Sunday, February 2, 2014

Patternmaking

I've been playing with a bit of patternmaking lately.

A few Christmases ago I received Patternmaking for Fashion Design, but didn't have a lot of time to play with it. The basic blocks take a bit of calculation. Nothing major, but I'd been biking a bit and losing baby-weight and didn't want to put a lot of time into making my own blocks, just to have them change before I got to sew up some clothes.

Recently, however, I came across an article talking about some new open source pattern-making software. I played with Valentina a bit, but I was really drawn towards the Tau Meta Tau Project. Susan, from TMTP is currently working on Valentina as well, so I expect the whole thing will be quite awesome in a year or two.

I'm not patient, though, and don't mind a bit of hacking, so I've been making TMTP do what I want it to and have had quite a bit of fun with it. All I've done so far is make the basic bodice, skirt, and dress blocks, but in the process, I've done quite a bit of work to get things more streamlined for myself. Also, I had to find a new source for pattern blocks, because, having done all of this work, I wanted to be able to share! So I did some research and came across a wonderful, copyright expired book by Esther Pivnick, that had been scanned by The Perfect Nose.

Anyways, the basic idea is, once you've got the extensions saved, you open Inkscape, load and extension, enter your measurements, and you have a block custom fit to your body. If you don't want to bother with your measurements, it can also load up standard sizes, but then it isn't quite so perfect.

If you want to play with it yourself, click on the "Open Source Patternmaking" link at the top of the page, or go here.