Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I learned to sew
so that I can have a designer's aesthetic at
a lower price point, with the kind of quality and sustainability you can't
find in fast fashion. [MUSIC] Hi, my name is
Robyn Andrea Burgess. I'm a Sewist and founder
of Styles InSeams. A fit-obsessed sewing blog
and Indeed pattern business. I started sewing six
years ago after decades of struggling to find clothes
that fit my 6' 2" body, my budget, and my
bold, cheerful style. I taught myself how to design and sell a handmade wardrobe. Everything I wear, I create from my imagination
and my sewing machine. This class is about decoding, deconstructing, and
designing fashion. Do you want your clothes to
look like they belong in the pages of Vogue or on the
racks with Neiman Marcus? We're going to look at
ready-to-wear garments and learn how to
replicate them at home. We'll learn about silhouettes, construction details, types of fabrics, and pattern hacking. By the end, you'll create
a sketch that you can use as a guide to sew the
garment of your dreams. You should take
this class if you have an understanding of
the basics of sewing. You're looking to get a
better understanding of fashion design so
that you can start to sketch out some
of your own ideas. My wish is for you to get a deeper understanding
of this craft. Fine tune your fashion eye, and level up your skill
set so you too can hack the fashion industry
by mimicking it's designs for a fraction
of the price. I'm so excited to teach
you everything I know. Let's get started. [MUSIC]
2. Getting Started: [MUSIC] One of the first
garments I ever made was based on a design
that I had seen online. It was too expensive
and wouldn't have fit my 6'2" proportions, but I loved it so
much that I got curious about whether I can
make something similar. I ended up creating
my own version for a friend's wedding and that was the start of
my sewing journey. We shell our cash or dress beneath our style
because it can seem impossible to create
clothes for ourselves that are in fashion and look
great on our bodies. Hopefully, by the
end of this class, you'll see that
there are a set of key elements that
make up all clothes. You just have to know
what they look like, how they're put together, and what they're called. I taught myself fashion
design by visually deconstructing the
ready-to-wear designs that I love and I'm
going to teach you too. In this class, we're
going to bring everything to the
Sketchpad and act as fashion designers drawing beautiful couture or
ready-to-wear pieces. First things first you're
going to need a sketch pad. Get one that you can
trace through the paper. Don't get one with two
thick of paper, otherwise, the croquis that we
want you to have for this class will be a little
bit more difficult for you. A croquis is basically
a model of the body. You can find these online
or you can YouTube a nine head croquis
key you can figure out how to draw one with beautiful
fashion proportions. The benefit of a croquis is that if you're not very good
at drawing like I am not, you can trace these and trace the design onto
these without having to know how to have the figure be straight and
well proportioned. With a croquis, you can either
print them out each time you want to use them and
draw directly on the paper, or you can put it behind the
page of your sketch pad and then trace directly into your sketchbook so that
everything stays together. You're going to need a
pencil with a good eraser so that you can make a few
mistakes and change details, some pens if you want
to lock in that design, and a ruler to help your lines get a
little bit straighter. You're going to use all of these materials to
create a design and a plan for the actual
garment that you want to sell. We're going to take the garment that you found online
and create a sketch of it with any design details or personal styling
changes that you want and notes about how to recreate it when you
actually go to sew. You do not need to be
an artist, designer, or have any drawing skills
to create a sketch. Its main function is to serve as a visual plan to help
you organize the design. Follow along with me and share what you created in
the project gallery. Maybe after you've
taken this class, you can create more sketches of your favorite pieces at
home and share those two. Let's dive in and first
explore silhouettes. [MUSIC]
3. Exploring Silhouettes: [MUSIC] We're going
to start real fundamental by talking
about silhouettes. What is a silhouette? Silhouette is basically
the impression that you get of the shape of the garment without
having the lights on, without seeing the details. It's effectively just
the outer shape. I'm going to start with dresses. When we talk about dresses, there's lots of different
shapes they can possibly be. Some of the most common
ones are sheath dresses, which are generally pretty
fitted to the body. Then you have A-line dresses where they fit to the
body and then the skirt goes out and forms an A or goes down like a
triangle to the bottom. Then you have other
designs like empire. An empire is a waistline
and it's Richardson style basically where you have the main seam of the dress
directly below the bust. Sometimes you'll find directives online or even still
today on the back of Vogue sewing patterns
where they'll say that this type of silhouette is
ideal for this body type. That's based on how
it accentuates, adds volume to or hides different ways
of shaping your body. I personally don't
believe in that. I think you can wear whatever
you want and you can be confident in whatever shape you choose to be confident in. There's probably
things that you know about the way that
you'd like to dress. For me, I have wide hips, I have a smaller waist. I generally like to accentuate my waste and wear
higher waisted pants, even though they say it's 6'2', you shouldn't wear
high wasted things because it'll make
your legs look longer. Well, I'm okay with that. You can just look in
your closet, like, what are the pieces
that you already own that make you feel confident
in what you're wearing? For this class, it's
great if you can find an image of something that
you'd love to recreate, it will help ground
what you're doing. I am going to use this beautiful
beaded strappy dress by Erdem as an example. But please choose
anything that you like, anything that you'd like
to recreate for yourself. Of course, if it's not
100 percent perfect, that's where we're
going to be changing as we discuss design details. The first thing that I wanted to talk about when we're
discussing what goes into the silhouette of
a garment is design ease. Now, in our fitting
and tailoring class, we'll talk about what
fitting ease is. That's really like the
size and the shape and how much extra room you need in order to be able to
move round comfortably. Design ease is any volume, any shape on top of that. Imagine your basic sheath. Imagine something
skin-tight that has either no fitting ease or
a negative amount of ease. But imagine a voluminous shirt, something with puffed sleeves
or a big circle skirt. That's something that might
have a lot of design ease. On this example that I'm looking at and I really liked getting these off retailers
websites because they show a lot of different
views of the dress. In this example, I can see that the bodice of the dress is
actually pretty fitted. It hugs tight across the bust. It hugs tight through the
top and down to the waist. When it comes down to
the skirt of the dress, you can see there's a
lot more ease in there. The next element that we'll talk about is the sleeve
or the leg style. My example is sleeveless. It's strappy. But that in and of itself
is something to talk about. There are a lot of
charts online that have the different
historical names for different sleeves styles or
different leg styles and you can find things like a Bishop sleeve
versus a puff sleeve or a cap sleeve and start to
understand what those are. This example, it has
some straps they go over the shoulder and
then a second set of stripes and then a Holter tie. That's how I would describe
the sleeve style of this. It's sleeveless or strappy, but there's a few different
elements going on at the top. The next decision that
we want to make for our garment is the
placement of the waistline. In a dress there's
only a couple of places where you can really
choose to put the waistline. You can have the empire where it's hitting
below the bust. You can have it at
your natural waist, which is the smallest point of your waste around your body. You can have a dropped
waistline which hits a little bit lower
down towards the hip. Or if you're making a
sheath or a less fitted, more of a loose garment, you don't really have to
define a waistline at all, at least not with the
shape of the garment. You can do pleats, which is when you have
really uniform folded and nicely pressed fabric
that's drawn in together. You can have tux where you take that extra fabric and you
fold it in and then hide it. Now I'm switching
over to the sketchpad and we're going to start just where we left off
with the waistline. Where does your design hit? What's going to be
comfortable for your body? I'm going to draw mine
into the natural waste. It may be faint to you, but I have drawn a Crokie on
here that I found online. The next thing that
I'm going to add to this design is the
shape of my skirt. I'm basing it on
this circle skirt. Basically, that is an
A-line shape because it hits your body at
the waist and the hips, but then it flares out a little bit as it has
additional fullness. I'm just going to
draw it in a bit. Again, does not have to
look great [LAUGHTER]. The next choice that I'm making is the length of the skirt. Because if I were to stop it, say right here ish, I can have a nice
little miniskirt. Honestly based on my example, I can have a cute
party dress with this exact design just by
having a shorter skirt. Or I can bring it a little bit more
office-appropriate cocktail party appropriate by bringing
it down to the knee. I can come down to the mid-calf
and make it midi length. I can come down to mid-shin and have it be T length
or I can bring it all the way down to the
ankle and make maxi length. I can even extend it to the floor and have
it be floor length. I'm just going to
draw on my arm line. Again, sometimes it's nice to have a little
bit of movement. I'm not great at drawing, but I just do a little
squiggly bit so that it looks like it's moving and it's not just this firm static thing. This is probably a
circle skirt but it doesn't tell you exactly
what circle skirt it is. You can make a
circle skirt that's called a quarter circle skirt, a half circle skirt, a full circle skirt. You can have a
double-circle skirt. That really is just
determining how big the circumference is
of that finished arm line. If you want to draw it in, you can make a representation of how much fullness
you have by just drawing in some
vertical lines to show how much fullness
you want it to be. Again, I'm not using
any straight lines. They're just going
to be a whimsical. Let's say that I want it to be a three-quarter circle skirt. I'm just going to just write that here so I remember that decision
that I've made. That's basically the
skirt of the dress here. I know that it's
hitting at the waist. I know that it's falling
to about T length, which is a bit lower
than midi length. I know that it has a
bit of fullness in it, and it drips like
an A-line skirt. Let's talk about
the bodice next. We're going to start at the
top, which is the neckline, and then move our way down
back to the waistline. One of the first things to
think about is like how modest or how revealing
you want the design to be. I'm going to draw
in my bodice now. Remember I'm basing
it on this design which has more of a
boost A type look. It's really just covering
the important bits. It's not necessarily cleavage because it's not
just like a plunge, but it's definitely
showing some skin. I'm just going to
draw it in like I see it here in the
example starting with the side seams and then bringing
through the middle bit. Then as it comes, got a little bit of shaping like more of a
diamond shape here through the bust and
it just falls in, let's bring that up
a little higher. Then don't worry about symmetry. It doesn't matter. [LAUGHTER]
You know what you're doing. Then again, we
talked a bit before about the shape of
the sleeve here. This is a little bit strappy. They all connect into
the top peak here. I'm going to attempt symmetry. There we go. That
effectively is the design. I encourage you to take
out your Crokie and think about your neckline,
your bodice fit, how it fits over your bust, how it fits through your waist, how it fits through your
hips and what the length is. In the next lesson, we're
going to talk about fabric, which will say so much
about the movement of the garment and how it actually looks as
you're wearing. [MUSIC]
4. Understanding Your Fabric: [MUSIC] I'm so excited
that we've arrived at my favorite part
of fashion design and that's choosing fabric and then incorporating that
fabric into your design. Now that we have the
idea of the silhouette, let's talk about the way that we can use fabric to
bring that to light. We're going to be
talking about drape and weight and opacity, and other qualities
of fabric that make it the right or wrong choice for your design project.
Let's dig in. The first element that I want
to talk about is stretch. I'm going to demonstrate
these different knits to you. They all look slightly
ragged because I've used them for
projects already but [LAUGHTER] this is a
good medium-weight knit. It has really good recovery
and really good stretch so I could use this
in something that had negative ease in the design, meaning that it can stretch around my body and
hold its shape. The next stretch that I have
here is really interesting because it is a knit,
it's very machiney. It's definitely not a hand-knit but you can see this
beautiful texture on it while it still
has a good amount of stretch in both directions. Another knit that I have
here is a sweater knit. This would be in a category of what we call a stable knit. If you're looking for
something that has the qualities of a knit fabric, which you can really see in the texture on the back here, but you want it to hold its shape and it doesn't
really need a stretch, you can find stable knits that barely have any
stretch in them, but still have this
warm sweater feel. There's also a way to make woven fabrics have a
good amount of stretch. Think about jeans, for example. Jeans are a woven fabric, but you definitely
find stretch jeans. You definitely find skinny jeans out there that have a
good amount of stretch and that's because elastin
is in them or spandex. If we look at this one, it's got a good
amount of stretch, not in this direction, but in this direction, it has a bit of movement. That movement is going to
help it fit around your body. It might be a little bit
more comfortable to make a really tight-fitted woven
garment if you've chosen a fabric that has
a little bit of stretch in it because it
will have [inaudible] and [inaudible] is what helps it to stay comfortable when you're wearing it and
you're sitting and you're bending and
you're stretching, instead of it just being
rigid on your body. The next thing I want
to talk about is drape. Drape is really important
when choosing your fabric because it determines how it's going to hang on your body. Is it going to be rigid? Is it going to stand
up on its own or is it going to be fluid or drapey, and flow and have movement? Here are two different
fabrics and you have basically very
different properties, but I want to show you the
different drape with them. Here's a beautiful remnant. I got it at FABSCRAP. It's dead stock material, so it's super sustainable. As I open it up you can
also hear it rustling, that's a telltale sign that
it's a little bit more crisp. This one if I sow
it into something, it's going to keep its
shape pretty well because it basically holds its shape
as it sits up on the table. This is something that
doesn't have a ton of drape, it does have some
movement to it. It's not totally rigid, but it would be good for making something
more structured, where I want something
to have volume, I want it to stand
up on its own. If I wanted to do a puff sleeve, I would choose
something like this because it would keep that puff. [NOISE] On the other hand, I have this nice Eco Varro, it's a viscose aka rayon
fabric and it is drapey. As I play with it, as I move it, it flattens itself back up, it goes back into a puddle. Imagine wearing this. If you put this on your body, if you walk with it, it's going to move as you walk. It's going to hang nicely. It's not going to
keep its structure. If you wanted a puff
sleeve out of this, it's just going to collapse. Don't choose a
super drapey fabric for something for volume. Choose a drapey fabric for something that you want
a lot of movement in. Next I want to talk about
opacity and I also want to show you how the same exact material can have very
different qualities. All four of these are silk. They're just very
different silks. This is a silk brocade. I actually bought it in
Thailand, it's beautiful. It's lovely. It's all silk. It's got a heavier weight to
it than the other ones have. It's also like a
brocade or jacquard, so you can see it in the back and no light passes through it, which means that
it's very opaque. The next one here that
I'm going to show is from Garment District
in New York City. I've been holding onto it
because it's so pretty. [NOISE] If you hear that, you know it's crisp. You know that it doesn't
have a tone of drape. This is a silk, it's like a taffeta and I can see a little bit
more light through it, but it's very opaque, it's a lot more rigid. But basically,
it's been woven in a very different style
than that last one. These next two are
very drapey examples, but again, very
different qualities. What's different
between these two? This one, it's pretty opaque, but I can definitely
see light through it, but it's got a sheen, so it's got a satin in front on it but it's got a lot of drapes, so it's really flowy. This would make a nice top
and you wouldn't necessarily have to put a lining with this one because it's so opaque. You can't really see through it. This one has more
of a crepe texture, but you can see a lot
more light through it. You could also maybe
use this without a lining but if you
were making a dress, you probably wouldn't
want to have this as a skirt bottom without a lining because your bits would be seen. That's a big question
you have to ask yourself when you're buying
and choosing fabric. Is this going to be
opaque enough to cover myself in the places
where I want to be covered, covered my undergarments in
the way I want them covered? Or do I need to change the quality of that a little
bit by adding a lining? I've shown you several
different printed fabrics. You've totally seen
what my fabric vibe is, but I wanted to show these are two different cottons and they
have very different vibes. This one is embroidered, you can probably
only faintly see it, but it has beautiful
little hummingbirds and Dragonflies in it. It's a white, basically, cotton lawn that is really super simple
and pretty minimalist. But if you want to have a
more minimalist wardrobe, if you want to have
a light touch, you totally don't have
to go with a print. You can add details with
embroidered fabrics. You can also add details with different textures
and other decisions than just adding color. But then also, you can find beautiful prints that are dead stock as well. A lot of designers actually partner with
some fabric stores, especially like Mood Fabrics, where you can find their printed dead stock
fabrics right in the store and recreate the actual garment by just
buying their fabrics. This is an example of
a [inaudible] fabric, I found it in new fabrics. It's just a remix because I've already made a skirt out of it. But check around, you might actually be
able to find the fabric exactly for what you're
trying to recreate. Thinking back to
my example dress, this particular fabric
that I pulled out would actually be a good weight
and texture to use. It's got a nice satin finish
and it's the right weight, but something like
this would not be really good for a
structured bodice. When we're talking
about dresses that have a lot of different
qualities to them that being fitted here and loose here and drapey here,
but structured here. What you probably need to do
is change the qualities of your fabric a little bit by
adding extra fabric to it. What I mean by that is choosing
either an interfacing and interlining or even
just a lining to get your fabric to the qualities that they're going to be. I'm not going to go into
too much detail but if I were making a dress out
of this as I have before, what I know I would need to do is apply a backing
to this to give it more structure so that when I'm putting
that needle through the fabric and then I am putting it tight
against my body, it's going to have
enough structure that doesn't just rip apart at the bodice and then just be a complete mess after one wear. Do your research and think
about how do you maybe need to structure the fabric differently to give you
the style that you want. Let's go back to our sketch and write down what
we've decided. I know that I want
a drapey fabric, I want it to have
a silky texture. I am going to choose the poor man's silk
and do a polyester satin. Now that we've
talked about fabric, I want you to get really
excited by your choices. There's so much out there. Go to a fabric store,
touch something, play around, go online, read the descriptions of it, look how it moves
in those videos, and try to figure out what would be the right material and right drape and
right texture and right weight for your
finished garment. You want to think
about practicality. A silk is going to be expensive, a polyester or a rayon might have some of
those same qualities, but at a much lower price point. Next up we're going
to be talking about construction details or
how the garment is made. Meet me in the next
lesson. [MUSIC]
5. Planning Construction Details: [MUSIC] Welcome back.
In this lesson, we're talking about
construction details. Those are the
practical decisions about how a garment is
actually going to be sown. Really they determine
how do you make fabric, which is a 2D object, fit onto your very 3D body? When we're talking
about clothes, which we'll get into a lot
more in the tailoring class, we have to think about how do we actually get this to fit us? How do we ease in the fullness
from point A to point B? That's really where
seam lines come in. You have a couple of
decisions that you can make. You can choose darts which actually take the fabric
and basically fold them in and then press them
out so that they go into triangular shapes
around your body going from point A to point B, or you can choose seams. Seams is when you're taking two pieces of fabric
and you're cutting them on a curve in some
type of way so that they ease out that
fullness through the curve. A really common way of thinking about darts
versus seam lines is thinking about bust and waist darts versus princess seams. A bust and waist
dart will go around the contours of your
body at your bust and fold out that fabric so that you can get the right amount of additional volume
for your bust, whereas the princess seam again, it's going to convert
those darts into just getting rid of that
extra fabric and creating a line for you
to stitch straight. For my sketch, the
design that I'm basing it off of has somewhat
of a boost da bodice, which means that it's really tightly fitted,
basically everywhere. Instead of just having
a single princess seam, I actually have to think about seam lines in a number
of different places. For this, I know that I
have to create shaping between what is the
under bust point. This wider point of my body and this smaller
point at my waist. The way that I'm going to
do that is with seam lines. About the mid point of the bust, I'm just going to
draw in a seam line that goes there
down to the waist, and I'm going to do
it on both sides. I know when I'm actually
going to look at a pattern or maybe trying
to find a boost da here, I'm going to find something
that helps me take out this extra width and brings it down here
through seam line. The next thing that
I have to think about is actually the bust. Almost regardless of
your cup size now, and a cup maybe you can
get away with this, but based on your cup size, you're going to need
something to give you extra fabric to go
around the volume, or the protuberance
of your *****. [LAUGHTER] There's a lot of different ways
that you can do that. A really common way is to have a seam line that
goes across the bust. That's what I saw in the example
with the all down dress. It basically comes from here
and it curves around here. In this curve, it
allows me to ease in the extra fullness and get
the extra volume that I need. I'm going to draw
that on both sides. If you've chosen a garment
that has more design ease, you may not need
this many seam lines in order to make it fit
all around your body. You might just need a waister. You might not even
need a waister, but it's important to think
about how do I take it from being a square
to being my body? How do I take it from being a paper bag to being this
fitted beautiful garment? The way to do that
is with seam lines. The next thing that I'm going
to think about is if all of this is going on in
the front of the garment, what's going on
underneath that all? If I just have a piece here, it's going to be frank. It's going to just be
flapping in the wind. I need to be able to
hide the places where I connect one piece of fabric
to another piece of fabric. You can do that either
through seam finishes or you can do that through
a lining or a facing. If you found an example of a garment online and
you don't really know what it looks like
inside, that's perfectly okay. Go to your closet, find something that
has somewhat of the same shape and look at what choices that
they've done there. You can answer a
lot of questions by just looking at
your ready-to-wear. I do that all the time. I look at a vintage
blazer I have in my closet or an old
dress that I have, which may not have
the exact same shape, but it will tell me
the choices that the designer made in order to finish the inside
and make it so that I have the outside
look of the garment. Let's write down the decisions that we've made
about this dress, and I'm going to put
them over on this side, just feel variety. We've decided that this bodice is going to be fully lined. For the skirt, again, I want this to be as
drapey as possible and the polysatin I'm
assuming that I've chose is going to be opaque enough that I don't need
a lining for it and I want it to be drapey
so I don't need to line the skirt at all. I can just let that hang
as it is. Unlined skirt. [NOISE] I've just decided that I am not going
to line this skirt, but I still want it to
look very professional. What do I need to do about
the seam finishes in order to make this look as
amazing as possible? When you have a line bodice, you're hiding all of those
seam finishes on the inside. You're basically taking fabric and you're putting
wrong sides together. You only see nice, neatly finished innards, but when it comes to
the online skirt, I'm going to see where
this fabric joins at the side seams and probably in the back depending upon
where I put my zipper. There's a few different ways
that you can finish seams. The most common way of finishing seams is to use an overlocker
machine or a zigzag stitch on your machine and just run a line of stitches down the outside to protect that fabric from fraying
and falling apart. However, when you're choosing something like a polysatin, that is probably
going to fray a lot, meaning that the
threads of the fabric will fall apart and
tear away from it, you might want something a
lot more sturdier to keep those frame bits in and keep the skirt from
falling apart. The choice that I would
make in this instance, because it's a
lightweight fabric, I'm going to choose
a French seam. I have a YouTube video about French seams and you can
totally go watch that, but basically what a
French seam does is it takes and encloses
that full outer bit in a second row of stitching
so that all you see is a nice neat innards the same as I've
chosen for the top. I'm going to mark
down what seam choice I've made for the skirt. [NOISE] Now we've made
this beautiful dress, but this is a piece of
paper and this is the body. How do I actually
get into this dress? Closure. What am I doing to
actually make it so that I can open up this garment and close it back on
its fitted bodice. I'm going to add a zipper. I have a couple of
choices with a zipper. I can either put it in the back or I can put it
on the side seam. A lot of really
high-end garments will choose to put
it in the side seam because it's a lot easier to hide it when it's not
really a design element. But you can also hide
it in different ways. If you choose an
invisible zipper and get your practice on and find a way to make a truly
invisible zipper, you can have something that's
really easy in the back. You can also have
a lapsed zipper or if this were a totally different design or if I wanted to change it up, I could put a button placket here and let it
close with button. I'm just going to write
down my decision here. I've chosen to do an invisible zip in
the back of the dress. That's going to be easiest
for me and it's going to help keep the look as
clean as possible. [NOISE] We've talked about the most important instruction details for our design here, but there's a lot more choices that you can make in the design. This could be fully
finished if you're making a simple garment or you
could add a lot more to it. You could add top stitching, you could add embroidery, you could add lacework, you could add crochet bits here, you could add a
little attachments. At this point, you
can add a ton of different design elements that just really show
your creativity, or you could stay faithful to the garment that you're
trying to replicate. It's totally up to you. In the next lesson,
we're going to talk about taking this design and matching it to patterns
so you can sow your finished garment.
Let's go. [MUSIC]
6. Combining Patterns: [MUSIC] Welcome back.
In this lesson, we're going to be
taking our sketch and then figuring out how we can use commercially available sewing
patterns in order to help realize this into
an actual garment. What we can do is take sewing patterns that are
made by any designers or big designers and find ways of mashing them together in order to get the
look that we want, do a little bit of change ups and get
our finished result. We're going to start
with my sketch and try to find some sewing
patterns and actually help me to make this without
having to know draping very well or know
pattern-making very well. This particular dress has two big elements that I need
help with pattern-making. The first is the
top or the bodice, and the second is the skirt. Let's start with
the skirt because that's actually really easy. I decided that I wanted to do a three-quarter circle skirt. There are calculators
on the Internet where you can help
define exactly how to create the proportions for a circle skirt without
needing to buy a pattern. I sew one that is all about
like a tiered circle skirt. I know Mood Fabrics has one where it's just a circle skirt because it's one of the most basic shapes
in fashion design. I encourage you to look it up, find a circle skirt calculator, make all the circle
skirts of your dreams. The bodice, however, is a bit more detailed. This is a bustier bodice. It's got fitted cups, it's got fitted
around the waistline. There are a number of
bustier bodices out there that you can buy
because they've been super popular for
the last few years. One that's super popular, and I've made a few times before into very different
looking garments, but all fits super well, is called the Rose Cafe Bustier. They sell a pattern
on Etsy where you can see it basically
has the style lines that we're looking for and I can just buy this
pattern and instead of having to figure out all of these pieces that go
into this bodice, I can take that pattern
and fit it here. Again, bustier bodice, fitted bodice, circle skirt. After I found those patterns
that fit those needs, there's just some things
that I might want to change. What I know is that I'm
going to have to add straps. Straps are easy, they're just like straight lines of fabric. Once I find this, I
can literally say, I'm going to make
some extra straps. I'm going to pin them in. I'm going to see
what they look like. I'm going to stand in
front of the mirror. I'm going to see what works. All I need to know
is I just got to get a little extra fabric in
order to make those straps. For this example, I'm
just going to write down exactly what patterns
I'm going to use. The Rose Cafe Bustier and
then I'm going to use a circle skirt calculator
[NOISE] and there we have it. I have most of the steps
that I need in order to get this design
using some patterns. I know I'm going to have
to make a couple of pattern-hacking alterations
on the back end. But this has gotten me so far there that I feel
pretty confident, I can make it without
much help at this point. My example is pretty
straightforward. I know that I can take two patterns and
put them together, aka Franken pattern, this dress. But I wanted to show you
two more examples of ways that you can pattern hack
to create your design. One more example that I
found on the Internet that I really love
and I would love to recreate is this dress by
Palma Martin. It's beautiful. I can see that it's
a nice cotton. It's got beautiful
toxin pleated details. Overall, I can tell that
this is a shirt dress. I can tell it has
it grown on sleeve, it's got a color, it's maxi laying, its got a button pocket, but even just going
through these examples, this might be difficult to create even for an
experienced pattern drafter. But I know generally the
vibe of what I want. I want something
that's a little bigger here and it comes
down to the waist, it's a shirt dress, and it's all one type of fabric. I've actually found a
pattern that's sold by Vogue that is so
much like this dress that I know I can get
the vibe of it without having to do a lot of that
pattern-making myself. Here's the top. It's Vogue V1874 and it's got a lot of
those same details. It's got fullness
of top and then it's got fleets
through the waste. It's a shirt by most of the design and
shaping is alright there. Another good way of looking
at a pattern online is to open up and look
at the line art. You can see that
compared to this dress, it's pretty dang similar. Maybe the tops are
a little different, but it's got the vibe. It's perfect for my use case. All I would need to do for a pattern like this
is lengthen it. I could take view
A and then just make it as long or
as short as I want. Without having to do really
any pattern drafting, without having to
Franken pattern in out of multiple patterns, I can make that
beautiful dress for a lot less money and without a huge headache
of actually creating it. Here's an example of a
shirt that I've been like a low-key obsessed with for
a couple of months now. It's by this
Australian brand Aje. What I have here is
an example of a shirt that is a basic shirt, but it's got a lot of
sewing detail in the front. For this one, I actually just want to find a regular pattern. I found a buttery pattern that basically is something that I can make a basic shirt, a bunch of times. But I can add all of these toxin pleats to it and make it something
really special. I've actually started
to make this shirt. I started with just figuring
out this texture detail and then going ahead and making the whole shirt in
a different color, that's great for my skin. If you're interested in
seeing how it's made, check the link in my
resources and I'll show you the whole process of how I
recreated this exact shirt. In this lesson, we talked about pattern
hacking, ready-to-wear. I encourage you make lists
of all the things you'd love to see in your handmade wardrobe
and then just go looking. Looking at sewing patterns. See if you need to pattern half a couple of them
together or Franken pattern a couple of them together
or see if there's maybe an exact pattern match for
what you're trying to make. Get social, ask around. Someone may know the perfect
example for that garment, and really just explore
your creativity. Keep looking around, keep buzzing around
finding something, and you can really get to what you want
to create. [MUSIC]
7. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations
on finishing this class. Now you're equipped with a
lot of the terminology and know to be able to look
at garments online, look at garments
you find in stores, look at garments you find
in fashion magazines, and try to figure out how you can make those your very own. I encourage you, every time you find something
that you really like, use this as a lesson, take this and create
a little sketchbook just full designs that you'd like to recreate for yourself. Think about how you make that silhouette perfect
for your body, for your wants, and how much skin you show
or you don't show. Think about how you can choose fabrics that fit your
lifestyle or your budget, how you actually
construct that garment. Like what's going to help with the durability that you
need in order to make this live in your life for
a good long while and how do you choose
those finishes and those extra little
pops that really make it your unique signature? I do this all the time
before I'm sewing a garment. I make a sketch. I make these exact notes and I think
you can do this every time. Even if you don't sew all
of those that you create, do this as a practice to just get your creative juices flowing and just feel even
more empowered to be able to create
anything that you see. I encourage you to check
out the class resources, see what's available there to help you along your journey. Please, please, share
the sketches that you design and the
layouts that you create. I can't wait to see
what you've made in the project gallery and
thank you again for joining. I hope to see you again soon.