pattern-drafting class, lessons 1 & 2

This post is dedicated to my sewing friend Becky, AKA The Barefoot Seamstress, who has inspired me to write a post about the pattern-drafting course I am attending.

I am attending a pattern drafting course in the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, which is the best fashion school in the country, and incidentally, a 5 minute drive from my house :-)

The lessons are four hours long, once a week, for 14 months. So far I have attended two lessons and we've learned so much already. We are drafting at a scale of 3:1. This means that if we want to draw a 30 cm line, we would actually draw a 10 cm line (using a special scaled ruler). This way, our drawings fit into A3 sized sketching paper. Later on in the course we will be required to draft in real-life scale at home, sew up the garment out of muslin, and bring it to class for fitting alterations.

Here's what we've learned to draft so far.

We've drafted a basic skirt block, using custom hip and waist measurements. 

There's the one-dart variation:

basic skirt block - one dart

And the two dart variation:

basic skirt block - two darts

For those of you who are not familiar with garment patterns and how they translate to real garments: the right half of the drawing is half of the back of the skirt. the left half of the drawing is half of the front of the skirt. The vertical line running down the middle between them is the side seam. The leftmost vertical line is the center front and the rightmost vertical line is the center back.

When there's a great difference between the waist and the hip measurements (when the hips are proportionately much larger than the waist, such as in a pear-shaped figure), it may be better to use two darts in the back (which translates to four darts on the full back piece) rather than just one. This way the fullness is distributed better.

We've drafted collotes, or a pants-skirt (skirt-pants?):

collotes / pants skirt

We made a "template" out of the basic skirt block, by tracing it with tracing paper and gluing that to a piece of cardboard: 

basic skirt block - cardboard template

And we used this cardboard template in order to draft an A-line skirt by pivoting at the dart point and eliminating the dart:

A-line skirt

Afterwards we proceeded to draft various kinds of circle skirts:

somewhat full circle skirt

"light" circle skirt (not a lot of flare)

half circle skirt (180 degrees)

full circle skirt (360 degrees)

Would you believe we learned all that in just the first two lessons?

I can't wait for whatever's in store for us in the next lessons!

Have you attended a pattern-drafting course?

If so, how has it affected your sewing?

If not, would you like to?