Basic Concept of Clothing Pattern Construction
Harshani Wijendra
Sri Lanka Institute of Textile and Apparel Technology (SLITA)
Email: harshani_bipasha@yahoo.com
What is Clothing Pattern Construction?
We all know that people wear variety of clothes and have a collection of different types of clothing. The difference in clothing could be vary or due to the type of fabric used, the color or the print, weave/knit structure etc. Very often with one type of fabric and color, you can sew cloth or garment of different styles. Have you ever thought how clothing manufacturers come out with various clothing styles? First step in the process of clothing manufacture is to decide on a style for a particular clothing. Depending on the customer’s taste and preference the style may vary. The person who decides the style of a cloth makes his decision based on several factors such as Culture, Geographical, Climate Conditions, and Social Status of the Wearer. Usually the Designer puts his ideas on a sketch.
In order to make the cloth it has to translate the Three Dimensional (3D) clothing to Two Dimensional (2D) shapes which when put together will form the desired clothing. This process of preparing the flat, two dimensional shapes is known as pattern making or clothing pattern construction. And before heading to Pattern Construction it is necessary to know What a Pattern is. Pattern is a Piece of exact Size and shape of Paper with the help of which the shape and the size of the required fabric piece to construct a clothing component can be cut. It normally comprises all the pattern constructional information such as grain lines, seam lines, cutting lines, darts, center lines, etc. and common information like name of the pattern piece, pattern size, number of pieces to be on each pattern piece, etc.
As a starting point of we draw a sketch of a person wearing the required clothing. The next step is to draw the Front and back view of the clothing. This drawing is known as the Production Sketch. Below shown is a Production sketch of a men’s dress shirt.
Once the Production sketch is drawn then the required Size and shape of pattern papers which will help to cut the Fabric pieces for the Production of three dimensional clothing. We know that the humans have different sizes and shapes therefore in order to fit a clothing to the body of a particular person his Body Measurements must be known and then it is easy to Construct the Pattern block for the required Size.
Clothing Sewn to the same person can have different styles. For example let us look at two Gown sewn from the same fabric to the same size with two different styles.
The Gown A has a halter neck with a flared skirt whereas the gown B doesn’t has a halter neck and it has A line skirt with a tube top and an opening from side. So when in constructing a pattern those information’s on a style should be provided. The information on style includes details about pockets, grain, line of fabric, collar etc. This information can be termed as Specifications.
Therefore, considering all above info we discussed we can come to a conclusion that in order to construct a Pattern it is required to have following basic information. Namely;
- Production Sketch
- Body Measurements
- Specifications
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Founder & Editor of Textile Learner. He is a Textile Consultant, Blogger & Entrepreneur. Mr. Kiron is working as a textile consultant in several local and international companies. He is also a contributor of Wikipedia.
