Learning to Draft - Slopers for the Girls

Disclaimer:  Long post with lots of words, very few pictures, and deals with the nitty gritty process of learning to draft clothing.  No cute project at the end.  Just don't say I didn't warn you.  :)

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One of my goals for 2013 is to learn to draft clothing patterns from scratch.  This is the beginning of that learning adventure.

It began out of frustration with my dress clothes, actually.  I am a skinny minny with a long torso and have trouble finding dress clothes that fit.  Dresses are always too 'busty', my long torso means the waists are always too high, which in turn puts the hip line closer to where the waist should be and the result is usually rather lumpy looking.  I have a few skirts and shirts I like and I just rotate between those few things and hope that the repetition doesn't bother other people as much as it bothers me.  Shopping for clothes is terrible - sleeves are always too short, necklines too low or gaping, and don't even get me started on the current fashion trend of 'low rise' pants.  So that frustration has been festering for a while, but I've always thought of myself as a quilter rather than a seamstress.  I've felt myself nowhere near accomplished enough to sew clothes to wear outside the house, let alone to church.

Then I had a few months of experimentation over the summer with the modest swimdresses and the knit dresses and skirts for the girls.  I learned a lot in those experiments and feel like they were a success.  That led to checking out a few books on sewing clothes from the library, which led to more reading, and then I discovered a few blogs with tutorials on drafting your own clothes.  All that reading led to more and more reading which has in turn built up my confidence enough to give this whole thing a whirl.  

Here's the summary: 

Step 1:   Read, read, and then read some more on drafting of patterns, clothing construction, clothing alteration, slopers, wearing ease, design ease, etc.  

Step 2:  Draft/Create a sloper of person (me eventually, the girls first).  A sloper is basically a fabric pattern of yourself.  Think of it as a skintight, perfectly fitted piece of cotton with all the proper technical things marked on it (darts, chest line, waist line, hip line, etc).  

Step 3:  Make a paper pattern from that cloth sloper.  Now you have a paper pattern of yourself.  

Step 4:  Design clothing from that paper pattern.  If you have all your druthers about you and properly design the clothes you should end up with a garment that fits you perfectly.  Ta dah!

Most people buy a commercial clothing pattern and then adjust certain parts of that pattern to fit themselves.  This is the same process, just in reverse.  You make a pattern of yourself and then create clothes to fit that pattern-of-you.  As long as I need to learn how to make clothes and adjust patterns I might as well learn to make them fit myself while I'm at it.  Then, in theory, you can make any adjustments you need to as your body changes.  Hmmm...  that could come in handy with two growing girls, don't you think?   And since we wear mostly simple, classic, modest clothing I'm hoping the patterns won't be all that complicated.  

So....  thats lots of theory.  Here's what I've actually done with it.  

Step 1 (all that reading) happened over the last few months.  Then I decided to try the whole sloper-drafting process on the girls for their Christmas dresses.  I figured it would be easier for a first go-around to do it on someone other than yourself for fitting/measuring purposes.  Plus they are approximately a half-inch or so less curvy than their mother.  :)  

I'll spare you the gory details (which I am recording in a notebook, like a flashback to the chem research lab days), but here is the short version:  I had said daughter put on a tight fitting leotard and then took a zillion measurements, drew on paper, measured some more, told said child to hold still and stand straight about two zillion times, drew some more, measured some more.  And here is what I ended up with:

I know,  kind of anticlimactic.  Just lines on paper.  But after all those evenings of reading I am pretty proud to say I've actually drafted two slopers.  The second one went smoother than the first and I feel as though I learned alot about how different body parts relate to one another and how they relate to the seams I will eventually be sewing on the clothing.

After all the drawing on paper, I cut that out and used that paper pattern to construct a fabric sloper.  Here is one on Grace (though I couldn't get her to stand up straight for the photo so pretend her tummy isn't sticking out all funny, and ignore the one-sleeve thing).

Grace's turned out to fit pretty well.  Leah's needed a little tweaking - the paper measurements didn't exactly fit her shoulders and the hip was too tight.  But those were easy adjustments to make on the cloth sloper which I then transfered to the paper one.

While trying on the sloper, Grace ran to show Daddy in the train room what it looked like.  He came back with a confused look on his face and said, "Um, honey, wasn't the plan to make modest clothing?  Don't you think its a bit tight?"  He felt much better after I explained that this was supposed to be skin tight.  You make the clothes bigger depending on what kind of clothes they are and what kind of fabric they're made of.

Once I had a well fitting sloper for both girls I transferred those onto cardstock (and threw away the stack of intermediate drawings so as not to confuse myself).

Now when I want to make them something I just have to pull out those cardstock slopers, make paper patterns from them (by adding seam allowances and design ease in all the right places) and we're good to go!

Thats lots of writing and probably incredibly boring for most people, but such is the first step in drafting.  Next will be the more exciting part - actually making clothes from those slopers.

P.S.  Did try to draft a sleeve.  Tricky business and it didn't quite work out.  However, that had to be abandoned till after Christmas when I have more time to mess around.  As you'll soon see, the Christmas dresses are sleeveless for this very reason.