Sewing Patterns: Finding the Right Size for You

1. Class Introduction: My name is Ariana and Bower and I am a sewing instructor, textile artist and seamstress from the Midwest. In this class, I'm going to teach you all the things you need to know so that you can select the right size for you on any sewing pattern. We're going to learn all about the history of sewing patterns and ready to wear and how the sizing that we see today came to be. We're going to learn about knit patterns and woven patterns and how are they different? We're going to learn about ease, design. E is wearing. E is what is the ease and knits and woven themselves? How are they different and how it applies to sewing patterns. We will learn how to figure out the stretch percentage of a knit fabric and how that applies to a sewing pattern. I'm gonna go over measurements, where to measure on your body, and where to measure on selling patterns. We're gonna go start to finish from opening that pattern envelope to measuring patterns, to copying patterns in my favorite way. I'm gonna guide you through the process of measuring different kinds of patterns and where to measure them so that you can see if the pattern pieces themselves fit you because it's not just the sizing on the envelope that makes a pattern fit. And finally, I just want to say before we get started, selecting the right size is really about just selecting the best size to start with. It will not eliminate the need for pattern alterations because no pattern is designed to fit your body unless you custom-designed it. Sewing patterns are just like ready-to-wear. They're designed for a certain set of body measurements and we will learn all about what that means in this course. But once you know how to measure a pattern and how to select the size, then you can easily make your adjustments to make that pattern fit your body, just right. Alright, I hope you're super excited and ready to learn because we're about to get started. I have been selling for over 25 years. I learned from my grandmother when I was a small child and have had a passion for garment sewing ever since then. 2. History of Pattern Sizing: In this section we're going to discuss the history of pattern sizing and why clothing and patterns sizing or so weird. Before the invention of modern spinning machines, all fabric was made by hand with hand spun yarns in hand woven fabrics. This made fabric a very precious commodity. It was extremely expensive and there was a limited supply. Clothing was made using hand tailoring and draping techniques. Clothing was typically refashion, allowing the reuse of cloth. The very first sewing patterns appear in Spain around 15, 89 in the book Libra, they geometric practica tracker by Juan de I'll Sega. By the 1700s and 1800s, a tailor would measure, pattern, cut, and assemble each piece of clothing to size for their client. These clients were primarily wealthy individuals. All clothing at this time was made to order and there was no truly established universal sizing system. Tailors were very closed about how they sized in proportion garments. And each Taylor had their own way of doing things. Regular, average everyday people, of course, would have to make their own clothes. In the 1800s, books for Home settlers began to be published. These books often used a system of special proportion rulers to avoid complex math for home sellers. Some books were sold in alongside printed paper patterns. During the 1800s, women's magazines started to gain popularity. These magazines often offered printed patterns or pattern drafting instructions. It was up to the home, so were to redraw the patterns at full size and redraft them to fit their bodies. In the 1880s, Haley's magazine and go Ds, Lady's Book began printing full-sized patterns. These patterns were printed in one size with no scale measurements for enlarging. A home sower had to know how to resize the pattern to fit their body. The world of fashion magazine in England was one of the first magazines to offer full-sized, full-scale patterns, including a fold-out supplemental to the magazine. Soon after other magazines started to publish fold-out patterns as supplements. The Napoleonic, Crimean and American Civil Wars progress the need for mass-produced clothing in an early form of standardized sizing. During the American Civil War, thousands of men were measured and the measurements were recorded. Mathematical patterns in the size of the chest, waste and legs emerged. The set sizes of uniforms were created and a new technology comes about. This starts the emergence of ready-to-wear. Heading into the late 1800s and early 1900s, women's wear was still considered a home industry and lack standardized sizing. Men's clothing sizes are sold using sizes based on body measurements. Women's Garments sizes are being sold based on arbitrary numbers that do not correspond to the measurements of the body. A pattern block is a base pattern by which all other shapes for clothing can be created through the manipulation of the base pattern. Charles heckling are created one of the first systems of women's pattern blocks for a range of body sizes in the late 1800s. One of the biggest factors holding back standardized women's clothing sizes was the course. It, the course it changed women's proportions, making it hard to make any sort of standardized measurements based on what you will call typical size proportion of the female form. Of course, it's began to fall out of fashion in the early 1900s in Paris. The rest of the world starts to change in the years following. This allowed the natural shape to be seen and used in fashion, leading to more options and ready-to-wear for women. Women also started accepting the idea of ready-to-wear clothing. Around this time. The US government funded a project in 1939 to gather statistics about weight measurements and 58 size measurements from 15,000 women throughout the country. The goal was to analyze key measurements in order to predict other body measurements. This study was skewed as it was only including white women. Additionally, body models were paid a fee to participate. The vast majority of participants were mainly poor women. These women often suffered from malnutrition, skewing the measurements and the study sizing system close to what we know today using the numbers 8342 was created in 1958. The arbitrary numbering system is based on the bus size combined with a letter to denote height in either an increase or decrease in size to account for hip measurements. In the 1970s through 1980s, the sizing system was modified based on consumer tastes and body types. Companies began adding lower numbers like zero to n, eventually zero-zero into the system. The waist measurement that was a size 12, was changed to be a size eight. This new system is called vanity sizing. Vanity sizing using lower numbers leveraged a bit of psychology so that women would feel they wore smaller size with different numbers. Sizing became a marketing tool. Instead of just a way to mark the measurements of the garment, the government did not regulate these sizes. The American standards for Testing and Materials, ASTM was created in 18, 98 and has been publishing standards for many years. In 1995, the ASTM publish its own non-mandatory sizing standard. This is the beginning of a major downsizing in size numbering two measurements. The 990s A5 size, standard size two, becomes a size 00 by 2011, Marilyn Monroe, who famously wore a size 12 in the 1960s, would become a size six. By 2011. Women are also increasing on average body measurements as a whole. The textile clothing technology corporation conducted the first true widespread study of Americans women's bodies called size USA in the early 2000s, just under 10,000 women between the ages of 18.80 from across the country were bodies scanned. This study identified nine distinct female body shapes. The traditional hourglass body type was only true for approximately 8% of the women in the study. Similar surveys were then conducted in the UK, South Korea, and in Mexico. Alpha sizing or sizing with a letter such as SML and XL are used in a lot of casual sports where we're, there's a good amount of stretch in the fabric, such as t-shirts and leggings. This sizing typically combines two to three numerical sizes into a single size letter. The system originated as part of a European size standard, first developed in 1996. It simplifies transition between different international size standards, making it easier for global customers to shop. Let's talk a little more about vanity sizing because I think this is a really important concept to understand. Vanity sizing is typically decided based on the median sizes within a brand or clothing line. The middle sizes are costed and developed, and then several sizes are graded up and down from the median sizes. Typically the median size is designed to fit the largest block of their consumers. This means that depending on the sizing of the typical consumer for a brand, measurements may be very inconsistent when attached to the arbitrary numbering systems of sizes. This is why a size 8.1 clothing line might be a size six in another clothing line by measurements. And this occurs in our sewing patterns as well. So pattern designers do this same concept of vanity sizing based on the expected audience of the clothing patterns, accompanying devices, a standard size set of blocks by which they create the variations of those blocks to make new designs. The Big Four pattern companies that are found at retail craft stores and are really easy to acquire such as simplicity, buttery, Logan recalls, have a much more traditional our shape block is these blocks were originally developed in the 1950s. And they are working on developing new blocks. And you'll see different parts of the pattern lines where that is the case. But still, the traditional size block tends to be the norm for the Big Four pattern companies. So the numbering system on these is based on numbers that are closer to the 1950s numbering systems then are more modern numbering system. So for instance, a modern size four might be a size 12 on the pattern envelope. But we have to keep in mind that a size four is relative which brands size four. But we can see though that we don't want to even come close to picking our size number on a Big Four pattern blocks such as a simplicity pattern or evoked pattern, based on what you typically look for if you were to say purchase clothing on Amazon. Now, indie pattern companies, also known as independent pattern companies, typically cater to their audience and have more modern size proportions with pattern size numbering that looks more like what you would see in a retail store than what you would see in a Big Four pattern. So this means that when we're talking about size, we can have a really wide variety of those arbitrary numbers that we talked about and we learned about in the history of patterns sizing that the size that we need to pick must be based by comparing your body measurements to the measurements of the pattern itself. So really what we're talking about is the pattern piece must fit around your body when you are done sewing or else why are you making the garment? So again, I just want to reiterate that the only way to determine the size in a sewing pattern that you need is by comparing your body measurements with the size chart and the pattern itself. But please, please, please do not be discouraged by the size number on his sewing pattern anymore than you should be discouraged by size number in a brand when you buy clothing at the store at the end of the day, a size is just an arbitrary number attached to a set of measurements. It has no value other than select the pattern size you need so that you can. So an amazing garment. Besides, when you finish your garment, it'll be whatever size you say it is. 3. Tips for Accurate Measurements: Let's talk about tips for taking in getting accurate measurements. Measuring is the key. So all great. So okay, number one, tip, don't suck in. The point of sewing is to make a garment that fits you, not to get upset about your measurements. Were you? And measurements just represent a mathematical value you will need to use to create a garment that fits. Cheating yourself by sucking in to get a smaller waist size or squirming around until the hip size looks the way you want, will only make garment that doesn't fit you. So you don't have to share those measurements with anybody else but yourself, but you do need to get accurate measurements to make a garment that fits your body properly. Number two, your undergarments matter. So depending on what you're making, you might wear different kinds of undergarments. So what you need to do is when you get ready to make something, be at evening wear or coat or a pair of pants you need to wear any undergarments or clothing you will be wearing underneath the garment that you're creating. So think about things like Ross shape where that you might choose to have undergarment. Are you making an overcoat that you want to fit over your favorite bulky sweater? Whatever it is that you're going to put this garment on top of, you need to be wearing that specifically when you do your measurements. Now, I'm going to make a little extra note Ambras, breasts can change shape significantly based on which brought you wear. And it can change the height of the bus as well as the overall bus size. So that is probably one of the really key critical components here, as well as shape where will significantly change your body size. Okay, next, measure every time you. So no matter what, I know, that sounds really ridiculous. But unless you So for yourself and you make new garments every week without fail and you're measuring yourself constantly. You don't know what your measurements are. It's really easy to gain a little way, lose a little way. You wrote down your measurement wrong last time. Just give yourself a quick measure overall to see what if your measurements are close to what they were last time you measure it yourself. If you so often don't sell very often, then this one is definitely critical to measure yourself every time you. So no matter what. Another common mistake that people make is putting their fingers inside the measuring tape. When measuring, don't include your thumb. People will have their thumb inside or first couple of fingers. You want to make sure that you don't have your finger inside that measuring tape, which will accidentally of course make that measurement to big. Next, Don't hunch or stoop or hold your body in a strange way when you're taking measurements. Something like the stomach on the waste, when we bend over the waist, size changes significantly and patterns are designed to give you measurements based on use standing straight without hunching, stooping, or twisting. So if you're struggling to make, take a measurement, you may need to get a helper, but you definitely want to make sure that you are standing in your normal standard upright posture when taking your measurement. Don't hold your measuring tape too tight or too loose. So we want the type to be snug. It's not enough that it won't droop, but not so snug that it is causing bulging or pinching that their skin hanging over. So we want that measurement to be just right, not too tight, not too loose. Now, this one's a really important one that a lot of people they forget to do and even sometimes I forget to do is just using a mirror to check yourself when measuring. So you want to make sure that certain measurements might be perpendicular or parallel to the floor that you are reaching, all the spots that you're supposed to reach. So using a mirror to check yourself when measuring is really, really important. I think that's one of the most super helpful things when I'm measuring myself. Next, I mentioned this before. Get a helper for measurements you can't reach on your own if you can find a helper. So my husband is not the particularly best person to help me measure, but I need him and I teach him and I'll show him in the mirror are based on him what measurement that I'm taking ahead of time so that he can see what he needs to do with my body. And again, this is where the mirror helps, where the person who's helping you, you can say put the tape a little lower or a little higher to more to the center and you can have someone help you. But definitely some measurements that we might take on a pattern, especially across your back, would be very difficult to acquire on your own. There are ways to do it, and I'm not gonna get into that in this course, but definitely find a helper with circumference measurements. Your tape measure needs to be parallel with the floor. So sometimes your body might be shaping in a way or you're holding yourself in a way where when you pull the tape tight, it pulls the tape no longer parallel with the floor in that case, loosen your tape a little bit. In the case of, for instance, I have a sway back. That can be a problem. So this is where that whole looking in the mirror to make sure that those measurements that you're taking are parallel with the floor because that's going to make a huge difference in how your garment sits on your body and affects drape, because drape is all affected by gravity. Here's one that I've learned over the years when you are taking body measurements that come from a key point, maybe the top of your shoulder, or a bust point where we're gonna be taking several measurements as we talk later on in this course, using a sticker or a pin that you've placed onto your clothing to help you take that measurement consistently from the same point, because we'll be taking different measurements from the same point, can be a big help. So that's just whatever you have available. It can be some silly stickers. I have a whole bin of stickers room when my kids were little. You could use pins made in a crosshair, safety pin, whatever works for you, but just grabbed some things so that you can easily mark that same point. And if you're measuring yourself without say, a shirt on, maybe you just have your bra on. It helps to put on like maybe a very thin cancel or very snug leggings that you can attach that too. So if you're if you're measuring yourself where you don't have any clothing to attach that to. You can always add some tights or some pantyhose or a set of thin camera soul, something that won't significantly affect the size of your measurements. Okay, let's talk about our wastes. So your natural ways is gonna be different from that spot that you oftentimes call your waist, which maybe that's where your favorite pants set. Some people like their pants, is it higher or lower skirts things so and waste length or waist height actually changes by fashion. So when we discuss waste, we're talking about your natural waist, which is the narrowest part of your wastes on your body. So oftentimes, and this is not the same for everybody. Your natural waist is three or four fingers above your belly button, but it could be higher or lower based on your body shape. So one of the easiest ways to do this is to tie a bit of elastic snugly, but not so tight that it's bulging around your waist. Keep it on for awhile. You again, you want to be wearing like maybe a thin castle something or you could even put this on under your clothes. Have move around, sit down, stand up, touch your toes, whatever it is, go walk around the house for a while and then come back and see where that tape ends up. Leave that elastic there while you're doing all your measurements because you may have to measure both vertical and horizontal measurements from your waist, as we're gonna see later on. And that is going to be one of the easiest ways to find what is called your natural waist versus the waste on the item of clothing. And we'll discuss that when we look at patterns about that. But when we draft patterns as pattern designers, we're leveraging the actual natural waist size when we tell you the waist measurement so that you can select your pattern. 4. Key Measurements: In this section, we're gonna talk about some key measurements that you need to know throughout this course. The high bust is taken around the back, under the armpits, and over the bust. So it's one of those odd measurements where you're not actually going to be completely parallel with the floor on this one. So this one, you don't want to take two super tight, give yourself a little room because the chest moves up and down when you breathe. But in general, the back of the tape. So here we are looking at the back should be parallel to the floor, but the front will come up at an angle over the top of your bus. Now, we'll go into greater detail over when to use high bust and when to use the, the, what you would consider probably the more traditional bust measurement later. But this is a significant help for people who have a larger bussed to maybe under bus proportion. So when you have a larger cup size and we will do, maybe you may oftentimes need what's called a full bust adjustment. Or you find that patterns fits you except for in the bus, like they might fit you at the waist and they'll put you under the bus and they'll fit you in the arm. This is going to be a very helpful measurement to have, especially when you go to the store shopping for patterns if you're shopping in person. Next, we're going to talk about the full bust. This is taken around the absolute fullest part of the bust, whatever wherever that might be. I know in this picture we are right in the center, but depending on where your bus sits, it might be a little higher or a little lower. We're going here is the largest measurement that we can take around this general body area. And what we need to do in this measurement is ensure that the tape is parallel to the floor, both in the front and the back. Now we'll talk about the full hip circumference. This is taken at the fullest part around the hip. This might be lower and might be higher depending on how your body is. So there is another measurement that we'll take this a little higher called the high hip. But right now what we're talking about is the full hip circumference. And when a measurement Renee pattern has the waist and hip. This is what we're talking about. We want to make sure that your hip fits inside of that garment wherever it is. And we want to make sure we have the largest part of the area on this sort of general vicinity down here. Now we have the natural waist circumference. So you can see in this very perfect model here that the natural waist circumference is the smallest part of the waste. Now, depending on your figure type, this may be higher, this may be lower. In, we talked about using that elastic band to help find this part. And when a pattern says the waste, this natural waist circumference is what a pattern is referring to, not necessarily where you might like to wear your pants. Because for instance, I like to wear my pants very high, but I know a lot of people who liked to wear their pants much, much lower than where I do. So you want to find your natural waist here that when we use this measurement, now, we're going to talk about the front bust. The front vest is taken across the fullest part of the bus, but this does not include the back. And so this is going to help us whenever we are adjusting for cup size. So what you're gonna wanna do is if you think of the side seam that's going to go directly down the body here, like that. We're going to go from this point here. We're gonna go around the body, around the front to that same point on the other side. And we want to make sure again, this is parallel to the floor, so that is the front plus. Now this is a measurement you may need a little help with. This is the across back measurement. So this is a back only measurement. What we're going to do here is we're gonna be going from here to here. We're going to basically be thinking of if you were wearing a snug sleeveless shirt, Where does that sleeve end? Or you can think about a very well fitted button down shirt made from a woven fabric. Where would the line of the arm CMV here. So that's what we want. We want the fullest part across the back. This is especially important in people who might have any differences where your back isn't, what you would call quote unquote regular. No one's actually regular. So there isn't such a thing. But this helps to account for different variances in our backs. So if you have a broader back, but maybe a narrower front, then that helps with the fitting here. So next we're going to talk about the waist circumference at the pattern physician. So once you've determined and figured out where the patterns design will sit on your waist. This could be higher, this could be lower. This is wherever it is on the pattern. You can actually then measure that point on your body to figure out, to compare the pattern pieces themselves, not necessarily the size chart, but the pattern pieces themselves to your actual body measurements. And again, the tape should be parallel to the floor. Let's talk about the high hip circumference. The high hip circumference is usually taken around 6 " or so below the waist measurement. It's very useful for people with fuller lower abdomen or a low setting hip circumference. So to take this measurement, you're just going to go and find this sort of general location on your body. And you're going to use your tape and keeping it parallel to the floor, take that measurement. I find this measurement extremely useful, especially in skirts or dresses, where there's really no fitting sort of below the, in this lower area here. Because I tend to carry more weight lower. So I will use this hip measurement when I am looking at the pattern rather than my lower one, when I'm thinking of having what size I should pick in that pattern. 5. More on Measurements and Fitting: In this section we're going to talk about using measurements. Let's review a few of the key measurements and talk a little bit about how we're going to use them. We talked about the high bust and the full bust. So we want to use the high bust measurement to compensate for differences in cup size. So if your cup size is larger than a D, you're gonna wanna use your high, high bust measurement and then proceed to a full bust adjustment on your pattern. If you're in-between sizes, go down to size. If the garment is very fitted or you're working in a, in a woven or very, very fitted garment. You want to go up a size with the full hip circumference. This is an essential measurement in selecting pattern size. We talked about that when we were looking at the measurements. So we're going to generally use the full hip circumference when looking to compare the hip on a sewing pattern, if you are between sizes, you're gonna go down to size unless the garment is very fitted and then go up the size. Then the natural waist circumference. We talked a lot about that, that we're going to use that to select the waist size on the patterns. If you are again, between sizes, generally go down to size and list the garment is very fitted where you can go up a size. So let's talk a few questions. What do I do when my top and bottom are different sizes and the pattern envelope? So this happens to me actually all the time that I generally where one size larger on my bottom than my top. Which is why I love sewing my own clothes, because I don't have to worry about that dress fitting me perfectly in the bus and just will not go over my hips. I can make these clothes fit. My preferred approach for this is what's called size blending. And we're going to talk about that way more and show you how to do that in the course. But I just want you to understand that we can do these things. We can blend sizes. So when you do this, you might go with the size that fits your top and then blend to the bottom. Or you might start by selecting the bottom blend to the top. In reality, what we're doing is we're going to look at both sizes. You might be a size 12 on top and a 14 on bottom or maybe a 16 on bottom or all of these things we can blend. We can actually blend out the waste, the bus and the hip into different sizes. Size blending is important to know is it's not an exact science, but they can get us quicker to the pattern alterations we need them by just selecting one size. Of course, we could go a very traditional way. We could cut the pattern out. And then one size we could do it selecting based only on your top bust measurement, which is the old-school rule, is select based on bust and then fix the other parts. But I find blending is a bit of a shortcut. Now blending is only going to work for us if we have a multi-sided pattern. And we didn't cut our pattern to pardon any point before. But I'm going to show you a lot of details on how we do this size blending later on in the course. But just know size blending is a great approach for when you are two different sizes in different parts of your body. So what do I do when parts are too long or too short? Sleeves too long, just leave too short torso too long torso to short. The calf areas too long, the thigh areas too long, lengthening and shortening are really easy. We do not need different pattern sizes for this. We can lengthen or shorten any area in the body. We can use a slash and spread or slash and shrink technique and any point. So we just need to identify the point where it is too long or too short once we do a fitting or when we do our measuring. So this one is a really easy one and doesn't affect the size of the pattern that you select. Okay? What do you do when your size is not available in a pattern, but you just love that pattern. Well, something we call grading. Grading is the process of enlarging or shrinking patterns to fit new sizes. Grading is not just adding or taking away the side seams. If you need three more inches in a pattern because the bust is that much too small or the waste is to smaller, the hip is too small. You can get away with a little bit on the side seams. But if you just start adding to the side seams, you are quickly going to find that pattern no longer seems to feel right. It might fit around your body, but it's not going to look nice and it's not going to feel nice when you wear it. So grading is not as hard as you think, and you can grade your own patterns to fit you. The cut and spread or the slice and spread and slice and shrink method work excellent. You select multiple areas and you grade across both vertically and horizontally. Now, I'm not gonna go over grading in this course. Now you know what word to lookup. So there are lots of great videos and things available out there on the Internet to look up pattern grading. But just so you know, you can grade your patterns, It's not that hard. It takes some time and effort and it will require a test garment or a Muslim, but it's worthy to do, and it's worthy to learn how to do so that you can use any pattern that you want at any point in time, no matter what your size is compared to the size of the pattern and what it comes in. 6. Learning about Ease: So let's talk about what is ys and how is 0s used in selling patterns. So why do we need to learn about ease when selecting a size? So understanding the concepts of 0s will allow you to understand how and why a pattern is designed to be larger or smaller than the body measurement. Knowing how much is in the garment will help you to understand if the pattern will fit you in that measurement. Knowing what ease is and how and why you need it will help you to select a size that will fit your body, that will also be comfortable to wear. So before we talk about ease, we're going to talk about a block or a slope, or a slope or, or block is a base pattern like what you see here, by which other patterns can be designed. Blocks or slippers have a minimum amount of ease added in order for them to fit the human being. There are two types of ease in pattern-making. There is wearing 0s, which is the amount of space added to the garment over the body measurements in order to be able to wear the garment. Then there is design ease, which is the amount of space added to the pattern over the wearing ease for style purposes. So let's talk about wearing ease. Wearing ease is the amount of space added during the pattern drafting process up above the physical body measurements. Positive wearing ease is required for woven fabrics. Negative yz is used in knit fabrics. The amount of space needed for wearing ease is based on the specific part of the body. So maybe the waste, the bus, the hips, etc, and the type of fabric the pattern is intended for, whether it's a knit or a woven fabric. Here, we can see a picture where there is the minimal wearing is needed here. Let's talk about wearing E is in woven fabrics. Woven fabrics have a very minute amount of mechanical stretch in the lengthwise and crosswise green. When you sit, bend, move, your body changes, shape, different areas will grow or shrink in girth, in length as you move. If you make a woven garment exactly to your body measurements, you will have no room to breathe, no room to sit. You won't be able to move your arms. Wearing ease is added to give you the ability to move. Over here, I have included a chart from the minimum wearing E is for woven fabrics for different areas of the body. For instance, in the bust, we need two to 3 " in the waste, one to one-and-a-half inches, the hip, one-and-a-half, two 3 ", and the upper arm about 1.5 ". Now, these are just the general minimums. Not every pattern designer has to apply these in any sort of strict standards, but they're just the general averages that we start with. Your comfortable amounts of wearing ys could be different than these comfortable amounts of wearing 0s. So negative wearing ease is used in knits. Negative yz means you are subtracting a certain amount from the body measurment, forcing the fabric to stretch over the body shaping and nits is accomplished without darts using negative yz. So the more the fabric stretches, the more negative yz is used in a sewing pattern. A good example is a pair of leggings, like you see over here. Hold those leggings up to your body when you're not wearing them. And they should be considerably smaller than your actual body. Shaping is partially accomplished with cut and partially with the stretch of the fabric, which you can see here, an example of leggings. What is design ease? Well, design ease is added on top of the Wearing is to achieve styles. A hoodie is a good example of a garment with a lot of design ease. Design ease is used the same way in both knits and Romans. And the amount of ease is up to the designer trying not to leverage the fact that there is designing and selecting your size, you may not achieve the style and the illustration or the picture of the pattern. If you do this, if you find you need to go beyond the wearing ease and into the design ease of a pattern. You might need to grade that pattern up in your size. So for instance, the sweater that she's wearing here has a lot of design ys in it. You can see that it's much larger than her body, and that is because of the style of this garment. So what is combined e's, well, this is a term that I like to use, which denotes the amount of wearing yz plus any design ease in the pattern. So when we learn to measure patterns, we will be finding the combined ease. This will be up to us to figure out just how much of that ease is wearing and just how much is designed. We can find this amount by using some simple math and knowing the typical amount of V is needed in a certain measurement. So 0s and pattern design. So let's talk a little bit about the typical big pattern companies, the big four pattern companies, McCall, simplicity, butter, invoke, generally use the same block and ease amounts in that block. So for fitted patterns, those with very little to no design ease, they will require more fittings and then patterns with a lot of designers because they have to fit more snugly to the body. There is a general standard for minimum ease, while there is no standard for design ease. But you can use descriptions like loose fitting or body con, or body conscious that will tell you a lot about how much design ease is in the pattern. You can also look at the picture or the illustrations. So this chart is included in your downloads as with all of the presentation. And this will tell you a little bit about approximately how much design ease is gonna be in a garment based on the wording they use. So for instance, in a dress, blouse or shirt, if it's labeled close fitting, it might have somewhere 0-2 and seven eighths inch ease. And these are not anything that is hard set, but this is just kind of an idea. So if you see the words, very loose fitting, semi fitted, loose fitting. And this can help you even in buying ready-to-wear clothes, because this will give you an idea of how this fits on your body. And this can also help you by thinking about your own ready-to-wear and things in your closet and how you like them to fit on your body. 7. Wovens, Stretch Fabrics, and Recovery: Next we are going to talk about knits and woven fabrics in garment making. Patterns are designed differently for knits and Woman's, it is important to understand the difference when you're selecting a size. Read your pattern description or pattern envelope to determine if your pattern was designed for knits are Walden's. Generally, you cannot use a woven fabric if your pattern is designed for knits without altering your patterns significantly, you can use a knit when a pattern is designed for wealth ends with a little understanding of how to alter a pattern when using a knit. Let's talk and learn a little bit about knit fabric. So not all knits stretch in the same direction or in the same amount. There are three basic kinds of knits. Two-way stretch knits, four-way stretch knits, and stable knits. Stable knits have almost no stretch and are generally treated like woven fabrics. Two-way knits stretch left and right, while for way knits stretch in all directions. So here I have two sample fabrics. The first Fabric is a two-way stretch. It will stretch this way, but no movement except a tiny bit of mechanical movement this way. This fabric is a four-way stretch. It stretches very nicely this way. And when we stretch this way, it does have some stretch in this direction, but not nearly as much stretch as it did in the opposite direction. Four-way stretch fabrics can have different amounts of stretch in different directions. So that is the difference between a two-way and a four-way stretch. Recovery is a term that we use when we talk about knit fabrics. Recovery describes how well a knit fabric goes from stretched to its original unstretched position. A knit fabric that has good recovery, fully returns to the unstretched position quickly without the aid of being washed. A knit fabric with poor recovery is slow to return or does not return to the unstretched position without washing the fabric. A good example of this is a sweater where the elbow is look stretched out when your arm is straight. Now let's talk about knit Recovery. Let's go ahead and look at the size of this piece of knit fabric. Now, I'm going to stretch this out and let it come back. I want you to take a look at the size. Do you see how it grew? Take a look at how uneven this looks on the folder where I've been playing with it. This that has what we would call poor recovery. This means this and it does not return to its original shape very well after stretching, poor recovery indicates a lower quality of fabric. Next, I want to look at this piece of fabric here. When I stretch this and let it return naturally, it does come back much more quickly and accurately to its original size. This fabric has much better recovery than this fabric. Now, excellent recovery would be if we pull to this fabric and it returned quickly and exactly to its original size, only the highest quality nits will have excellent Stretch recovery. 8. Calculating Stretch Percentage: Let's talk about stretch percentage. Stretch percentage describes the amount the fabric will stretch without damaging the fabric. Stretched percentage is critical to Patterns designed with negative ease. Patterns will describe the type of knit you should be using. For instance, a two-way or a four-way knit. Patterns designed for nits will describe the stretch percentage the pattern is designed for. There's usually an area marked on the pattern envelope or in the directions for you to test your fabric to see if it has the correct stretch percentage for the pattern. Let's talk about swapping 2-way and 4-way stretch fabrics. So you can use a four-way stretch instead of a two-way stretch and the pattern will work, but it might fit a little loose. You cannot use a two-way stretch when your pattern calls for four-way stretch without altering your pattern. If your fabric has a higher stretch percentage than the pattern calls for, you can use the fabric, but the garment may fit looser. You might want to go down to size. In this case, if your fabric has two little stretch, you will need to select a larger size or alter your pattern. You might have to increase two or three sizes. This all depends on the stretch percentage requested and the stretch percentage of your actual fabric. So let's talk about calculating the stretch percentage. I'm going to demo this, but first we're going to look at the mathematical formula we will use, and later we will talk more about it. So what we're going to talk about is the stretched width is going to be divided by the unstretched width minus one multiplied by 100. And that gives us our stretch percentage. So I know that's a lot to take in, but we'll break this down. If I have a four inch wide piece of fabric and it stretches to 5 ", this is how the formula would look. We do 5/4 and then subtract one and multiply by 100. That means that our fabric would stretch 25%. That would be our stretch percentage. To calculate the stretch percentage, the first thing we want to do is take a bit of fabric and we're going to fold it over. We want to check it on a folded area because the ends don't always stretch the same as the middle. And we want to check it where it would stretch in the middle of the fabric. The cards on my work surface are here just to help illustrate what I am going to do. I'm going to center my fabric and put a pin at the start of my mark of 4 ". I'm going to put another pin at the end of my four-inch mark. This is going to be the space where I am measuring. Then holding a pin in each hand, one on the zero mark, I'm going to pull the other a controlled amount. I could pull this fabric further, but I can feel the fabric starting to get less pliable and it isn't able to move as much. You have to feel for the amount of stretch in the fabric. This is comfortably stretching to 6 ". To calculate our stretch percentage, we will use the formula. So we do 6/4 them subtract one and multiply by 100. This means this fabric has a stretch percentage of 50 per cent. Now we're going to take a look at the second fabric. We know that this is pretty stretchy from our previous videos. I'm going to mark it at the beginning and the end of my 4 " with pins. And I'm going to repeat the same procedure we did before. I'm going to grab a pin in each hand and I'm going to pull here. This stretch is comfortably to six and 1.5 ". Now, it could pull it further, but we don't really want to just doesn't feel very good in the fabric. You have to feel this in your fabric. From here, we can calculate the stretch percentage for this direction. But before we do that, let's look and calculate the stretch percentage for the opposite direction. So we would fold the fabric over in the opposite way and mark out our 4 ". This piece is a little skimpy for this, but I'll go ahead and show you anyway. I'm going to stretch this across in this comfortably goes to the five-minute mark, but you could take this a little further at the five-and-a-half inch mark. But to be on the safe side, I'm gonna go ahead and call this at 5 ". So this fabric stretches 4-5 " in this direction. Now, just take a little note that the recovery in this direction is more poor than the recovery in the opposite direction, then it's just important to note, so you know how to work with this fabric. Now, for this fabric, we're going to calculate the stretch percentage in each direction. So we're going to need two calculations. So for what I'll call the left-right stretch, we take six point 5/4, subtract one and multiply it by 100, that gets us 62.5%. For the opposite direction stretch, we take five and divide by four, subtract one, and multiply by 100, and that gives us 25 per cent stretch. Now, if you don't want to do the math, I have a chart or a cheat sheet here, and this will be downloadable that if you start with a six inch by four inch piece of fabric and you mark the center with a pin. You just have to see how far your fabric stretches. So we'll go ahead and I will show you the rest of the chart. So this just continues on again, like I said, this will be downloadable. 9. Practicing Using Size Charts: Let's have a little practice at selecting your size when you were searching or buying a pattern. So let's say we go to the craft store and we have a few of our basic measurements that we know in mind. And we want to figure out which envelope to buy or we're downloading a pattern and maybe it has a split size download. So here I have a scan of a vogue pattern. This is for this body suit here. And let's suppose that our body measurements were a 39 inch high bust, a full bust of 42 inch, a waste of 36, and a full hip of 47. So let's take a look at this size chart and see where we might fit on the size chart. So I'm going to come here and it looks like I think the primary measurement we're going to need here is the bus, because the bus has to fit correctly over everything else. It would be relatively easy to adjust the waist in comparison or to actually use our blending techniques that we will learn to adjust the waste. So our bust here we have a full bust of 42 and high bust of 39. So let's see where the bust is at. If we have a 42. So that is right here with a size 20. And the waste is for a 36. So the 36 is somewhere between here and here. So in my opinion, I would probably select the size 20 for this measurement. Now it has something called chest. Chest is gonna be the high bust and the high bust of 39 with a chest of 40. So this size 20 looks pretty spot on. So that's what size I would look at just as I'm choosing to buy or when I'm prepping to start working with this pattern, we would still need to, of course, measure the pattern pieces themselves. Then let's look at this skirt. This is just a simple a line skirt and we're going to look at a waste of 36 and a full hip of 37. So we're gonna go down here to the waist and we're going to look for a 36, but says in-between sizes and the hip. And they do specify now this is nice. A hip specifies 9 " below the waist, which would help you to know where to measure to get that same hip measurement that they're getting. And that is a hip of a 47, which is kind of looks like it's gonna be even up a size off of this pattern envelope. And so if I were very hourglass in this shape, we're looking at here, I would probably go ahead and do the waste and the hip here from this size 22. And then I would navigate my pattern from here, possibly grading up if I needed a bit of extra room in the hip. But I wouldn't measure these pattern pieces to be for certain, but I would definitely say I would be in the 22 category if those were my measurements. Let's take a look at this top. This is a pattern that I'm going to look at, looking at the bust first. So I'm going to come across here. We have a bust of 42 and a waste of 36. The hip does not matter because there's really no fitting to the hip here. So we have a bust of 42 and a waste of 36. So in this case, I would do a blend from the 22. 22 because it's usually easier to fit with having a little extra room, especially with these nice starts here. I'll be able to fit that in really perfectly for me. So that's what I would do is go from the bust of a 20 and the waste of the 22. Now let's look at a PDF pattern from LAN MAC. Their size charts look a little different, but still we are going to work them the exact same way. So here we have our full bust of 42 and our waste of 36. So let's go ahead and search for the bust because this is a jacket patterns. So I'm going to go with the upper body bust measurement is my primary measurement to look for. So here we have a bust of 42, which puts us need extra large category here and a waste of 36, which actually fits us perfect in that extra large. 10. Deciding What Size to Print in a PDF Pattern: In this section we're gonna be talking about PDF patterns and what size or sizes we should be printing on a PDF pattern since we have the choice. So PDF patterns will typically come in a wide array of sizes, sometimes a massive amount of sizes. And if you were to print all of those sizes out, there's a lot of lines there and it can be really kind of dizzying almost to see that. So what most PDF designers go and do is they will do what's called layers in Adobe Illustrator and they will make it so you can turn layers on or off. And that reduces the amount of lines on your pattern. But here's the thing We talked earlier about, things like blending sizes. And at this point, we haven't actually measured the pattern pieces themselves. So we're going to want to do that before we decide our final, final piece sizes that we want to cut out. So what I like to do is printing both, selecting two sizes up in two sizes down on your pattern just based on your bust or high bus, depending on your cup size, waist and hip measurements. So go on those, figure out the chart. What size you would need by doing that. And then turn on that size, two sizes up to sizes down and then do your print and assemble. What that means is you're not going to have to go through all that work of assembling your pattern several times whenever we may want to do a blend, or you may find out after you've printed it, that the ys is just too small or the way the pattern has been designed, you really wish you would have had more sizes printed out, then you have to go through all that work again. And one, I absolutely love PDF patterns, but I absolutely hate taping them together. So I like to do that as few times as possible. 11. When to Use the "Wrong" Size: So one should I choose what I think is the wrong size? And when do I ignore the size and do a pattern adjustment instead? After measuring out a pattern, you may find that you dislike the amount of ease in that pattern. Sometimes you might find there's too much ease in all of the measurements. And then in this case, I might decide to use a smaller size from what the size chart recommends. The stretch factor of the unit you are using, effects what size you choose. If I have a very stretching it, I may choose to go down one or even two sizes based on the measurements of the pattern in reverse. If my net is not stretchy enough, I will go up a size or even two. So if you have determined that you are going to need a full or small bust adjustment, meaning that maybe the back across back fits you perfectly fine in a pattern and the waste fits you and the arms fits you, but it's just that front bust area. In other words, the cup size is too big or way too small for your body. So that is going to be when you ignore the bus size and proceed with a full or small bust adjustment, choosing the size that fits you best as the overall of your body and then adjusting the bust. This also applies when you have a full bottom. So remember, no pattern except one that has been custom drafted to your body exactly fits you without any alterations needed. It is up to you as the garment maker to make the adjustments needed to fit your body. 12. Measuring Patterns for Tops and Dresses: Here we have a bodice block. This block, Let's imagine this block has no seam allowances. This is a pretty standard woven block. We have a dart at the front, the dart at the back, a dart in the shoulder. So how would I evaluate measuring out the parts and pieces of this block so that I can figure out how this pattern works. So let's start by looking at the neck. So from a to B and a TB, that is going to control the neck lengths. Okay? So if you are measuring around your neck, and now let's remember, this is a one-half measurement. So this is one-half of the front neck and one-half of the back neck. Add these two together, multiplied by two, and you have your full neck length. So the next measurement we're gonna go to here is the shoulder length from B to C and then B to C, skipping the dark because that space is going to be enclosed. This here is our my markers are catching me. My shoulder length. Okay. So this is shoulder length and this is shoulder length. Here and here to this combined is the shoulder length. And we do not need to multiply this measurement by two because this is actually the full length. So let's move on to our center front here, from a to G, and our center back here from a to G. So this is centre and this is center front. If you were to compare these measurements to your body, this is the neck at center front, coming to the center front, natural waist. So on a block or on a slope or we always use the natural waist here is where this breaks. This is where this stops. So now we're gonna look at E to F and E to F on the front end, the back, this is going to be your side seam. So this sits at the armpit area under the sleeve. And so this is your side, length side. This is your side. Those are length measurements. These length measurements, we do not have to multiply by two. These are the full measurement. Now, let's go ahead and look at line C to D to E, and C to D to E. These are your arm hole measurements. And so this is also known as the arm ski. And so this is going to tell you the total length of your arm hole. So if you take this length plus this length and then took a soft ruler and put that around your body. You would actually be able to test and see if that arm hole measurement is going to work for you. Then lastly, we have at the bottom here, from F to here to g, G to here to f. This is going to be the waist. So this is the waist circumference here on this block or slope. So this is going to be one where we doubled. So we're going to take this plus this, plus this plus this, multiplied it by two, and you have your waist. Now, this pattern does not have the bust marked on it. But we can assume that the bus probably sits about somewhere here. So we could measure down from our neck line here and figure out on our body where our bus would come. But let's assume that somewhere about right here is the bust. We would measure from here to here and here to here. And then multiply that two by two, and that would be your bust measurement. So this is how we would measure the basics of a bodice front. Now, we can take the idea that we know what all these parts, how they apply to our bodies, all the spaces on the pattern. Then we can apply this to our knowledge of any sewing pattern to measure that and to see how big or small that pattern is. So we talked a little bit about ease. This pattern would have only wearing yz. So this is a block that would have literally just the Wearing is there's no design ease in this garment. So that's just to apply that ease concept. So let's go ahead and look at another block. Here we have a dress block or a dress slope. Or again, this looks pretty close to our bodies slope or except that we have some long darts here to control the waste at the center front and two in the front, two in the back. So let's go ahead and see how we would work this pattern. So again, we have from B to a and a to b. This is the neck. And we talked about the neck. Neck works exactly the same as it did on our bodies pattern. We have B2C and we have B2C and then this is the shoulder the shoulder length. We know how that works. So I won't talk more about the shoulder length began. That's where that is. Then let's go ahead and look here. From C to D to E. And from C to D to E, that is going to be our arm whole length here. And here we talked about that on the bottom slope or the bodice block. So that is the same here. So let's talk. We have a to I to H. So we have this new letter I. So a to i here. This is going to be the center front to waste. Okay, Then this is waist to him. So this could be however long your dresses. So this is the waste to him. And the full distance here is going to be the center front of the neck to the ham. And that is the same here. So a two I is to the waist and then to g is two the hem. Now let's look over here. We have E to F. F is the waste, and then down here to G. So this is going to be the full side seam. And from here to here, that is going to be from under the armpit. So that's gonna be the arm hole down to the waist. And from here is the waste, again, down to the hem. And then we'll mark it over here. E to F to G. Then let's go ahead and draw in where we feel the bust might be. And so the bus is going to be maybe not quite that high as we marked on the other one. So let's assume the bust dart. So we're going to assume the bus goes here, kind of here. So what we would do is if we are measuring the bust, we would go from here to here, here to here, and then we will call that the bus. Now, we would remove and subtract any space that has a dart in it. I believe on this pattern that dart would probably be a bit long and this is just kind of a general drawing. So don't be concerned about the length of this Dart. So we would have the bus there plus the bus here. And we multiply that by two and that is gonna give us our bust. And again, let's go ahead and do some of these circumference measurements. We have from F to E and F. Now that is the waste. And we measure that the same way we did on the slope or so. We're going to subtract here. Here. We subtract those in here, here, and we subtracted those. So that is going to be how we discovered the waist. We're going to measure this, subtracting out the darts. And then we are going to multiply that by two. Again, we multiply by two on the bus. So all of the width measurements we multiply by two. Then length measurements, we do not multiply. Then we can assume where the hip might be. We can either do it visually or we can measure, or sometimes our patterns might be marked. Let's assume our hip is somewhere around here. And then we can measure from here to here and here to here. And then that would be the hip. Okay, Now we're going to discuss the hem circumference after we finished the hip. And I already have this marked here. So we're going to go from here to here, and here to here. We're going to add those two together and multiply by two. And that is the hem circumference. The head circumference would sit wherever the length of the dress sits. And that is decided by the designer or by you as the pattern maker who can adjust that length. 13. Measuring Patterns for Bottoms: So here we have a skirt, front block, in a skirt back block, and we're going to start looking around at this skirt. So here we have from B to here to here to a, and from here to here to here to be, this is going to be our waste. And we saw this on both the bodice and the dress blocks. So there's going to measure out exactly the same way. We need to remember we omit or remove any darts in that measurement. And this is going to be one of those circumference measurements. So we add the two together and we multiply by two. So let's go ahead and do the rest of our circumference measurements and go across here like that. And across here like that, that is going to be our hip. I've marked with the hip with C. I know this because I've designed this block. It's not always marked. So you may need to devise where the hip might be to get a good general estimate. But we can oftentimes just see on a pattern like this, It's where that curve starts to. And so this would be the hip. And we would measure both of these, add them together, and multiply by two. And let's come down here and go from D to E and E to D. And this is going to be the circumference of the hem. So this is our him right down here. And we talked about that on the dress. This is gonna be exactly like the address where this is based on design. So however wide that is, is however why that is, but it's useful to check it because then you will know if that's what you want to make in your pattern. Let's go ahead and jump to here. So from here we have this is the center front. And from here we have this is the center back. And this is going to be from the waist at the center front to the hem. Same thing here for ways to him. And here is waist to hip. So those are those center front and center back measurements. So then we have B2C, which is going to be waist to hip. And this is going to be along that side seam. This can be very helpful in knowing if the hip is going to sit where you would expect it on your body. So this is a good measurement to take on sewing patterns. So again, on both the front and the back now these do need to be equal on the front and the back because these are going to be sewn together. So in reality, we would only need to measure on one of the pattern lines. Then we can continue this measurement all the way down to the hem. And then we have waist to hip to him. Continue that here. Then that really takes us through a skirt. Not a whole lot to measure here, but that is a skirt, bodice or slow over. Here we have two different sleeve blocks or slow verse. Here we have a short sleep, but this could be a long sleeve and this is what most slaves were, the front and back of the slave, and also the front bodice and the back bodies have the same size arm hole. So this could be most knit patterns and a whole, actually a whole lot of patterns you're going to see out there look like this. Short sleeve is here. Long-sleeved just goes longer and then this is a fitted monks leave. You'd see this in things like blazers and suit coats. So let's start talking about sleeves because the, this portion of the sleeve is kind of confusing to know what parts of this actually align to the parts of the bodies as well as the parts of the body. So let's start here. Here. Here are on this leaf here, and here. These are going to align to particular points. This is going to be essentially the armpit side seam. Armpits side same. These two gets sewn together. Armpit side seam, side seam up through this point here that's going to control the length of the sleeve cap. Just bear with me. This will become clear as we continue on. So this is gonna be the sleeve cap here and here. The same thing here and here. Now, here, B to C to D. This is going to control the height. This is actually the height of the sleeve cap. And if you're having problems, where from the top. So if this is the top when we go around here on the sleep, right? This is the shoulder seam, right? And so we have asleep that comes like this. This here is gonna be this here, this length here. If you're having tightness in this area, like here and here, this height needs increased. So we would take C up. Or down accordingly or if this is way too big. So knowing which parts these control is actually really important. And the double notches here represent the back and a single notch represents the front. That's pretty standard patterning methodology. So we've got that controlled. So that's actually the most complicated part. And so this total, this is the part that's this whole length here that has to fit into an arm hole of your sleeve. Now if you have gathering or if there is pleats or anything, there might be some additional space in that sleeve cap there which would add to some giving you additional room. Actually, sometimes I like to add a pleat it when I'm struggling here because it just gives me that little extra room in the top of my shoulder there. But that is a pattern alterations class, which is a whole nother thing. So here we have this whole thing that is the sleeve or the arm whole length. This is going to match that other measurement that we saw on the bodice. Now, from here to here, here to here, here to here, here to here. These are going to control the sleeve length. Now in a mirror and sleeve like this. These are the same in a sleeve here. That's a fitted sleep. This is going to be the front and this is going to be back. And we are controlling this with some shaping by here. So remember, we always subtract darts. So when we measure this, we subtract the dart, but having this little extra bit here that actually helps with the shaping of the arm in a suit jackets. So they're always shaped to have a little bit of extra room in that elbow area there. So we have one more measurement to look at, and that is here. And here. This is going to be the width at the bottom of wherever the sleeve hits. So this is the sleeve width. By can write at him. Sleeve with that him. And again here in a long-sleeved, this would be the wrist, like here. This is going to be around the wrist. In a shorter sleeved, this will fall somewhere on the bicep into three-quarter sleeve. It'll fall midway. So this is going to be wherever the end, wherever the hem of the sleeve sits, that's gonna be that width. And then this concludes looking at a sleeve block or slope. Then finally here we are going to look at a pant. Block. Pants have a little extra to look at because we obviously have a crotch now to handle. And there are a few additional measurements there. So let's look at the ones that we've already looked at before. So first, I'm going to take you through the waste. So here to here to here, here to here to here. That is the waste. And we've talked about that measurement. We know what that looks like. So here, coming down, Let's go ahead and talk about this. From here to here that is going to be waist to hip, here to here that is hip to crotch. Okay. That's the crotch depth which we may or may not need on that outside seam, but that's good to know. So here to here that is going to be to the knee and then to the hem. So we can measure to any one of these places. These may or may not lines may or may not be marked on your pattern. So we might have to estimate these, but these are good to know because you might need length, not between the knee and the bottom of the hymn. What if you need length here in the thigh? What if your thigh is longer or your calf needs to be shortened? We don't just always add to the bottom. By adding to the bottom, we're not putting length where we need it. So by knowing these measurements, we can adjust length where we need it. Because again, like I've said before time and again, every one's body is different. So we'll go ahead and mark this here. And let me get another color. And we're going to look at the circumference measurements. And so this from here to here, here to here, that is the hip. And we've talked about the hip measurement before. This is generally going to be the full hip. But if your hips It's lower. This might be the high hip from here to here, and here to here. That is going to be the distance from the inside of the crotch to the side seam in the front, the inside of the crotch to the side seam on the back. This measurement circumference wise, I don't use very often. It's just, I'm showing you you could measure this if you want it to. So here we have this distance here, this is going to be the circumference around the knee area. So if you have something very tight fitting, you may want to check and see if that fits around your knees. Or just for design purposes, you might want something that is wider at the knee. So you can decide here to here. This is going to be the distance at our him. So this is that circumference around the hem. So you'll know how wide around the bottom of that pant leg is going to be in. Remember we multiply these measurements by two. So let's go ahead and talk about a few more of the complicated measurements. So what I'm going to talk first about is let me get another color is B to C. So this controls the crotch depth. So this is where the inside of the crotch starts to starts to turn and go between your thighs. So if the crotch depth is too short or too tall, It's not going your pant is not going to fit well. So you want to measure this distance, comparing it to you. Then we have from line C to D, and this is controlling the crotch depth from the sort of the facing part of the body in through the inner thigh into the center. So depending on where a pan to feels tight, you might need to add room here, or you might need to add room here. So it's interesting because the crotch itself is both a vertical measurement, but it's actually been around measurement. And you can easily measure this distance on you by taking a measuring tape, taking it through your crotch area and actually going starting at the front of your body and then going around to the back of your body and you can get an estimate. But again, depending on how the crotch sits on the pant, is it a low riding pants as the crotch purposefully sit low like in some athleisure wear, they had a style for awhile where the crotch sat lower. So there's some of this is designed and some of this is just fit. But I do know that a lot of people, especially me for instance, where I have a bigger booty, this distance just on the back, not on the front, is usually too short for me. So I would actually do an alteration where I'm going to slash, I'm going to spread that open and I'm gonna give myself some length in here. So by increasing that length, I increase that space. But again, that's getting in the pattern alterations and we're talking about measuring. But when we measure and we know where to measure, then we will know if this is going to fit us before we decide what to do. And if a larger size through here might be useful than a larger size could be blended into this area. So you might end up blending here like that. Maybe we extend here to give that some more length. And then we might deepen it a bit that gives it some more length. And we could probably do that by just looking at a larger size up and blending that in. So there's a lot of different ways we can control that. And then here we have the in which you would know is the inseam. We have going from D to E to F. So this is the inseam from the inside of the crotch to the knee to them. And so that's the same on both of these in this controls everything on the pant. So now that we know how and where to measure, we will talk in the next section. We'll actually get out some real patterns and we'll do some measurements and see what those look like and compare those to a particular size. I'm gonna give you some human body measurements. And we're going to try and figure out how to select a size for that humans measurements for different various patterns. 14. Selecting the Size on the Back of the Envelope: We're gonna go ahead and take a look at this simplicity 12 82 skirt pattern. We will discuss how we will choose what size to copy for a specific set of body measurements. Since this is a skirt, we will not need to use the bust measurement. Let's assume we have a waste of 31 and a hip of 40. Let's start by looking at the waist on the size chart. The size 16 has a waste of 30, and the 1800's has a waste of 32. We're right in the middle. Our waste is 16-18. We are right on the size chart with the hip at the 40. So we could select to do the waste of the 16, or we could do the waste of the 1800s and then blend to the hip of the 16th. Because I'm going to show you blending and because I find it easier to always have a little more fabric than a little less. We're going to go ahead and select the wastes from the 1800s and the hip of the 16. Let's start looking at our pattern. I want to show you something that's common in many patterns. Here we have several pattern pieces, 78596 and the ten. These are all parts of the waist band. This is the upper back waste man. This is the lower back waste man. This is the upper front waste man. This is the front facing, the lower front waist band, and the back facing. There are multiples of each copy. You can see some have two, some have three. Now let's take a closer look at these. We see that this piece only has three sizes, 1,418.22. The other piece carries the size is 16.20. Let's go ahead and take away everything except the size 18. For instance, here we have a 16.20, here we have the 1,418.22. I just want to keep the 1800s since that is the size we selected for the waste. Once we do this, we will no longer have multiples of any of these pattern pieces. Now let's take a closer look at the size 18 pattern pieces. And then we can do some measuring. What is it we need to measure? We're looking for the narrowest part of the waist band to measure and compare it to our body waist measurement. I'm going to take away the facings since we don't need to measure those because they have to match the exterior pieces. Now are facings have been removed. If we arrange these, we can see that we have an upper back and the lower back, an upper and a lower front. This is an interesting design feature. We have two stacked waste man pieces. Let's hold onto these pieces. And in the next section we will talk about where to measure to find the finished waist measurements of the pattern pieces. 15. Start to Finish: Cutting Apart Pattern Pieces: We're going to work with this simplicity, one to eight to skirt pattern. It is a good example because it's pretty straightforward, but we'll show you how to handle pleats, which also applies to gathering as well. Everything I'm going to show you here would apply for it printed PDF pattern or if we're a preprinted pattern, we're going to work through this pattern and take this pattern from start to finish to see how I would select a size in this pattern. The first thing I'm going to do is separate the pattern pieces. I want to make them easier to work with when I go to copy the pattern, I do this to nearly all of my patterns. The one exception is patterns that are vintage or collect or patterns that I don't want to alter in any way. Make sure when you are cutting, not to cut too close to the pattern lines. The goal here is to separate the pieces so that we can copy them later, not to cut out a specific size. I like to leave a good amount of blank paper around each piece. After I'm done cutting, I oftentimes like to lay pieces over a chair if they're big or if they're small, just set them aside on a separate area. Put a little weight over them so they don't blow away accidentally. Let's take a closer look at these pattern pieces. Notice here how some information is placed below around the pattern piece. I want to be sure to leave this information attached to the pattern piece so we have it when we copy off the pattern. Sometimes there's a lot of extra blank paper around a piece. So I do like to remove some of the blank paper because it will make the pieces easier to fold up for storage. I'm gonna go ahead and cut out the rest of these pattern pieces. I will see you in the next lesson where we will flatten out or pieces using a warm iron. 16. Start to Finish: Flattening Pattern Pieces: The next thing we're going to do is straighten and flatten out all of the pieces using a warm iron. If we were to measure or work with our pattern pieces the way they are right now, you would see a very poor result. The folds and wrinkles can make significant changes in the dimensions of your pattern. We went to open up and flatten out all of the little folds and wrinkles so that we can accurately measure and work with our pattern. In order to smooth out these pieces, I'm going to adjust my iron to the lowest heat setting. We're going to turn our steam to the off position. Now with a dry iron, I'm gonna go ahead and simply work my way across the pattern piece using a little bit of pressure. Now you can see that we can take a pattern piece that looks like this. And now it will look like this. Very smooth with no problems. If you have a pattern piece that you folded that was taped together, you can put another piece of paper or an ironing cloth over that taped area where you need to smooth out a fold. We don't want to run our hot iron over the tape as the tape could melt into the iron plate and that would make a big mess. So I'm gonna go ahead and finish all of these pieces. And in the next lesson, we will start talking about measuring and sizing. 17. Start to Finish: Measuring for the Waist: In this section, we will be measuring the highest part of the waist band pieces to measure out the finished waste of this pattern. This will give us the smallest circumference of the waist band of this pattern. We will start by measuring the top of the upper friend. Using a soft measuring tape. I will negotiate the top of the waist band area by moving my tape around like so. These measurements do not have to be perfect, but try to be as accurate as possible within reason. I'm going to note this down as 8.3 quarters inches. Let's move on to the upper back waist band. We see a marking here. This is the marking of the waistline. The waistline notation on the pattern is the natural waistline. Remember from our previous section, so this means the narrowest space on your body where you measured your waist. Now we will measure the back waist band at the top, just like we did on the front, noting down the measurement of eight and 1.5 ". Now we know the size of the upper front, which is 8.3 quarters inches. We need to subtract the seam allowances. We have one seam allowance of Bible passage, so that gives us 8.1 eighths inches. Next we will multiply by two to get the full front of 16 and one-quarter inches. We know that the upper back measures eight and 1.5 ". Now we subtract the seam allowances to get 7.7 eighths inches. Next, we will multiply by two to get the full back, giving us 15 and three-quarter inches. Now that we have the following measurements, the full upper front and the full upper back. We can add those two together to get the full waste. So here we have a full waist measurement of 32 ". Next we will compare that against the body waist measurement of 31 ". Let's think about this. We had a natural waist body measurement of 31 " and the finished size of the waste is 32 ". We know that we need at least 1 " of ease for the waist measurement. So this actually works really well for us. But let's think about a different waist measurement. Supposed our waist measurement was 32 ", which is the size they show on the envelope. If we had followed the pattern and selected the size without measuring the pattern pieces, we would find that this skirt would fit way too tight. There'll be no room for wearing ease. This is the perfect example of why you should always measure the pattern and not just trust the measurements on the chart. But looking at all of this, I can confidently say that I think the size 18 would fit well for the waste sizing of a person with a 30 1 " waist. Next, we will look at the pieces involved for the hip and take that measurement. 18. Start to Finish: Finished Garment Size Markings: Here we have the skirt panels. We have a side back, a back, side front, and the front. The first thing I'm going to do is investigate these pattern pieces to see if the finished hip measurement is written on any of these pieces. Here we have found the finished garment hip measurement printed on the side front pattern piece. I wanted to point out the different patterns and pattern companies print finished garment measurements differently. Sometimes it will be in the directions, sometimes it is printed on a single pattern piece. It could even be over multiple pattern pieces. In this pattern, we are even lucky that the amount of ease in the hip measurement is actually printed on the pattern pieces alongside the finished garment measurements. We can see here that there is 6.5 " of ease from learning about E is we know that this is the combination of the wearing ease and the design ease in the pattern. Let's compare the body measurements to find finished measurements. So we know our hip on our body is 40 " and the finished garment at a size 16 is 46 ". We found that on the pattern. If we do the math, we can see that our ys would be 6 " versus 6.5 " listed on the pattern. I'm okay with that because that small change and designers won't really affect the overall look of this pattern. So based on what we know from the finished hip measurement here, the waist measurement that we took and our body measurements, we can confidently say that a size 18 wastes and a size 16 hip would be a good choice for us. In the next section, we will discuss what to do if the finished hip measurement had not been provided for us. 19. Start to Finish: Measuring for the Hip: Let's imagine that we were unable to find the finished garment measurements. How would we go about measuring this pattern? Where do we measure for the hip? This pattern does not have the hip line marked, which means we need to do a little bit of educated guesswork. We know that there is a certain amount of space between the waste and the hip. We know we will need to take the two-part waste man into account for this measurement. This means we need to get the finished wastes bandwidth. Here I have the upper front waist band and we need to get the width measurement. I'll go ahead and measure it out. And that comes to two and one-quarter inches. We will need to do the same for the lower waist band. I'll go ahead and measure that out and we find this is also two and one-quarter inches. We know the upper waist band is two and one-quarter inches wide, and the lower waist band is 2.1 quarter inches wide. To find the width, we need to remove the seam allowances. For the upper waste man will do two in one quarters inches minus five, minus five A's because there's a seam allowance on the top and the bottom, and that will give us 1 ". We will also follow that with the lower waist band, and we will get 1 " width on that one. Now we need to add those together to get the total waste bandwidth. So 1 " plus 1 " equals two inch, which will be the full width of the waste man. Now, let's say we measured our waist to hip that and the waist-to-hip was 8 " and we know that our total waste man width is 2 ". Now let's take our waist to hip and subtract the waste man width. So 8 " for our waist to hip, and 2 " for our waste bandwidth. So eight minus two equals 6 ". Let's add our seam allowance will be on the top of each skirt panel. So 6 " plus five-eighths inch equals 6.5 base inch. We're going to measure it, cross the hip on both the side back and the back panel. We will go down from the top corner of the seam line, six and five-eighths inch, based on the calculations we made for the approximate hip depths. Then measure straight across the pattern to find the measurement I measured across here and across here, leveraging the grain line and noting those measurements. We will come back to them later. Moving on to the front, we have to do things a little differently because of the pleat. The easiest way I find to measure across to pleaded pieces is to temporarily assemble the pleat. I'm going to fold this on the line marked for the size 16, which we're going to do the hip depth on the size 16. I will align it up and place it on top of the plate and put some weight on it. I have my own handy-dandy pattern weights. You can use whatever it is that works for you. We have now line this up and we will mark six and five-eighths inch down the seam line to find the hip depth. Then we will measure across on our hip line. I noted down the measurement and next we will talk about what to do with our measurements. Now we have measured both back panels. The back panel is six and 1.5 " and the side back is seven and one-half inches. We need to subtract the seam allowances. So six and one-half inches minus five-eighths inch equals 5.7 eighths inches. And seven and one-half inch minus five asynch minus five eighths inch equals six and one-quarter inches. We only subtracted one seam allowance for the back because it's cut unfold and to seam allowances for the side back because there are two seemed sides. Now we're going to add the side back in the back together. Then we're going to multiply by two to find the full back hips. So that's going to give us 24 and one-quarter inches. Now let's take a look at the front panels. We measured those as one panel. So we have that measurement of 12 and five-eighths inches. We need to subtract the seam allowances. There are two seam allowances here. So when we do that, we get 11 and three-eighths inches. Now, we multiply by two for the full front, which would be 22 and three-quarters inches. Now, let's look at the front and back hip measurements. We need to add these two measurements together and find the full hip. So we add them here and we get 47 ". Let's compare our measurements to the finished hip measurements are found on the pattern and see how we did. So we came up with a finished tip of 47 " for the size 16, the pattern notes a finished hip of 46 " for the size 16. Why is our number different? This is because we had to guess where the hip line was located on the pattern since we did not have the hip line marked, I made an educated guess based on some measurements as to where to measure. It's highly possible the hip depth was measured higher on the pattern. If you look at the angle on the same line, you can see that if I had measured up even an inch or just a little bit higher, I could have gotten the 46 " listed on the pattern. After looking at all of the measurements, the pattern the pattern envelope, and the size chart, I am confident that a size 18 waste and a size 16 hip would be a very good fit. So with that knowledge, let's move on to copying this pattern. 20. Copying Patterns - Part 1: Now I want to discuss about copying patterns. Before we get into actually copying a pattern, I want to discuss why I copy patterns. So copying patterns is an extra step. I understand and nobody wants to go through more time before you actually start to get sewing. But there are a few important reasons why I always copy patterns. Number one, it is easy to make a mistake when you're measuring. We all do it. If you cut the original, then you cannot go back to another size. This means you will have to do a lot of powder on alterations to make up for the fact that you no longer have the original sizes available. Next is, we don't stay the same size forever. Most women actually, most humans go up and down and weight throughout their life. If you've ever had the perfect skirt pattern, but you now where a different size, wouldn't it be nice to make your skirt and your new size? Do like to make clothes for others because I certainly do. I so for my family and I like to be able to make the same Garmin in different sizes for different people or in different sizes as children grow. I love PDF patterns, but I hate assembling them. My big paper is essentially a lot cheaper and it's less time consuming to use than all the tape and the time spent cutting and assembling PDF patterns every time you need a new size. I would much rather print a set of sizes that I might need and then copy the pattern to the specific size, then print them over and over again and do that assembly. Once you cut a pattern, you now have a single size pattern. You probably paid a reasonable amount of money for that pattern. So why ruin it by taking a multi-sided pattern and making it a single sized pattern. So now that we have the y out of the way, let's see My favorite method for copying a pattern. I'm going to show you my favorite way to copy a pattern using the tools that we see here. There are many ways to copy a pattern. I'm showing you my favorite way, but you can copy a pattern however you like. So what you're going to need to do this my way is some paper. I get this at ikea and the kids section, but you can use any kind of paper you have. You can even taped together copy paper. You will need scissors, some tape. My secret weapon, which is the light box. And I have a battery because I'm not near any sort of plug near the wall. So if you would like to have your lightbox more portable like mine, just use a little USB phone battery works great for me. Then of course, my pattern. We're going to just copy two pieces of the pattern, since you will work all the pieces the same way. The first piece we will copy is the upper front waist band. Then I will show you how we can blend while we copy on the side front piece. Let's get started on the upper front waist band. Now, the way I like to do this is to get my paper to lay down flat. Then what I'm gonna do is flip my pattern piece upside down. I want the right side facing down. I'm going to just take a tiny bit of tape and put this here on one side. And the scrap area I'm going to ease across to make this taught. And then I'm gonna put a little piece of tape here. Now we can move this around quite easily. I'm going to go ahead and cut this off, set that aside and flip this over. Now we have the pattern piece on the lightbox. My lightbox is magnetic, so I have my little magnetic helpers here. I'm going to get a marker or a pen and start marking out the corners of the pattern. My preference when marking out is to not to try to draw the full pattern, but instead just put little dots or small lines that will help me to trace this out after I've removed it from the light box. So I've marked some of the corners and I'm going to do the same thing all around. I will use a ruler to get these lines straight later. I'm going to mark a dotted line across. And as I come across here, you'll see I'm going to come from this direction. Then I'm going to come from the other direction. It can be a little hard to see the lines you are marking on curves with so many sizes, which is why I tend to change directions and move the pattern piece around as I go. It just makes it easier for me to see. Now we can start to blend that line. Then I'll come back and blend these lines together at the end. So let's go ahead and do this part. And you want to make sure that your marketing well enough that when this is all removed, you can see the lines later. Now we have the outside cutting lines, but we need to make sure we mark all of the interior elements. Here we have a marketing for the centerfold. I'm going to mark it with an arrow here like that. Then I usually shorten centerfold to see dot f dot. I always use the same abbreviations so I don't get confused later on. You can mark this however you like. Then I'm going to look here. We know we want size 18. I'm going to mark the 1800s. Let's look around for any other markings. Here we have the 1800s and we see anything else? Yes. We have a marking for the waistline. Mark that. And now we're done. So now we can remove the light box. Next, we're going to remove the tape. Now, sometimes it will really easily come off. So what I do is then just fold it down and then do the same thing over here. And if that tape didn't come off cleanly, we can just cut it off. The next thing I'm going to do is start marking off the rest of the pattern info. I have this piece set here for reference. So this is the waistline. I'm going to mark that by writing the word waste. And the next thing we're going to write is the piece name. This is the upper front waste man. This piece is four views, a, B, C, D, E, and F. So I will mark all of that on my pattern piece. I will also mark down that this is piece number five. I don't want to forget to write down the pattern name. This is simplicity, E122. Then what size is it? This is a size 18. Makes sure you mark the size since you copied off for a specific size. It's really easy to forget to do that and then you don't know what size you marked off later on. Another thing I like to mark on my patterns, which is not marked on the original, is the general seam allowance and any special seam allowances specifically on the pattern piece itself. This is because sometimes I actually changed the seam allowances. And I like to know what the seam allowance is, especially if it's different from the pattern. Next, I'm going to note down how many of this piece to cut, this piece we need to cut one on fold. And now at the end, before I take away my pattern piece, I'm just going to double-check that we have copied over all of the information. Finally, the last thing we're going to do is go ahead and take a ruler and line that up and draw in the straight lines. It's just so much easier with a ruler. Then I will cut this piece out with my scissors. I can cut the notches out with my scissors as well. Now that the whole piece is copied, I can make alterations if I need to without injury to the original pattern piece. This way, if I mess up, I can come back and copy again, or if I need a different size, they can cut a different size. No matter what we do, we're not committed to anything permanent with this pattern piece because we can always just copy it again. In the next section, we will copy off the side front piece. 21. Copying Patterns - Part 2: Now we're ready to copy off the side front piece. I'm going to flip this over and get a little bit of tape on either side. Sometimes on these bigger pieces, I'll put an extra little bit of tape just for added security. Now I'm going to cut this off and show you how I handle pieces larger than my light box. My trick is to simply move the large piece around in the light box and copy off the pattern in sections. So as I go I can get all the areas of the pattern piece. Now I have my pattern on my light box. What I'm going to do is mark the 1800s up here at the waist in one color. We know we chose the 1800s, the waist band and the top of this piece needs to fit that waist band. I will continue marking out around the perimeter here with some dashed lines, marking match points. As I go. We know we plan to blend the 1800s down to a size 16. First, I will mark the side seam of the 1800s along with the match point. Then I'm going to mark the 16 and the match point in a different color. Now as I go, I'm going to make sure that I mark as many lines as I can. I will mark this pleat line here with a few marks, then come back to it with a ruler later. I will continue marking both the 800s and the 16 on the side seam. Now we have reached the grain line. We didn't have the green line on the other piece. So this is good to show. What I am going to do is draw off the triangle of the grain line and some of the straight line was some dashes. I will finish copying the perimeter. I will keep going until I reach the longest headline, draw a corner Mark, and then come across the pattern on the hem line until it starts to separate for different sizes. Then I will go back up and mark the other hemlines and the other side of the grain line. If you know which skirt hem you want, just copy off the single Hamline. I chose to copy off all of the hemlines for demonstration purposes. When I reach far enough down the Hamline, I can stop marking the size 18. I wanted to make sure I mark more than I need because we want a smooth transition between sizes. I will continue marking Only the size 16. At this point. I will continue marking off the size 16 hemlines coming in from the opposite side to make following the sideline easier. Before we remove this from the light box, I will double-check to make sure if I missed any pattern markings. We can now take the light box away, separate the original pattern piece from the paper, and then finish our markings. The first thing I will do is use a ruler to mark out all the straight lines, including the pleat line and the green line. When I copy off my patterns, I will usually extend the grain line as far as I can in both directions. This helps to get the grain more accurate on a bigger piece. When we go to cut the fabric, I will copy off all the same things I did before. The pattern name, the piece number, the seam allowance, the views, et cetera. But I will do the size a little differently. Since we're blending this piece, I will note that in my size, I will write size eight, waste to size 16 hip as my pattern size. I will also note the finished hip size and the approximate amount of ease in that measurement. On the original pattern, the view letter and haem allowance is written next to each Hamline. I will write the view number and Himalayans of five-eighths inch next to each hem line. Now all of the copying is complete and we can turn our attention to blending the side seam. We have to figure out how we are going to get from the 16 cutting line to the 18 cutting line. The easiest way to do that on a straight piece like this is using a ruler. I will angle my ruler from one cutting line to the other. This will help to ease that measurement down gradually, so there is not an abrupt change in the lines on the body. I like to test out where I will blend with my ruler first. If I started right here, which is the line we marked as the hip depth. And I went like this. This would be very abrupt. I don't like that at all. I will show you what this would look like though, using a different color. You can see how this would go down on the straight line and then have an angle and that would not hang well at all on a full skirt like this. What I'm going to do instead is take another color marker so you can see the change. And I'm going to take this line and draw a different line like this. Now we have a really nice smooth transition between the two sizes. I will mark the match point from the size 16, because we're going to treat this like a size 16 from that point down. When you do these match points and you are blending sizes, make sure that you've selected the same size match point on corresponding pieces. I will finish drawing out the line and refining it. Now we have an 18 waste to a 16 hip that has been blended out nicely. We can then cut this out and copy off the rest of our pattern pieces just like we did here. You need to remember that after you copy off the skirt panels, you will also need to check that this name matches to the seam on the next piece and adjust as needed. This is called brewing the pattern. You only need to do this in areas you have altered, such as blending lines between the 1800s and 16. 22. Extra Tips for Copying Patterns: Now that we know how to copy a pattern, I'm gonna give you some tips and tricks that I've learned over the years for copying patterns. Number one, separate the pieces before copying. We saw that in my demonstration. It just makes it easier. By whitepaper on a roll. Medical exam paper is a classic and inexpensive option. Can use Kraft paper, white printer paper, tracing paper rolls. Amazon carries lots of different paper options. You can tape big paper together, just like you do with PDF patterns. So you can create extra wide pieces that way. I usually only by 24 inch wide paper because it's the best cost ratio. But sometimes you need to really wide piece, so I'll just tape those pieces together. Tape your pattern to the bigger paper in a few key places to prevent the pattern for moving around while you're copying. We saw that in my demonstration. Go ahead and use an LED light box like I did. You could also try using a window with a bright sunlight going through. That works really well as well. You can blend your lines while you're copying your pattern. That was in our demonstration. Make sure that you copy every marking, including grain lines, placement markers, alignment markers, whatever is on that original pattern. Make sure you have it copied over to your copy. Use a warm, dry iron to remove folds. We saw that in my demo. Use a ruler to copy straight lines. I do this as often as possible. If you have a French curve that can help you as well. I prefer to use fine tipped pens or pencils. I know I used fatter markers in the demonstration and that was so that you could see them well. But fatter markers can skew or change the measurements a bit. So my absolute favorite is gel pens. Use different colors for different parts of the pattern. I find this helps me to differentiate between cutting lines and other markings. And you saw me do this as well in our demonstration of copying patterns. Cut patterns never, never seem to want to go back to their original shape and the pattern envelope. So I store my patterns, enlarge envelopes from the office supply store. Then I make a copy of the front of the pattern and we'll attach it to the envelope so I can easily see which pattern is it is. If you don't mind altering your original pattern on your tissue paper, there is a little trick you can do. You can take advantage of the fact that the markers bleed through tissue paper. So you can put your pattern on top and make dots with a marker allowing the market to bleed through. You have to be a little careful so it doesn't soak through the tissue paper too much or it will tear. This is not a method that I prefer to use. It's kind of like a backup emergency method if I don't have a light box or any other way to deal with it, but it is a method and whatever method works for you is the method that is right for you. 23. Marking Seam Allowances: Let's talk about marking seam lines on your pattern. I'm going to give you some tips on marking seam lines and why marking seam lines is helpful. And then we're going to do a demonstration of marking seam lines. So if I plan to do any alterations to my pattern, I will go ahead and mark out the seam lines. You want to check your pattern directions or your envelope to find the seam allowances for the area of the pattern you are measuring. There will be a general seam allowance that will apply to the overall pattern, except where different seam allowance is indicated. You need to read your pattern directions or investigate your pattern to find out if there are any special areas with different seam allowances. Hemes have different allowances and seems check the pattern or the directions to find out how much hem allowance is built onto the pattern. Measure the amount of seam allowance from the edge of the pattern. And Mark, and I'm going to show you this in just a minute here. Marking your seam allowance is really helpful if later on you decide you're going to just completely remove all the seam allowances. In couture style sewing, we don't typically use seam allowances in our pattern pieces because we might want to have really big seam allowances for fittings. This is a super important thing if you're deciding to make something like a wedding dress or something that you're gonna have very expensive fabric that you're gonna need to do several fittings. Or if you're just doing something that you're concerned really isn't going to fit, remove your seam allowances and re-add them back to your fabric. How you would do that is a whole nother class, but this allows you to essentially change the size of your seam allowances once you have measured them out and removed them. Let's talk about marking out seam allowances. So I know from reading the directions that the seam allowance on this piece is five-eighths inch. We're going to mark out the five eighths inch seam allowance all around this pattern piece, you will need a marker and a ruler. This handy device is my absolute favorite tool. You can see how much has been used. This is a Nancy Zemin brand seam gauge. I feel like this is one of my can't live without sewing items. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to mark the seam allowances using this. You could use a ruler as well. Any ruler that you have will work. This is an omni grid quilting ruler. I like to have a really good selection of rulers around and these clear quilting rulers are so easy to use. So I will set my seam gauge to five-eighths inch. And then what I'm going to do is place my ruler here and make a mark in a different color. Now, I'm marking this boldly so that you can see it well, it typically do this in pencil or in a lighter color on a small piece like this. But to show you where the same lines are, I will go ahead and use a more bold marker. Now, notice how I have this marked as a fold line on my pattern. So that means there is no seam allowance in this area. So we're going to continue going around and marking our seam allowances until we have completely marked out all of the seam allowances. When do I mark seam allowances? Well, I like to mark seam allowances on complicated patterns or patterns where I am planning to change the amount of seam allowance. So let's say that I've made this pattern and I just find that the amount of seam allowance is wasteful. I could easily bring this down to one-half or one-quarter inch. So I'll trace out my seam allowance from the original pattern and then redraw back in my new seam allowance and cut that off. Alternatively, we could cut off all of our seam allowances like we do in couture sewing. And then we would trace out the shape onto the pattern piece using a piece of chalk or some erasable marketing method. Then we would mark our seam allowance directly back onto our fabric before we had it out. We can also use the seam allowances to measure any area of the pattern very easily and quickly. So if we were coming back here and measuring our pattern piece again, we would be able to measure right on that line. So that's a demonstration of how to mark off seam allowances on two-year pattern. It would work the same with any pattern piece that you have. 24. Why You Should Make a Sample Garment: There is no way to eliminate fittings in sample garments. You can not eliminate the need to make a sample garment no matter how carefully you select your size. Why? No pattern designer can design patterns to fit every body. Our bodies are uniquely our own. Over our life, our bodies will change and we can have things uneven. Maybe one side of the bust is bigger than the other side of the bus. Maybe one arm is longer than the other. You have arthritis. Maybe you've had childbirth and now your stomach fits differently. So all of these things and all of the things that we do in our life affects our body and makes each body unique in how we are shaped. Meaning that as unique people, there's no way that a pattern designed out of the box will just automatically fit you. To illustrate this, you could take 100 women with the same general bust, hip, and waist measurements. When you look at them, they will all look different. They could have different torso length, leg and arm length, neck length, shoulder width, bust height, etc. All of these different measurements might be different. This means that on a measurement chart though, where we're only looking at bus hip and wastes. They would all select the same size sewing pattern, but the finished garment would eat fit each of these women very differently. In addition, people are rarely fully symmetrical. You might have one cup size bigger than the other, one arm longer than the other. But when I'm trying to make here, this point is that this all leads to one important thing. We're going to need a sample fitting garment. A sample garment is created for the sole purpose of fitting, and it's oftentimes referred to as a Muslim. This is named after a fabric that was commonly used for making fitting samples in older times. So I advise a sample garment for all woven patterns amongst they are very simple and loose fitting and you are very confident in your size choice. Make your sample garment out of a fabric that is similar in weight, drape, and stretch to the final garment fabric. This means that you need a knit, knit garment and a woven, for a woven garment, you may have to buy extra of the same fabric. Snow to knits are exactly alike. One of the very best reasons to learn to sell garments is to create garments that fits your body exactly. So learning how to get close to fit your body well comes with practice, experience. Unfortunately, there is no way to bypass the work of learning. If you are a beginner, always do a sample fitting garment. Select a fabric you can easily make markings on and learn how to fit yourself. Fitting can be frustrating in the beginning, but it is well-worth it. And every effort that you put into learning fitting will show when you start making amazing garments. 25. Conclusion: Thank you so much for taking this class and I hope you learned a whole lot about sewing patterns, the history of sewing patterns, and how to select the right size to get you closer to that perfect fit. In sewing garments, we have a saying it is whatever size I say it is. And I'm going to back that up with the fact that by the end of your fitting and sewing experience, literally is whatever size you say it is because it's size, you, no matter what, don't get discouraged by what size number you choose. Or if you have to do several things to get your garment to just the right fit. A well-fitting garment that you love to wear will make you happy. I'm sure you'll be getting compliments. You'll feel confident. You'll love knowing that you made an amazing garment that fits you perfectly. I really want to see all of your projects, so be sure to post pictures of your projects in this class. You can also check out my other classes in my profile. Thank you so much everyone, and let's get going.