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Pattern Draping: Drape a Basic Form

Draping and in pattern flat pattern making to you primarily work on the half. And the reason for that is that when it's the best way to get both sides to be perfectly balanced just by human nature, if you try to do something on one side and repeated on the other things are always going to be a little bit off, and the truth of the truth of it is that the human body is a little bit off one side is a little bigger one's a little smaller or longer shorter, so ah, lot of times they're closed kind of correct us, you know, they balance us out in terms of how we look, but also, um, uh, you can do this on the doing the whole design, like you can work on the half first and then duplicated it, do it on the fold so that you could do asymmetrical designs and I'll show you that in a minute, so I'm going to give myself a little extra room on top, and I'm going to pin I'm gonna pin in and over that's kind of key because all the action you're going to be taking is in this direction and it's not going a...

nywhere if I pin in this way, I'm taking it with me. Okay, so the direction of the painting is very important and I'm a big advocate of pinning as little as possible because I wanted to see the clothes to skim the body I don't want to ever be like torturing fabric and forcing it that's a really important thing because a lot of people want that sort of tight look which is great but that's something you would do in terms of the sizing of the garment and who'd wear it you'd get them to wear it if there were less slightly size bigger so here I'm going to just let the fabric and form my movements I'm going to cover that center line and I'm just going to go straight down to the waist very very simple and now I'm going to do a basic waistline dart to start off with so I'm going to be just following this map of this body so I'm going to smooth out and again I always like to use just the back of my hand and just smooth it out so it's natural the nice thing about dress forms is the seams you can kind of feel them through the fabric so you can kind of feel along here to the ridge and secure that there I will come over here and put a pin closer to her neck and we see we have this tension right here that's okay because that's not going to be there we're cutting that away eventually so you want to cut to release the tension and all of a sudden it can lie much smoother than it was before I cut a little so j just for us newbies like myself tell us again what we're doing are we looking at as we're planning what we're doing we're doing folding and gathering here we drink beautiful we are oh, sorry we are we're basically working we're draping and developing the flow for how we want it to drip on the body okay, so this is just we're taking uh we know about the nature of the fabric the green lines to buy us now we're manipulating at all so we're talking we're in the second we're going to go to fold and gather but drape and flow just general the I think the core before we get to those it's kind of a little step in between okay and just one more thing because I'm again a newbie no good and you always hear the term on the bias on the bias can you explain that again? Okay, I'll show you here we'll take this piece and if this is hanging straight it's hank it has no give so the fabric is going to be taught across both directions but if this is on the bias this starts to give and it also starts to give across and we get these soft poles and soft like sort of almost hugging the body with the bias and that's usually a bias like a lot of like little slip summer dresses and a lot of sort of satin evening gowns and things like that will be cut on the bias so that at no point do they kind of stopped abruptly they have this sort of flow and they hug the form this one of the biggest takeaways for me for the bias so we've smooth this out and here again this is the arm hole, which is another air we're cutting away so I don't want I don't have to worry about that too much, but I do want to worry about here and again I wanted to be very, very smooth I don't want to pull the fabric and here I'm gonna pin in the other direction so that it creating a nice smooth surface over the bus to the side of the bust and then I'm going to follow the side and again not force it just follow it let my hand just gently trace where this is going to go that's the waistline, right? We have the waistline here and now we have the beginnings of a bodice we have almost everything we need except what are we doing with this now this could very well just be loose and flowy right sort of a boxy top but we're going to make it a fitted garment so we're going to take and bring this over to right here on the princess line and this is also where, you know, a lot of people ask me about the drawing element and why it's so important, I think if they work interchangeably, I think if you have some pattern making skills, it'll improve your sketching and if you work it out on sketching, it'll improve your draping, okay, now I have a little pulling going on because we have that tension hey that's helping and so now smooth that out a little bit better now these two points our meeting and we have a dart now with a dart, what we would do is so from here to the point and that this extra fabric would be on the inside and usually brought over to the side. So with this now we've draped it a basic basic bodice. Now we're going to market and transfer over the details that we need for a flat pattern. All right? So again, I don't like tio have a lot of notation, I'd like to have it fairly simple because we're going to do all the really clean stuff on the table, so at all these points where I have a pin, I'm going to draw a little corner so along this shoulder and then just the start of the shoulder here underneath the arm and just on the seat side seam here and then on these I'm also going to draw a little corner and just a little mark here a little more here and around the neckline because I don't have straight lines I'm going to give myself little dots that follow the curve so you don't need anything else um the on ly I mean in terms of drying, the only thing you might want to do is take two pins and show where the apex of the dart is so not a lot of marking you could put a mark there but we're going to modify it a little bit so this is enough to now go to paper okay? So let me make sure that's true yep okay it's what I'm used to be honest with you when uh you forget to talk sometimes when you're doing when I'm doing all this usually there's music playing in a big way ok, so now we're going to lay this flat and that was very three dimensional we lay this flat and we're going to concern ourselves with filling in the marks and those corners our great because what we want are straight lines we want absolutely straight lines between those markers, so I'm going to give myself a light straight line here because I'm going to modify that a little bit I'm going to straighten out this corner over here my mark was a little high so I just squared off the corner with the dark better to go big than to tend to be short very cool um shoulders uh I know I did something um I forgot to add the the marks for the for the arm hole but I can actually see the impression of it so I'm just kind of kind of bring these in here um and then we have the base of this side and tio create the perfect dart when I'm doing this I like to bring this over to check it and if that's fairly smooth were pretty good because we wanted because this starts to turn a little bit on bias so when we're sewing it could stretch out so we want to make sure that that's pretty natural it actually folds to where it goes here I'm going I didn't want to draw this really hard because we in this process that's fitting that manic and perfectly I mean that dress form perfectly but we need a little ease in places so in the arm hole in particular we want to go what I call down and out and if this is the corner I like to go down and out at least a half an inch for these underneath the arms so see this that's why I love the sea through rulers this is the corner right and I want the corner to go down and out. So if I line this up at the halfway mark at the half inch mark you received by line it up so that corner is half an inch away, all I have to do is drawn my new corner, and I've gone out and, well, I'm sorry we're in the wrong place here. So this is my new quarter, and what I want to do is blend this into this curve and blend this line into the new armful, okay? And I'm just gonna take this back to the dress form because I don't want to guess it, so I just want to get those dots, okay? Perfect. So I want to do oh, I was actually pretty good don't tell me, teacher. All right, um, right now, I'm just using a president color, just one of my prison color pencils, but I would recommend a pencil. It doesn't smudge so hard pencil usually I usually get, like, a red pencil on a blue pencil just kind of seed, you know, like difference is that you want to know tate. So here is the arm hole and the neckline. So one other area, I'm sorry here with the neckline. Is another area we want to add a little ease because our next lean forward a little bit so we don't ever want anything cutting us right at the base of our neck because it could become an irritant, so we just go down a hair it could be is little is a thug a niche as you're doing this, can you tell us again what you are? What is the design that we're getting? Two or what? Well, this is this is just the baseline for what we're going to go to next, just the the most basic were so we're setting it up yes on dh then we're going to build upon that right? We're going to modify this in different ways, so we're goingto talk right now for the for the drape this is I think we got them a little flipped, but for the draping flow, we're going to talk about how it skims the body, and then we're going to modify it with golden gethers. And so is it something particular again that you already have in mind, or you just shaping this particular form? Well, for this, I mean, you always want to start with whoever or whatever you're designing for so that's why this step is so important because you want to get the fit right. Before we modified it anyway, so if you can get the foundation built it becomes what you would call in the industry of sloper. So a basic pattern sloper usually doesn't have any see malone's and you could manipulate the slope and when we do flat pattern making, I'm going to show you how to do that. So just so that I again newbie have yeah, you know, so you could be making a top you could be making a dress. You could think this piece could be a bodice for address. It could be a top it could be anything that would be on the top of her body. I mean aiken make modifications I can add a collar I can have a sleeve it can transform anything is basically a body covering that's fitted to the body for this particular size. Great. Great. Thank you, sure. And then we'll take a curve and att the top of the shoulder I like to square off um the starting line so I get a perfect corner but then I will take occur and start to blend that and try to line it up a zb estas I can with the dots that I have to the new you would see that oh, okay, so basically to the new arm hole so we dropped down a little and out a little bit and for the bottom of it, before we cut into it, I wanna cut it up, cut out this excess for for when we close this, we know that the fabric underneath is going to go towards the side seam. So again, I pinched this over I'm a little off there and I pin it, and here is where I want to make sure this connection works a little adjustment, and the reason we do that is because you're gonna fold over that and catch it in the scene. If you don't, you might get a dart that cuts up this way because it went straight blind, so here I'm just going to a rough cut before I had seen the lines, but just so you can see the shape when I opened it up again, it dips down a little bit, and that wouldn't happen if I just went straight across, which is kind of important when you're trying to catch it. So before I put this on the dress form, I'm going to do the neckline again, use your curve, all right, so we have a finished. Pat will beginning of fish finished pattern piece and what I can do here now is add seam allowance so that we can work with that and seam allowance is the extra amount of fabric that allows you to join two pieces together because this would be the joining mark and traditional every house is different but traditional seam allowance is about a half an inch around the neck line it would be more of a quarter and for here I'm just going to mark a quarter all the way around and add a half an inch shoulder and half an inch yeah you left your allowance on the neck area and not just keep existent one yeah just less book yeah I mean you can have mohr of chances are you're going to trim it away and again the corners I like to make sure I square off all my corners because when you meet them um you know it avoids getting a peek or a dip in it okay, I think here we're almost ready to try and take it off and put it on the dress form okay all right so now I can cut it over here now I can cut away and we're just getting away the excess so we can put it back on the dress form test it okay that's a little weird it's like I want to be close to it but I told you all right okay so now um before I put on the dress form I want to close up this dart and for darts um if this is the apex if this is the apex right here I could put a little market get rid of my pins um traditionally you're going to come just a hair down from the dart um the fashion right now is to have close kind of skim over the bust and have sort of around in that we're doing something very go t a pointy bra kind of thing you might go right to the apex but this avoids getting that pointy nous tue to the design so sometimes will bring down about an eighth of an inch down from the apex so that it has the chance to kind of roll over the bar so I'm going to close this and I'm going to pin it closed so I'm going to pin it in pick up pick up all the layers and go across this gets a little tricky and again you want to try not to force it let it kind of roll up to the point and if you have a heart table this is a good thing to do you can push into the table pick up all the layers and go over and now if you turn it in this way can you see that on the screen? It allows you to do it a little flatter and I'm a bit weird about making sure those pins go in the right direction. Okay, so all across. So now when we put it on here way, have the first part of our body, jake, quick question. Will this eventually become a pattern? Yes. This would be trapped. All the these markings would he transferred onto paper, which I have some samples of over here. Basically, thieves are all the pieces for basic pieces for garments, and this will be that right. So we have the apex of the dark. We notched pattern. Two bass parts that joined together. We have seam allowance. Sometimes you'd have notches. For instance, on the sides depends on how complicated the design is. I have since seam allowance here. If I was going to do a zipper, if I wanted to do it, for instance, on the fold and have it just be one piece of fabric, I would cut that away and and cut it out of the fabric on the fold. And then I would have ah, one piece top. Yes, that's that way just created that. And I think the only other thing that's important to remember on this is that it really is important when you get to this point is thinking about things like the grain line so for instance, we drape this on the lengthwise so you start to put on your finish pattern lots of information about what the green line is so you know here I'll have grain line I'll have the size, the style, all the information so that you have this resource to always go back to. All right? So we have our bodies and noticed that here is really nice because we have ah, little room so when that joins the back piece she's got a little ease underneath the arm and that khun barry, how much you do you know, if you're doing a sort of a big oversized garment that could be very low, this is a fairly fitted top, so you know, this would be your starting point, so getting back to s o this is sort of the draping around the body. You can also manipulate fabric over the body in different ways and doom or complicated things. So we're gonna do something a little more fancy someone cut another piece. I think I have a piece here, so will this be another draping technique? Same thing, but getting a little bit more um not so not not worrying about fitting it perfectly to the body like doing something a little fancier yes during so when you're doing this with like solid fabrics it's a lot easier but what if you're trying to like a lineup a pattern while adding in you would do that actually in the pattern making stage like so for here that's a good question like if you're doing a plaid and you wanted to line up all the way around you would have like this is for instance at the bust right? So you're you're back pattern have it so you would have corresponding lines on the other piece so when you're placing this on the pattern so use this as an example pull out a little bit of this covering pattern pattern making right another yeah but this is more about the fabrics we're we're not going to be talking too much about this so this is a really good example okay if you're lining it up on a pattern like this you can make sure that line that bus line is lined up on the dark cream lined up on the dark green and then they will sync up all the way around and that's a that's a really nice thing I'm glad you brought that up because that is the mark of a really good garment like if you just randomly I mean it could be on grain but if they if they miss match that's just one step lower than you know that ideal garment okay this fabric beautiful