How to Design Clothing Patterns
Making your own clothes can be a fun and rewarding experience, but it can also be frustrating if you don't know where to start and can't find a pattern that matches your creative vision. Fortunately, designing clothing patterns can be simple. After some practice, you'll be able to visualize a piece of clothing and create the pattern without much trouble, but until you get to that point, it's easier to copy bits and pieces of existing pieces of clothing.
Things You'll Need
- Paper
- Colored pencils
- Clothing that fits you perfectly
- Seam rippers
- Pins
- Plain white cotton fabric
- Markers of two colors
- Scissors
- Pattern tracing paper
Instructions
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1
Draw your idea for your future clothing item on the paper with your colored pencils. Be as specific as possible. Refer to this drawing frequently during the rest of the process to make sure you are staying true to your vision.
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2
Choose clothing that fits you perfectly and can be replicated in the final pattern. For example, if you want to make a dress, you might choose a blouse and a skirt that, when combined, are similar in shape to the desired final product. Don't worry about details like sleeve length or skirt length; you can easily adjust these.
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3
Disassemble the clothing items you chose, using your seam rippers. You may want to avoid using cherished pieces of clothing unless you are experienced with a sewing machine and confident in your ability to reassemble these items perfectly.
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4
Decide whether your final garment varies in any significant way from the disassembled pieces of clothing and combine the pieces if necessary. In your example, perhaps your blouse buttoned up the front but you want to make a dress with a zipper in the back. In this case, you would take the two front pieces of the blouse and pin them together so they overlap as much as they would if buttoned. This will make a solid front for your future dress.
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5
Lay each piece of the disassembled (or partially reassembled, as in the example above) clothing flat on your plain white cotton fabric, at least 4 inches apart, then pin each piece of clothing to the fabric. Use pins every 1 or 2 inches around the entire border of each piece of clothing to hold it securely in place.
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6
Trace around each piece of pinned clothing with your marker, taking care not to get ink on the clothing pieces unless you don't intend to reassemble them. This should leave you with outlines of each piece of clothing on your white piece of fabric.
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7
Unpin and remove the pieces of clothing from the piece of fabric.
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8
Cut out each of the shapes you drew on the fabric. Do not cut directly on the lines. Instead, cut about 2 inches outside of the lines while trying to maintain the shape of the piece. If you cut directly on the lines you would not have any hem allowance and the piece would be much too tight. Leaving an extra 2 inches gives you plenty of room for the hem and also enough space to make slight modifications if the piece does not fit perfectly.
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9
Pin the pieces together so that the lines touch.
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10
Put on the pinned garment and observe the fit, then remove the garment. If you want to make any modifications, do so now. For example, if one part of the garment is too tight, adjust the place where the relevant pieces touch each other to make it slightly larger.
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11
Draw along the lines where the pieces of fabric meet with your other colored marker. If you have not made any modifications to the fit, this step is unnecessary as you will only be drawing over the previous lines.
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12
Unpin the garment. Cut off any excess fabric, leaving ½- inch around each side of each piece of the garment.
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13
Lay each piece of the garment on a flat surface, then lay your pattern tracing paper over the pieces of fabric. Trace around the outside of each piece of the garment as well as over the lines of the garment (as drawn originally in Step 6, or as drawn in Step 11 if you made any modifications). This should result in two lines for each piece of the garment---one approximately ½-inch inside the other.
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14
Cut out each piece of the tracing paper along the outside line. The extra ½-inch is the seam allowance, and the inside line is where each piece should meet the next.
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Resources
- Photo Credit sewing image by Greg Pickens from Fotolia.com
