pattern making class, lesson 3

Last Friday was the third pattern making lesson and boy was it fun!

full circle skirt

First, our teacher Debbie explained that we can modify the waistline measurement for the full circle skirt:

• If we want to use it to make a ruffle for a sleeve, we use the sleeve hem circumference as the "waistline" measurement.
• If we want to add gathers at the waist, we add some excess length to the waistline measurement.

How simple is that?

Then we drafted a 10-gore skirt, using custom waistline and hip line measurements. The one on the left below has a flare starting at the hip line. The one on the right is longer, and has a flare starting at some arbitrary point we chose below the hip line. 

After drafting these patterns, it's easy to see how you can make a custom 10-gore skirt, at whichever length you want, flared wherever you want and however much you want.

10-gore skirt pattern

Below are two more variations of a 10-gore skirt.

In pink: The skirt is close-fitting until the flare point, where it suddenly ruffles out a lot. 

In yellow, along with the 1/4 circle piece taped to the side: you add ten such 1/4 circle pieces, called godets, between each of the ten skirt pieces. This variation, compared to the pink one, allows saving fabric (due to the more compact shape of the pattern pieces), and allows changing the fabric/color of the godet pieces.

As before, we can easily control the length of the skirt, the location of the flare and its intensity.

close-fitting 10-gore skirt with ruffle

Here is a really fun exercise we did. We took the basic skirt block and modified it to become the pencil skirt design in the image below. What we did was move the dart closer to the Center Front / Center Back, shorten the skirt length, taper the skirt at the side seam and at the new seams on the front/back pieces. The dart was eliminated by separating the front pattern piece to two pattern pieces, and ditto for the back.

See those dark pieces at the center of the page below? Those are pieces of drafting paper (tracing paper) - we copied each pattern piece separately and marked the waistline and straight grain on each.

Voila! Self-drafted pattern!
How cool is that?

Skirt variation: Model 100

Finally we learned how to modify the basic skirt pattern to make this flared skirt with a yoke. The two skirts below are the same, except that the one on the left also has gathers. We drafted the one on the right.

flared skirt with yoke, with or without gathers

Here's how we did it: We copied the basic skirt block, drafted the yoke, and divided the skirt part to four pieces.

skirt variation: Model 102

 Then, using tracing paper, we copied the above pattern pieces, while pivoting as we went along! How awesome is that??

Pattern pieces (in progress) - Model 102

 I need help finishing these pieces so I'll ask the teacher in the next lesson. The homework for the next lesson will include drafting a 1:1 (real life size) basic skirt block according to our own personal measurements. How exciting!

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