Dressed in a Dress - The Sewing Journal

No exploration of dart manipulation is complete without addressing the back bodice, which is often overlooked. This post delves into the importance of back waist and shoulder darts for enhanced fit and design. With detailed explanations, calculations, and step-by-step tutorials, you’ll gain practical knowledge to customize patterns, eliminate fabric disruptions, and achieve precise upper back fit—all while honing your patternmaking skills.

This long-awaited post delves into single-dart designs like the French, waist, and mid-shoulder dart. We’ll uncover their connection to two-dart designs and see how dart relocation influences fit and aesthetics. We’ll gain practical knowledge to customise patterns through theory, calculations, and detailed illustrated tutorials. And the little homework will give you some extra practice.

As a fundamental part of dart manipulation, the pivotal method is a practical foundation for understanding the patternmaking process. In this post, we’ll explore darts from a different angle, shifting from the slash method to the pivotal one to efficiently relocate darts in two-dart designs by rotating instead of slashing and taping.

After three previous theoretical posts, we are finally ready for practice. At first, we'll learn about the most common dart manipulations, as they form the base for more complicated ones in the future. Why do we choose some designs over the other? What should one do to transform the basic darts into the ones you need? You can find the answers here. So, prepare your pencils, pens, rulers and paper and we are ready to start.

After learning what block patterns are, let’s take a closer look at a basic dress block and what one needs to know to create other dresses from it. This is an introductory post for future pattern manipulations—here you can see what it takes to turn a 2-dimensional pattern into a 3-dimensional garment. And if you were wondering what a dart is, the answer is here too.

In the previous introduction post, I briefly wrote about two main stages of patternmaking that lead you from an idea to a beautiful dress: the basic block and flat patternmaking. Did you know, there also are fashion blocks? And all these blocks exist not only in apparel industry but in many others? So, let's find out what they are and where you can get them.

Every dress starts with an idea. You might see the perfect one in a magazine or you might get lightened with inspiration in a fabric store when you see that silk organza with velvet dots. But one cannot sew a dress without a pattern, right? It is not that complicated, as it seams. And I'm here to help. So why not learn to make one?

Creating a garment is a long way and I hope this trilogy of posts can guide you. So, if you’ve just joined the reading, please, visit the first part page. It tells about inspiration, ideas, ways of getting a pattern and measurements. In this post I'm writing about patternmaking and samples. Please, enjoy.