Alison Victoria School of Sewing: Pattern Drafting course: Day 4

Today, we learned how to draft our sleeves from our bodice blocks. Again, I’m not going to show  you how to do it here as it’s just too involved for a little blog like this!

Needless to say, by this stage in the week we’re all getting tired and our concentration was waivering a lot! It took a good chunk of the morning to draft out sleeves.

Then, we designed a top to put the sleeves in to to check if they worked. This also helped up to draft a little collar of our design. I chose to add a Peter Pan collar onto mine. We drafted up the top (this took a little longer thanks to our waning concentration) and made it up, setting in the sleeve. The sleeves were all fitted and we traced them onto cardboard to give our blocks which we can draft from in future.

In addition, Alison helped us create a two piece sleeve. I have to admit, I’d never even thought about a two piece sleeve existing – every one I had inserted had always been a one piece – but it will come in very useful for the coat which I hope to get a block done for on our final day!

This is the end of our official “syllabus” for the course. From her on in it is free reign ! Almost all of us wanted to learn how to draft trousers and this is what we did on Thursday evening. I have to admit, by this stage my back was really starting to hurt from leaning over the table for four solid days. Because of this, once I’d made my dot-and-cross pattern of my trousers I really couldn’t face tracing it out (that and I had run out of tracing paper. I took that as a sign!) and so I left it there for the day. Tomorrow, tracing off my trousers and fitting them and then hopefully working out a jacket or shirt block!

Once these blocks are done it really is a case of having a look through the book and tracing and trying out things from there. The basics are down! How nice it feels to have a whole library of pattern blocks that are fitted just to me!

By the way, I should really point out that our very talented instructor is none other than Alison Smith, author of both mine and Tabatha’s favourite sewing reference “The Sewing Book”.

It, and many others by Alison, can be found on her author page on Amazon.