I read another interesting post today on fashion-incubator about getting patterns digitised (Kathleen covers all the good topics). It was about all the things you need to think about when getting your paper patterns ready for digitising … and it got me thinking too … why would anyone in industry still be working on paper? OK there are going to be those who are forced to use paper by old fashioned work places, those who can’t afford all the high end fashion software and of course those who are technophobes … and a whole host of other reasons … but surely these should be such a tiny minority by now. Being a pattern maker, I know they’re not … and that kind of frightened me a little.
Then I realised how narrow minded I was being. I’m a flat pattern maker. I can make almost any 3D shape in a very short period of time and have it fit pretty much perfectly first time. But I’ve spent 20 years getting to that point. I also work mostly with stretch-fit and close-fit styles. By flat pattern I mean I was taught how to take measurements and convert those into a pattern (via sloper/block) directly on paper. While many school’s still teach this (I certainly do), I’m seeing more and more people draping directly on to a dress makers dummy as their primary method for making patterns … and of course you can’t drape in a computer (or can you? <wink wink>). I wonder how this predominance of draping affects future students … especially considering the constant and increasing trend toward stretch fabrics.
There will always be a need to drape because designers are fluid, tactile people who need to physically see the creation emerging before them. I understand this although having dedicated myself to swimwear I’ve been denied that joy … instead I need to complete the garment, put it on the model and go back to the drawing board if it needs tweaking or fails. Is this evidence that draping is a better technique? Not at all … a far greater proportion of perfectly draped garments fail when put on a moving body.
It’s almost impossible to drape for close fit stretch garments but I have known it to be done. One lady I know does it regularly (she makes dancewear). She drapes her client in calico and goes about pinning every little tuck and curve, then draws, in pen, the darts she’s pinned and things like leg lines, neck lines, etc., while the drape is still on the body. She actually has a pre-prepared (is that such a word) set of calico templates that she uses in a number of sizes. When she’s finished she applies a preset amount of reduction in various places to make the pattern flat and lastly transfers her final pattern to computer (not to paper, go figure). As perculiar as this first sounded to me, she gets some amazing results.
The obvious problem with this is that it’s a dress-maker only technique … I’d be uncomfortable with pinning every nook and cranny on a live customer. I still don’t understand why she doesn’t have a set of standard garments to test on each client and tweak from there … but to each their own.
As far as ready-to-wear fashion is concerned, unless you have a nice standard-sized muse then you’re still stuck for a starting point. Stretch wear has been a continuous trial and error type evolution for most companies because (to be frank) they have no idea of the science behind stretch. And how many dress maker’s dummies have legs and a properly shaped bottom (is there such a thing?).
Hmm ok somewhere in there I started ranting again. The questions are:
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why aren’t people designing their patterns directly in the computer? … I’d love to know peoples’ reasons
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has anyone tried to drape for stretch wear and if so, how did you go about it?
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does anyone mourn the gradual loss of flat patternmaking? … is it a dying art?
I often talk about the great advantages of pattern making in CAD and I doubt anyone is disputing the need for a final digital pattern in commercial manufacture. I’d love to see more students (and home sewists) trying to use CAD as the start point rather than the end point and avoid the whole digitising process by a third party wherever possible. With so many cheap CAD programs on the market (Inkscape is free!) that will export to DXF you really have no excuse anymore … if you can draw it on paper you can just as easily draw it in CAD … it just takes a shift in mind set.
I know I mentioned my experiment in alternative fashion in my previous post, but I’d like to mention it again as it’s becoming obvious there’s going to be a reasonable amount of overlap between this blog and that one. Itty Bitty Evil Kitty is the whole creative design process which (because I’m a pattern maker) includes all the considerations of developing something from scratch right through to, hopefully, manufacturing … this site instead only deals with stretch fit pattern making (and my occasional ranting and fashion observations). Please keep an eye on my experiment and offer feedback as often as possible … especially students!
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Kamille, I did a patternmaking course like yours, where we indeed did not learn about stretch. Today it still baffles me because when I go to shop for clothes, almost everything is stretch, yet no general course even touches the subject.
My advice today would be to complete the course, and get a certificate/diploma. It will at least give you the basics, a lot of practice and an interesting piece of paper. After my course, I read through this site and then I read “Design and Patternmaking for Stretch Fabrics” by Keith Richardson which is on the Reading list (http://www.patternschool.com/?page_id=28). You’ll read that it has shortcomings, but I think it is a good place to start. And then: experiment.
Hi! I enrolled in a patternmaking class a few months ago we basically went through the whole basic bodice and skirt process. The problem is my teacher told me that patternmaking is different for stretch or knit fabrics as compared to what she thought us. So I’m kind of stuck since I want to make clothes using stretch fabric. How different is it? Please help me
Hi Lesley … it’s been a long time since I’ve sat infront of Gerber!! … my reason for not liking it was nothing to do with what it could or couldn’t do at the time … it was that it way way overpriced for what it was … I could do most of the same tasks in off the shelf CAD software … so for a subcontract pattern maker there was no point in it to me.
Hi Stuart, can I just ask what version of Gerber you were using? I ask because the older version was really annoying, but the newer version is much more intuitive.
I use Gerber for work, and I do agree that it’s cost is rather prohibitive for small designers, but I really do love to use it. I can do much more accurate work on computer than I can by hand – but I still do teach patternmaking by hand, so go figure. I always tell students that you need the tools to design by hand before designing by computer makes sense.
However, at home, I use a combination of AI and hand, but mostly because I’ve worked out how to convert AI files into Gerber files…
Kathleen, I would love to accept your challenge to digitise your pattern piece!
Hi again Stuart,
my dress form has legs, it was a gift from my mother, she said my uncles brought it from Hawaii, it’s a chinese brand, and looks antique, that’s all I know hehe. If you don’t have one with legs you draft from measurements.
Hi again Ivy!
If you have a dressmakers dummy woth crotch and legs then where dig you get it?? I want one. If not then how do you drape leglines and crotch on a dress makers dummy??
greetings Stuart,
I drape on the dress form.
Hi Amy,
I completely agree and will never take away from the artistic side to pattern making or design by saying CAD is the only way because it plain and simply isn’t. I still do a quick sketch by hand to visualise complex things because I too need to visualise. I also think its essential for every pattern maker to remember ever step … rather than cut and paste every time … because when the power goes out they’re going to have to start from the begining!
Corel and Inkscape handle this much better than Illustrator. In fact I gave up on Illustrator fairly early on because it just wasn’t on par with it’s cheaper cousin … apparently they’re closer now but I can’t vouch for that. The contour function in Corel is accurate right up until your angles get under 3 degrees … but the work around on that is to accept the error and chop the tip manually … 2 second job on something that really shouldn’t arise in normal pattern making. The curve equation for measuring lengths is a plugin for every software package in a maner of speaking. In CorelDraw and Illustrator you add it manually, in industry CAD they already wrote it in for you … again its a few minutes to do and it’s yours forever … it takes longer to make a cup of coffee.
CAD is a steep learning curve … no arguement there. For most fashion students (the point of this blog) it’s a skill they have to learn anyway so why not make more use of that skill? All the colleges I’ve been to have wide format printers for full scale patterns, but for class work we used quarter scale which prints out just fine on A3 or A4 … assuming you need to print them at all ie; classwork could be handed in by email or memory stick.
It’s really only home sewists that might have difficulty with this process, but surely multipage printing isn’t all that hard?
Hi Kathleen, great to see you …
As you mention later this all comes down to familiarity with the working environment. I still do some pretty complex styles and to be quite frank the thing that put me off doing these in CAD was software designed specifically for us …things like cheap off the shelf Illustrator or CorelDraw (cheap compared to industry software I mean) handled it with much greater flexibility because, well, they’re not tied to the rules with been taught to work to. Once I mede that discovery, I never went back … or is that what you were actually eluding to?
This says it all to me! You’re upset with industry specific CAD software so you’ve abandoned all CAD and gone all the way back to paper and pencil … only to send it out for digitising afterwards. There’s a VERY important step in the middle there … non-industry specific CAD! Yes that would mean a new learning curve all of a sudden, but I don’t know very many fashion students who don’t have it and are being taught it as part of their course these days (I do have a grumble that there’s more emphasis on this than actual pattern skills but that’s a different rant). Here goes, I’m going to say it …. I hate Gerber. I despise the control and lack of respect … I despise its exclusionary cost … I despise it’s lack of flexibility …. I despise almosteverything about it. There I said it. Thanks to a $300 off the shelf product I never have to deal with Gerber ever again!
In Illustrator or CorelDraw anything that can be drawn on paper can be drawn in CAD … complexity is irrelevant. In industry specific CAD programs it’s usually very difficult. I used to use a very old version of CorelDraw in the early days, do complex pieces and then export a DXF to be converted into Gerber files. As time went on I started doing more and more in Corel because it was just easier and it eventually got to the point that I was just doing seam allowances and piece matching in Gerber. Then I realised if I could create a tool to measure curves and to put in seam allowances automatically I’d be on my way to getting rid of Gerber completely (as a subcontract patternmaker). That was a learning curve … programming in CorelDraw was difficult but logical, and just as I worked it out Corel changed the way they did it (grumble). Now I have my own self-written grading tools, curve matching tools, seam allowance tools, and even a very basic layout tool (for my own benefit of visualising).
So, do your complex piece in off the shelf CAD and export it to DXF then import it for whoever’s doing the manufacture. It’s not as ridiculous asit sounds .. if I can get you to see the benefits of using things like Illustrator, CorelDraw or even the free Inkscape as a legitimate pattern making tool I could change the world (insert maniacal laugh here).
I don’t draft mine in the computer. I do it much faster by hand. CAD is great for easy styles but I make almost none of those. The learning curve for CAD is very high so if you’re making very complex things, you demand a lot more from the program than the basics; you often have to develop work arounds to get it to do what you want and you can’t do that if you are not good with the program in the first place.
As to why I lag in CAD, it’s multi-faceted. First, I don’t have confidence in it. If the program can’t do something simple like name a function the way we call it in real life, I’m supposed to trust it? Menus are a bewildering array of choices. We don’t share a common language. It is very annoying that CAD companies claim they’re the end all and they can make our lives so much easier…well, if they wanted us to use their program and it was designed for us, why didn’t they talk to us rather than someone they have cause to know who knows a lot about computing but not much about drafting but because they don’t know drafting, they don’t know that person’s experience is nowhere near that of a lifelong pattern maker. Here’s a great example, I was trying to change the grainline on a pattern but could not find how to do it no way no how. Come to find out, my CAD vendor has arbitrarily renamed grainline to “baseline”. Wth? Seriously? A baseline is not a grainline. Etc.
Fundamentally, it is a lack of respect. If you want me to use your product, it needs to compliment the way I work. Don’t give me this humdinger tool and on the way out the door say, “btw, I renamed all your functions, good luck figuring it out” [evil cackle]. I shouldn’t have to relearn my entire work vocabulary just because the CAD Co CEO has consulted on terminology with his wife or GF who had a hankering to be a fashion designer 20 years ago and forgot what words they used in the *ONE* pattern class she took. Point is, if you don’t know what it’s called, you can’t figure out how to do it. You have to muddle around endlessly and get lucky enough to stumble on it. And then it never does what I need it to do, it’s always something very simplistic.
Stuart, I should send you a pattern piece I have here that I don’t think can even be digitized because the program’s designers couldn’t envision something like this being needed. Now that is something.
I’m a beginner at patternmaking and sew custom things. But I’m fairly experienced and fast at Adobe Illustrator (I work in design). I traced out some personal blocks in Illustrator and did a few drafts this year and really liked the speed at which I could change things compared to hand-drawing and paper. But they are very different tactile experiences. Some people can visualize shapes faster on paper. It’s like (for me) comparing Photoshop to a darkroom. One is just more tactile, not to mention a different scale visually. There are still architects who draft on paper (there’s a very cool documentary on Frank Gehry where you can his team going back and forth in both CAD and paper environments).
There are also some caveats to Illustrator (and maybe Inkscape? I don’t know). There is a bit of a workaround with seam allowances. (Just offsetting lines get messy and need to be fixed, especially in tight corners.) And you need a plugin to measure curves accurately. Not to mention the learning curve of these programs. I spent about 12 weeks in school using Illustrator daily–it’s mostly the learning curve and cost of these programs that prevent a lot of people from using them. I’m speaking for people like myself that aren’t in the business of manufacture, though. Students and home sewers have to resort to printing things out on multiple pages and puzzling them together–no room or money for a fancy wide printer
Hi Ivy … what did you drape the leotard on if I may ask?
First, i’ve known of pattern makers usually using these programs to design patterns and then when i asked them how to draft the pattern on paper they don’t know how to explain it, they almost forgot.
I use draping only for couture garments, i don’t have much experience on stretch knits but i’ve draped a leotard before.
Not necessarily have to draft on paper, once you understand pattern and body is easily to work directly on the fabric.
I tried some vector programmes and at some stage I gave up. I think it would be great to have patterns on file, as in not to have to redraw, copy or trace it over. I just cannot figure the programs out. I have Adobe Illustrator CS3 and half a brain – not a good combination.