Pro Patternmaker Reacts to Common Fitting Myths

Podcast Transcript

Sarai
Welcome back to Seamwork Radio, where we share practical ideas for building a creative process so you can sew with intention and joy. Haley is out on maternity leave with her new baby, so I have a special guest today.

We have Robin, our professional pattern maker here, who's been patternmaking with us at Seamwork for more than seven years.

Prior to that, Robin worked in the ready-to-wear apparel industry as a pattern maker with companies like Patagonia, UGG, and Hanna Andersson. Today, she's here to bust five Common Fitting myths.

This is going to be a juicy episode, huh Robin?

Robin
Absolutely.

Sarai
By the way, if you missed the last episode, Robin walked us through the entire process of making a Seamwork pattern. Be sure to go back and find that one if you haven't listened to it already. All right, let's get into the myths. I'm going to read the myths, and then Robin, you're going to bust them, okay?

Robin
Bust them wide open.

Sarai
All right. So the first myth is that having your own sloper means that you won't have to ever make a muslin.

Robin
Busting it. So this is not true.

A sloper is good for learning basic pattern drafting and understanding how the fabric goes from 2D flat to around a 3D body. However, a sloper is very specific to that body. It's very close-fitting. As soon as you start adding ease and cutting in style lines, moving the shoulder, adding details, you change everything about the sloper that made it fit the body so perfectly.

The balance can get altered, and that's how it sits on you front to back. You could develop wrinkles somewhere because the pieces aren't fitting together right, or maybe you went from the sloper to a princess seam and you didn't rotate the dart enough.

So while it's That's really good for understanding the concepts and the principles. As soon as you change the design, you lose all the information that you had with the sloper and have to redo all that.

Sarai
Yeah. I think a lot of people think that if they have a sloper that's fitted to their body, that's the end of fitting, and they can either compare patterns to that sloper or make changes to the sloper. But sounds like what you're saying is you will still need to go through all that fitting process.

Robin
Absolutely. You still need to go through toileing. Things about the sloper will still change. For instance, crotched depth on the sloper because it's very fitted to your body is going to be very close. But if you are creating, say, a wide-leg pant from that, things have to change. You need to add more ease in the thigh, and maybe you're adding a waistband.

So all of these things change, and you still have to go through the process of testing it and creating a new toile. Otherwise, we would be able to knock out patterns because we could just start there and have it in one go. But no, we average three prototypes. Sometimes it goes more, sometimes less, more rarely, but it’s still work.

Sarai
Yeah, because you're adding in all these variables When you're adding all those details to it or changing the ease or whatever you're doing to it.

Robin
Yeah, I'd love it if we could get that all right on the first try. But all these different things converging at once, you have no more constants.

Sarai
So then when is a sloper helpful for somebody?

Robin
It's good for understanding the pattern-making concepts. It's like a good exercise to go through.

It might be good for knowing your shoulder slope and comparing that to patterns, although that can change as well based on the design. It could be good for knowing your torso height or your sleeve length, leg length.

I know a lot of people use sloper and block interchangeably, but they really aren't. The sloper is that thing that's very fitted to your body. A block is more something like a T-shirt. A company creates a lot of T-shirts, and they want to make sure they're not exactly the same, but very close to the same every time. Maybe the width is always the same, or they always want this armhole depth to be the same. So they would use that, a block. So a sloper, you could create, say, a block from that if you're going to do a lot of the same thing.

Sarai
So a block is more like a specific style that you want to do over and over again. Do variations. This is the word I'm looking for, variations on that style.

Robin
Variation, yes. Sometimes they have some style lines cut in, but most of the main things are going to stay the same. And so it's easy to move from one to the next.

So if you were somebody that wanted to make a lot of pants, and you created a pair of pants from your sloper, that could become your block where you could add leg width to it or decrease leg width. But you'd know that, say, the crotch depth is exactly where you want it.

Sarai
Very interesting. All right, let's bust myth number two. This is one that I've seen, which is that the block for an indie pattern company is always based on the owner's body or some person who works there.

Robin
Yes, I've heard that a lot, too. And while that may be true for some small companies, one-person companies, it's never been true for Colette or Seamwork.

As you know, we've used live models since the beginning. Some companies do use dress forms and just dress forms, but in general, there's usually a fit model because you can't, you can't get all the information that you need if you're fitting it on yourself or if you're fitting it on a form, you need to be, you need to get some distance between you and that so that you can see what's going on and you can manipulate the fabric.

I'm sure everybody knows when you make your own toiles, it's sometimes it's hard to look behind you and see what's going on know exactly what to pin.

Sarai
Yeah, that would be very difficult to do. For me, personally, in this company, it wouldn't really make a lot of sense. I have scoliosis. You know, that's not something that I want to impose on everybody else. If I were making patterns only for people who had scoliosis, maybe.

Robin
They would work great for me because I do, too.

Sarai
But, you know, there's definitely quirks to my body that do not match any average. And I think that's true for most people, but we still want to get as close the average as we can.

Robin
Yeah. We're looking, and since you spoke up about average, that's actually almost its own myth, too, is that we draft for the average person.

There is no average person.

We try to draft for the middle of our size range on both size ranges, and then grade up and down from there. So if a person's body doesn't match that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that because there is no average.

Sarai
I think that's something that's a little bit hard to get your head around sometimes, is that just because maybe statistically this is in the middle, that doesn't mean that there's any one person who's going to be exactly like that, right?

Robin
Exactly, yes. We're going from the 00 to the 18. We're just looking for the middle of that range so that when we grade out, lines don't get wonky. It stays true to what we're wanting it to do on the base size.

Sarai
Yeah, great one. All right.

So myth number three is that if a person has to make adjustments, then there must be a drafting error. There must be something wrong with the pattern.

Robin
Great. This is a really good one. So unless a person's body is exactly the same as the model that we're fitting on, they will have to make adjustments. It is extremely unlikely. I have seen it a couple of times where people say, “Oh, I don't have to do anything,” and that's fantastic. I'd like to use them as a fit model.

But for most of us, we have to make changes. We have to make height changes in the four zones of height, not not just chopping it off the bottom. There needs to be height changes in all those different areas on your body. There are width changes. Rarely does anyone fall exactly in a size.

Our shoulders are often different, our arm lengths, our biceps. So it is absolutely normal to have to make three, four, or five. I make six changes to a pattern because I have a lot of heights that are off and places I need to grade between things. It's completely normal.

Sarai
Yeah. It depends on the style of the pattern, too, don't you think? Like, how many adjustments you may need to make.

Robin
Absolutely. Something that's more fitted, like the Emma dress, is probably going to need more tweaking. But it happens with simpler garments, too. Regular tank tops, things that look really easy can be surprisingly challenging if you don't know exactly what you need to do for your body or how your body differs from our fit model.

Sarai
Yeah, that's almost a separate myth is that just because something is simple doesn't mean that it's going to be easy to fit.

Robin
Yes, it's actually It's a joke between us when we're developing. The ones that look simple, we often have more work on than the ones that look really complex.

Sarai
I know for me, I can look at a pattern and see whether I'm going to need to make a lot of adjustments or a few adjustments. I mentioned before that I have scoliosis, so I have a short torso. So something like the Emma address, for example, I'm going to want to make sure that it's hitting in the right spots because it's so fitted.

Robin
Yes. We see this a lot with the upper arm area, the arm hole area. If that is too long on somebody and that bust is not sitting where it's supposed to, it can look like other things in the pattern are off. So it's really important to address all the different areas to get things in the right place. And sometimes that takes a few adjustments.

Sarai
Yeah, that's a simple adjustment people can do, that length adjustment to make sure that everything is heading right where you need it to hit.

Robin
Absolutely. And sometimes that's the most important one. Because you can't see what's going on circumference-wise if the circumference is in the wrong spot on your body.

Sarai
Yeah, that's a really good point. All right, myth number four is that if your clothing has wrinkles, that means you have a bad fit.

Robin
Let's think about that. Let's unpack that.

When you wear clothing, you need to move in that clothing. You need to have that ease, and more fabric creates more opportunities for wrinkles. So yes, sometimes it is pointing to a fitting problem, often.

But a lot of times it's not. There are hollows in our body. There are hollows where our legs meet our hips. There are hollows up on our upper chest area. And unless it's meant to be a skin-tight, dance costume, gymnastics costume, you're going to have some extra fabric that needs to move.

Then it also depends on the design lines. So if you have a drop shoulder, there's no arm hole, right? There's going to be fabric there because it's the armhole seam that takes out that excess fabric. So if that seam isn't there, you're going to have fabrics there, which is creating wrinkles.

Sarai
Yeah. It seems like when clothes have more ease, there's always some wrinkling. You know what you're saying about gymnastic clothing? It has to be absolutely skin-tight and the fabric has to have stretch.

Robin
Right.

Sarai
In order for it to not have any wrinkles whatsoever.

Robin
Right. A great example of why sometimes you're going to have wrinkles you can't do anything with would be sleeves. Okay, so imagine the sleeves on a T-shirt.

The T-shirt got its name because if you lay it flat, it looks like a T. That sleeve has a very short cap, sleeve cap, if any. So what that does is when you put your arm down, you're going to have some excess fabric. It's going to have some wrinkles, some diagonal wrinkles there on your arm. But that excess fabric and those wrinkles, that short cap allows you to reach for things with the rest of your garment not pulling up. Now, the opposite of that is if your sleeve fits perfectly flat, straight down, no wrinkles on the sleeve. It might look beautiful, but you're not going to be able to move your arm as much as if you have some extra fabric there that allows you to have lift.

Sarai
What about in pants? Because I feel like that's an area where people get really hung up about wrinkles.

Robin
Yes, absolutely. Again, we have curves, and there are areas where we can take wrinkles out. But one common place we see them is around the crotch. We have hollows there. So this is actually so common that jeans companies embellish those wrinkles. You've seen pants, jeans with bleached wrinkles there to really let us know that this is normal and this is something that happens.

If you have curves and you have hollows, the fabric can't be plastered to your body unless you're in your bike shorts.

Sarai
How do you... I don't know if there's a clear answer to this, but how do you know the difference between wrinkles that are there because something isn't fitting you correctly and wrinkles that are there just because of the style of the garment or will allow for movement?

Robin
You go to school for four years and then study for 20. No, I'm kidding. It really depends on the style of the garment. If something is closer fitting, and say in a woven fabric, like jeans, trousers, trousers especially, because there's a little bit of ease, but not too much ease.

So as that fabric is going around your curves, there are going to be places that it's moving differently. It's a wrinkle that means you have to change something. I feel like the sewing industry in general does a really good job of saying, when you see these wrinkles, these are some of the changes you need to make. But it can be hard to know.

You have to really look at the style and see how it fits around your body. And when I make toiles, I always pinch any extra fabric on my body. Is it going to make it look better? Is it going to make it hard to sit down? Things like that, that can help clue you in.

Sarai
Yeah, balancing what it looks like and the functionality and figuring out where that is for you.

Robin
Absolutely. Absolutely. If you try to take out wrinkles on the backs of your arms, right? And then try to drive a car, you'll know. So if you pin that out and then try to drive and you can't or hug a person, not everybody drives, hold your bicycle handles, then you know you need that fabric, and maybe those wrinkles are okay because we're not judging each other. I never look at people's wrinkles as I walk down the street.

Sarai
Okay, and myth number 5. If the base pattern is drafted for let's say, a sewing C cup, that means that it'll be a sea cup in all the other sizes, too.

Robin
Yes. So this is a very prevalent myth in the industry. And I'm not sure where the idea of sewing cup came from, but it is ubiquitous across the industry that the difference between your full bust and your high bust is your sewing cup size.

So we actually draft for actual real bra cup sizes. And the reason this is, is the high bust measurement does not encompass all the information about the rest of the body, especially when you're comparing it to your full bust. It doesn't tell you how muscular the back is. It's also how it's measured is problematic because it's a diagonal measurement. So that measuring tape, you could put it parallel there.

Most people put it diagonal. So you could measure it in two different places and get two different measurements. They wouldn't be too far off, but they would be slightly different.

Sarai
By a diagonal, you mean that it could be lower in the back and higher in the front.

Robin
Exactly. So how do you do that and be completely accurate? It's even hard sometimes to get that parallel measurement, especially when you're doing your measurements yourself. But that's not even the most problematic thing about sewing cup size.

The circumference of the body, full bust, grows at a greater rate than your shoulders. Shoulders are mostly bone, and they do not grow as fast as the rest of it or at the same rate. So your shoulder grade is a smaller grade between sizes.

We talked about in the last episode how the circumference of, say, between a six and an eight is one inch, right? That's your full bust. But the shoulder is only growing half an inch from side to side. So what happens with high bust is that it has a grade in between those two.

In order to get the armhole as it grades out to be the same shape as the base size, it can't grow as much as the bust grows. It has to be between those two measurements. The only way a sewing cup, that three-inch difference on the example size C, could be the same for all sizes would be if the high bust was grading at the same rate as the full bust.

Sarai
So just to put it into different words, the high bust, which, if people listening aren't familiar with that is, it's under the armpits, right? That area. That measurement is going to be closer to, say, your shoulder then it is to your full bust, which tends to grow more as sizes get larger.

Robin
Exactly. That's actually how we want it, because if you're using that high bust measurement to get a more accurate shoulder fit, you want it to be grading much closer to your shoulder than to your full bust.

Sarai
People seem to think, it's the myth we're busting, people seem to think that if, for example, a pattern is created in a size 8 with that measurement being, say, a C cup, then it'll be exactly the same in all the other sizes.

You're saying that's not true because the grading is different.

Robin
Because the grading is different. That three-inch difference as you grade up to the larger sizes is going to be greater than three inches.

Technically, the sewing cup would not be a C anymore. It would blend into a D or a DD. It's going to go down as you go to the smaller sizes because the bust is grading an inch around, but the high bust is only grading about five-eighths around.

Sarai
Would you recommend when people are choosing a pattern size to go by the full bust measurement and then make adjustments elsewhere, like to the shoulder area?

Robin
That's how I like to do it. But also I recognize that I'm at an advantage because I can do it on my computer and because I've made a lot of sleeve changes, and that's where it gets a little bit more complex.

I do like to grade between the shoulder and the busts if there are different sizes. A lot of times I'll choose based on the shoulder. We do have patterns like the Rhett jacket and any of our unisex patterns, the Bud jacket, where we list shoulder measurements. We're doing it more often now. We've got a body measurement that we base things off of and what the final garment shoulder measurements are.

If one is able to check that and start with that on, say, a jacket or something, or they know they have narrow shoulders, I do like to grade between the two. But then you do have to make adjustments to the sleeve. Typically, that's just measuring the cap, making sure that it matches or has a little bit of ease in if you're easing it in.

Sarai
If a pattern doesn't have the shoulder measurement listed, you can measure the pattern piece, correct?

Robin
Absolutely. Once you have that pattern in front of you, mark off seam allowance and measure between those shoulders, put that on your body, and see if that's what you like. Again, it's relevant to design, too. Design lines. Is it a drop shoulder? Is it right on the point? Is it a little bit off? It changes with every design.

Sarai
That's definitely something for people to be aware of, that cup size might not be what you think it is, just based on the draft of that base pattern.

Robin
And you can measure their high bust on the garment, on the pattern, too, just as easily as the shoulder. And check that against you and see how that works.

Sarai
Yeah, and see how much ease is left there.

Robin
Yeah. I'm a big proponent of using the lines that the patternmaker gives you at any company and grading between those because you really can see as well. You know, you can draw a beautiful line rather than just guessing.

Sarai
Yeah, absolutely.

All right. So that was our five pattern making or fitting myths busted by our pro pattern maker here.

I'm going to recap the myths for you all.

Number one was that having your own sloper means you don't have to make a muslin. Robin, you busted that one.

That the block for indie companies is based on the owner's body or somebody who works there.

If a person has to make adjustments to a pattern, that means there must be a drafting error with the pattern.

If your clothes have any wrinkles, that means that you have a bad fit.

If the base pattern is drafted for a sewing C cup, it'll be a sea cup in all sizes.

Those are the myths that we busted today. I want to give a quick shout-out to Robin for joining us today. I am so happy that you were able to come here and share your expertise with our community.

Robin
My pleasure. Thanks for having me. This was so much fun.

Sarai
If you've heard any other fitting rumors that you'd like us to bust, then comment and let us know. Maybe we can make another one. If you want to practice getting a good fit on patterns, be sure to check out Seamwork.