Pattern Cutting

Pattern Workshop First Impressions

| louisealicejay

Hello everybody! hope you are all well 😀

Today’s post will be a quick one. Super busy right now so my content is going to be non-existent until I organise my room. I’m setting up an area in my room with a white backdrop and studio lights to take images for this blog & film youtube videos. I swear I’ll be way more active when all that is finished.

pattern Workshop Screenshot

So anyway, I thought I’d share my first impression of a course I started 2 days ago called Creating PDF Patterns: Sketch to Sale. The course was put together by a lady called Lauren Dahl, and  I have to say so far I’m very impressed and excited. I don’t have a lot of time so I’m just going to do a quick bullet point list of all the things I am loving so far.

  • The first thing I fell in love with is the friendly, informal nature of this course. Don’t get me wrong, I love Crafsty, but it can feel so fake and polished at times. You don’t get that at all with this course. It feels as though Lauren is a friend who has invited you to her house to teach you something. She’s super friendly and likeable and some of the videos have cats in the background.
  • It assumes nothing. I’m not great at pattern cutting yet, but I’m glad I wasn’t before I started this course because I have taken so much from it already. Grading is no longer something I dread having to learn. The whole process of digitising the patterns I design seems achievable.
  • Selling PDF patterns has been a career goal of mine for some time now. This course has given me the confidence that I can achieve it. Up until now, I have been doing Craftsy’s pattern cutting classes with Suzy Furrer- which are great! But they only cover how to draft the pattern on paper. I was worried that I would get to the point where my patterns were finished and digitising them would be impossible.
  • Her illustrator tutorials make it look so easy. I don’t have illustrator yet, I’m not going to be getting my cloud subscription until I have finished drafting the patterns I want to digitise but I am reaaaally looking forward to getting it.

So that’s about it for today. I probably won’t post now until early September because like I said I am organising my room and after that I will be at Reading Festival for a week. I love you guys, byeeeee.

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Pattern Cutting Supplies Haul

| louisealicejay

PATTERN ROLLS LOUISE ALICE JAY

Hellooo there, readers. Today we are going to be doing a haul, I only bought 3 things but 2 of them were pretty damn big (and pretty damn expensive). As you may know, if you’ve read my other posts, I’ve decided to teach myself pattern cutting and sewing. I started to learn them when I was studying fashion, and loved them, but hated fashion so I dropped out. I really don’t want to stop learning this though so I’ve invested hundreds in supplies, books & classes in hope that I can continue.

These purchases are from 3 different places. I will start off with the smallest purchase first.

LOUISE ALICE JAY FABRIC SCISSORS  I decided to replace my fabric scissors as my old ones just weren’t cutting well after around 4 years of regular use. I dropped them while I was in college and it made them a bit hard to cut with. Some of my friends didn’t notice a difference, but I definitely did. As well as that when I was in college lots of people used to borrow them and cut all kinds of things with them. These are my ride or die fabric scissors. They cost around £5 but they cut beautifully (if you look after them). My college tutors told me that they were as good as ones they had paid £40-£60 for. I got mine on amazon, and they are listed as (affiliate link) 240mm Stainless Steel Tailoring Scissors.  If you are in any way new to sewing, or just looking for a new pair I would DEFINITELY get these they are brilliant for the price.

 

My next purchase was this 150m roll of pattern cutting paper. I bought it from Home Crafts for £34.99. There are lots of shops online selling these rolls but I went for this one because it had the best price. I also chose this one because the dots & crosses are 2cm apart, whereas lots of others are 2.5cm apart. This means that I could use plain cm grid paper to make quarter scale patterns, and they would be really easy to scale it up onto this pattern paper. My only issue with it was the way it was packaged during delivery. It was only wrapped up in Kraft paper, and some of the paper on the top layer has holes in it. This isn’t too bad, and I can still use the top layers of paper, I just would have preferred it to be wrapped in Bubble Wrap. The delivery was really quick, though, I ordered it on Monday and received it on Wednesday.

My final purchase was this giant 50m roll of Calico from FabricUK . It was expensive, it cost £96 including delivery, but I plan to use it for a lot of things. Firstly if I’m going to be learning to pattern cut I’m going to be getting through this a lot when testing my patterns. I also want to use it to toile commercial patterns to make sure they fit. I also quite like the feel of calico, so I may even dye it and make clothes with it. I plan to get through a lot of this stuff and I think that although £96 seems a lot, this roll will last me years, and save me from wasting lots of other expensive fabric.

So that’s all for now. I may do another post on the resources I’m using to learn pattern cutting soon. If you are interested in learning more about pattern cutting please subscribe because I’m going to be posting a load of reviews of classes & books:D hope this post was helpful! x