Making a Custom Bikini Swimsuit

Video Transcript

"JENNIFER CROW: Hi, this is Jennifer. I'm the owner of wedgiewear.com, and we're here with Expert Village. In this series, we're going to be talking about how to design and how to make a swimsuit with more emphasis on how to actually make a swimsuit. What you first want to start doing is to have a design in your head or actually drawn out on paper. What I've done is I just got a pattern that I like and I've tweaked it into the way that I actually--most people can wear. So we can do is just get regular pattern paper that we have at Joanne's or Michael's or any craft store, and you can just start drawing it out, what you want your pattern to look like. We're going to be talking about the measurements. It's not really needed to get a tape measure to measure it since you are going to be building it from scratch. What you just want to do is just measure from the outside of, like, your hip area or pretty much like your love handles are, and start in and you can take a piece of fabric or your pattern paper and just some way to measure and then you can take that and put it down and maybe do it like a mark on either side. And then also from the back and work all the way up here, and also you do want to make it a little big larger as well for error to take place. And then you would do that measurement and you would just start it from there. What we came up with, this is the front of our pattern that we have and then this is the back of it. So we just started to draw it out, to tweak it in the way that we want it. So if you have a pattern that you like or a swimsuit that you like, that will be a great way to look at it and make some measurements, and then find out what you like about the suit and go from there from it. Also again, with the top, it's the same thing. What you want to do is just measure. Again, the bust line that you have and pretty much you're going to, again, make it larger than you have and this is the triangle top that we came up with. It's pretty much just a triangle. And then, again, it's trial and error, you make it. You always want to make your pattern a little bit too large or a little bit larger than you think that it actually needs to be and then you go from there."