Practical Pattern Making: A Step-by-Step Guide

More and more women are making their own clothes but there are few comprehensive references available. For the most part, dedicated sewers have had to adjust standardized patterns or muddle their way through foreign-language books.

In Practical Pattern Making two pattern-making experts and designers introduce the basic techniques of creative pattern design for clothing. It is intended to help fashion students, designers and enthusiastic sewers develop and create a variety of styles, regardless of complexity.

The book uses photographs, examples, diagrams and templates to explain all of the techniques, formulas and professional tricks to create a custom-tailored skirt, suit or dress. The tutorial style poses questions that encourage problem-solving.

Features include:

• How to measure the body, with 13 illustrative photographs
• Blank professional worksheets to copy and use
• 40 scaled pattern templates with all markings
• How to draw and mark a sized pattern with darts, pleats and so on
• Modeling and draping to design and fit a pattern
• Working with fabric grain and bias
• Photos of garments in process and finished

The 40 garment selections begin with a basic skirt and progress from a fitted jacket and suit to an asymmetrical balloon dress, flounce dress, tissue dresses and more. All require just a few pattern pieces.

Lucia Mors de Castro has worked for Vivienne Westwood and several other fashion labels, designers and artists in London, Lima, Vienna and Berlin, where she currently teaches Pattern making/Draping at the International University of Art for Fashion. She is the author of Patternmaking in Fashion.

Isabel Sanchez Hernandez is a fashion designer and pattern maker. She has extensive teaching experience and has developed her own work method in which she mixes conventional and geometrical pattern-making techniques. She is the author of Little Black Dress.