the type of seam, the type of stitching that will be used, if a seam will
be bonded instead of sewn, etc.

Most serged seams will be 3/8” or 1cm, while a hem is typically 1” or 2.5” allowance.
Flatlock seam allowance is usually much smaller and will depend on the stitch width
of the flatlock itself. For this pattern, I have simply added a standard 3/8” to all
serged seams and 1” to the hem and sleeve openings. The dotted lines indicate
where the fabric will be cut, while the solid lines indicate the stitching lines.
Cutting and Stitching lines on the pattern
Depending on the shape of your pattern piece, you may need to manipulate the
seam allowance at the corners to ensure that your pattern remains trued. One
example of this is a turnback hem. You can see in the sleeve on the left that the seam
allowance continues down, becoming narrower at the hem. When you try to fold this
hem allowance up and sew it to hem, you would end up with puckering due to the
fact that the cut edge is shorter than the sleeve width at the fold. On the sleeve on
the right, you can see the turnback hem has been applied so the cut seam is a mirror
of where it will stitch to.
There are several other types of corners which can be applied to seam allowances to
keep them trued. Another very common type is a mitered corner, which is helpful for
pieces which end in a very small, narrow point.

Creating a marker
We’re not talking about a drawing instrument here. In apparel pattern making, a
marker is the term for the layout of a pattern for cutting. Within a marker, you want
the pieces aligned along the grainline, you want a small buffer of space between
pieces to ensure that one piece doesn’t end up over cut into another, and you want
to do the best you can to optimize how the pieces are laid together for the best
material yield and lowest material waste possible. I like to think of marker making as
the ultimate game of grown up Tetris. The better you stack the pieces, the lower your
cost and the lower your material waste.

You can see in the marker here, that we’re only utilizing about 77% of our fabric, with
the rest going to waste.

However, by rearranging the pieces in a more optimal layout, we can increase our
usage to nearly 85%, saving money on fabric cost and keeping more of our fabric out
of landfills.
Optimal pattern layout for cost efficiency

Perfecting the fit

Once you’ve created your pattern and sewn up your first sample, you’ll have a fitting.
You may need to make some fit adjustments. Many things can factor into the pattern
not being perfect the first time. Things like the way the fabric drapes, any shrinkage
that may occur during production of the sample, variance in measurements of the
wearer to the drafted body, etc.

The most commonly made adjustments are bust adjustments – especially on woven
garments – to make darts hit in the proper location. Other common fit adjustments
are shoulder slope, rise shape, and neckline adjustments.
These are all part of the normal pattern making process and can be adjusted on your
patterns after fitting.

Darting, pleats, and other fullness

Creating a perfectly tailored garment, especially when using woven fabric, often
requires the use or darts, which add fullness to a specific location in a garment. Bust
darts are commonly used in women’s wear to create fullness at the apex of the chest,
while keeping the armhole closely fitted to the body to avoid gaping.
But let’s say you’re starting with a pattern which was drafted for a B cup and you’d
like to make a version for a D cup instead. Rather than starting completely over from
scratch, you can add to the fullness of the chest and then use a larger dart to
maintain your original armscye length.

You can also rotate darts to different places to keep the overall fit intact but change
the design. By maintaining the dart tip location at the apex point and rotating it to
the shoulder, I’m able to keep my fit but have the aesthetic of a shoulder dart rather
than a bust dart.
Pleats are another common way to add both fullness and design detail to your
garments. There are several different types of pleats, and they are added to your
pattern in slightly different ways. Although the way you add fullness to your pattern
will vary depending on if you are using a knife pleat, a box pleat, or a tapered pleat,
you should indicate the pleat with notches to show where the fabric will join together
and a fold line to show where the pleat will be folded.
Gathers and pintucks can also be used to add additional design detail and fullness to
a garment. But what if you want to add fullness without changing the very clean
visual of your design? That’s where you could utilize the slash and spread method.
Slash and spread involves creating a slash line from one edge of your pattern to
another, cutting almost all the way through, but not quite. This will allow you to
spread the pieces apart, without changing the length of the edge that you didn’t
quite cut through, adding fullness to the other end. By using the slash and spread
method on my skirt, I’ve maintained my waistline length, but added fullness to the
hem going from a more sheath shape to a more A-line shape.
What is pattern grading?
So now your base size pattern is created, fit, adjusted, and perfected! You’re really
happy with the final result. But what next? Do you really have to do all of that all over
again to create additional sizes? Of course not.

You’ll use what’s called pattern grading to adjust your base size pattern to create the
other sizes. There are different methods to grade patterns, but the end result is that
you have a consistent visual across sizes. In the end, you’ll end up with a pattern for
each size in your range.