![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
School: The most difficult homework yet!
Dec. 24th, 2011 11:40 amSome of you might have already seen this fly by on Google+. Since it was so hard to draw this pattern, I've decided to dedicate a blogpost to it. It's also an inspiring thought: it was hard, but I managed to finish it in the end. Is it any good? We'll see after the holidays.
We've been drawing patterns for a year now, most of them on a quarter scale, and we've just gotten to the more difficult pattern alterations for difficult figures. We've already handled and mastered the larger bust sizes and now have moved on from raglan and cut-in-one-with-the-body sleeves to bendy people.
Bendy people?
Some people have a round back because they stand hunched forward. Others have such a straight posture it looks like they're leaning back. This brings problems with it that need solving in your pattern. We've also just started on 'taken' sizes, instead of standard confection sizes. For those girls (and the single man) in class that have never drawn for anybody yet, this is strange. I've of course already drawn a few patterns for myself so I know that the straight-and-simple blocks from the books are very different than what you get from 'real' measurements*.
Ready to get started? Okay! We're given a simple line drawing of a garment and we have to create the pattern for that garment on ¼ scale. It's on the right, good luck:
Let's analyse, shall we? This was what I needed to draw:
- a "Zwagger" coat (wide coat without vertical seams, uh-oh) with....
- Overly straight ("backwards-going") posture
- Flat stomach
- High shoulders
- Round backside
- Rolled collar (sjaalkraag)
- Half-raglan sleeve in front
- Sleeve cut-in-one with body and armpit triangle in back.
The first time I went wrong I had miscalculated and also incorporated a large bosom into my measurements, adjusting my pattern as I had learned. I was wrestling with the waist darts. The deviations of the posture required extra room taken out in the front (flat stomach) and room added in the back (round backside). But there were no vertical seams at all in the back! There was also the added difficulty of not knowing about the armpit triangle, because it didn't show at all in the line drawing. Difficult!
The second time I'd forgotten to adjust my chest width measurement to the backwards-going posture. Because the person is standing up so straight, not only is the front shoulder-to-waist length longer, you'll need a centimeter extra in the chest width. And since my help lines are in red and red pencil can not be erased very easily I just gave up on the drawing and started over.
Three times is the charm! I wrestled. I wrangled. And I came up with the following be-au-ty of a pattern:
Click to view a larger size
This is just the front part of my pattern sketch. The pattern pieces still have to be traced separately from this drawing. The upper-collar is attached to the facing, right up to the first buttonhole, where the rest of the facing is cut-in-one with the center front panel and the under-collar. There's the little triangle that everybody hates because the collar overlaps the front shoulder seam, there's the point where you fold down the chest dart to create the raglan sleeve, there's that stupid excuse for a pocket...
Gosh.
And the backside? I made a dart in the armscye so I could cut a vertical line to the hem and open the pattern up to create extra room for the round backside (2 centimeters at the hipline extra). It's a 'zwagger' classic.
Okay, I'm very proud of this, and most of you probably don't even know what the hell I'm talking about. But Anemoona and Kass can follow, I'm sure, and Absintheskiss and Steelweaver probably can too! As for the rest of you, I'll take a "Good job" and a smile and will take your questions in good stride.
-----
*) Confection sizes are based on an average measurement of a thousand, if not a million women. The majority of people will fit into clothes based on these measurements well enough. But there's people so far out of the mold that they can't even see the mold on the horizon anymore. Not everybody fits the mold. That's why we're studying custom dressmaking -- made to your measurements.
We've been drawing patterns for a year now, most of them on a quarter scale, and we've just gotten to the more difficult pattern alterations for difficult figures. We've already handled and mastered the larger bust sizes and now have moved on from raglan and cut-in-one-with-the-body sleeves to bendy people.
Bendy people?
Some people have a round back because they stand hunched forward. Others have such a straight posture it looks like they're leaning back. This brings problems with it that need solving in your pattern. We've also just started on 'taken' sizes, instead of standard confection sizes. For those girls (and the single man) in class that have never drawn for anybody yet, this is strange. I've of course already drawn a few patterns for myself so I know that the straight-and-simple blocks from the books are very different than what you get from 'real' measurements*.
Ready to get started? Okay! We're given a simple line drawing of a garment and we have to create the pattern for that garment on ¼ scale. It's on the right, good luck: Let's analyse, shall we? This was what I needed to draw:
- a "Zwagger" coat (wide coat without vertical seams, uh-oh) with....
- Overly straight ("backwards-going") posture
- Flat stomach
- High shoulders
- Round backside
- Rolled collar (sjaalkraag)
- Half-raglan sleeve in front
- Sleeve cut-in-one with body and armpit triangle in back.
The first time I went wrong I had miscalculated and also incorporated a large bosom into my measurements, adjusting my pattern as I had learned. I was wrestling with the waist darts. The deviations of the posture required extra room taken out in the front (flat stomach) and room added in the back (round backside). But there were no vertical seams at all in the back! There was also the added difficulty of not knowing about the armpit triangle, because it didn't show at all in the line drawing. Difficult!
The second time I'd forgotten to adjust my chest width measurement to the backwards-going posture. Because the person is standing up so straight, not only is the front shoulder-to-waist length longer, you'll need a centimeter extra in the chest width. And since my help lines are in red and red pencil can not be erased very easily I just gave up on the drawing and started over.
Three times is the charm! I wrestled. I wrangled. And I came up with the following be-au-ty of a pattern:
Click to view a larger size
This is just the front part of my pattern sketch. The pattern pieces still have to be traced separately from this drawing. The upper-collar is attached to the facing, right up to the first buttonhole, where the rest of the facing is cut-in-one with the center front panel and the under-collar. There's the little triangle that everybody hates because the collar overlaps the front shoulder seam, there's the point where you fold down the chest dart to create the raglan sleeve, there's that stupid excuse for a pocket...
Gosh.
And the backside? I made a dart in the armscye so I could cut a vertical line to the hem and open the pattern up to create extra room for the round backside (2 centimeters at the hipline extra). It's a 'zwagger' classic.
Okay, I'm very proud of this, and most of you probably don't even know what the hell I'm talking about. But Anemoona and Kass can follow, I'm sure, and Absintheskiss and Steelweaver probably can too! As for the rest of you, I'll take a "Good job" and a smile and will take your questions in good stride.
-----
*) Confection sizes are based on an average measurement of a thousand, if not a million women. The majority of people will fit into clothes based on these measurements well enough. But there's people so far out of the mold that they can't even see the mold on the horizon anymore. Not everybody fits the mold. That's why we're studying custom dressmaking -- made to your measurements.
