What is 'Creative' pattern making?
The role of a pattern maker or 'Pattern Cutter' in the design room is to draw paper patterns for the garments that the designer wants to create. 'Creative Pattern Cutting' means you are making a brand new pattern for an original garment that doesn’t exist yet, rather than adjusting or updating old patterns or grading them to different sizes. In creative pattern cutting, you are literally pulling an idea out of the designer’s head and turning it into something real. Making a pattern for something from your own imagination can be pretty difficult, but taking it from someone else’s can sometimes seem damn near impossible.
To make it worse, designers work hard on infusing their work with their own signature handwriting – their own unique visual design style – and this dissipates into their sketches as well as their illustrations. When you are pattern making for a designer who is creating a brand new design from paper, you will not be working from nice neat technical drawings, but from hastily scrawled sketches full of raw inspiration, which are delivered along with much pointing and gesturing and talk about drape and wearability and texture. Learning to interpret this language of sketches and keywords is probably the most difficult thing about creative pattern making for someone else, and one of the most important skills to learn.
It can seem challenging at first, but it is possible, and there are some things that will help.
Fashion Design Terminology
Learn the key words. Most designers tend to use a repertoire of key words to describe certain characteristics of clothing. Learn to pick them out and recognise them, and find out exactly what the designer means by them. For example, a designer might say that they want the hem of a certain skirt to ‘kick’. What exactly do they mean? Find out by asking them to point to something with this characteristic, another garment hanging on the sample rail, perhaps, or something somebody in the studio is wearing. Point to something yourself, and say – “You mean like this?” “No!” they might say, “Like this!” – they’ll find something they like better and show you. Now you know precisely what they mean by that word, and that is what they will always mean every time they use it.
Fashion Drawing
It is also important to learn the signature shapes. When you have looked at enough of a designer’s sketches, you will begin to recognise certain shapes or details that are used over and over, and these translate to a certain effect the designer is imagining in the finished garment. On the drawing of a frill for example, you might notice that the designer uses a zigzag scribble to indicate a gathered frill shape, and a series of straight lines instead to indicate a circular frill. This is a fairly subtle difference, which you have to learn to pick up on. At the beginning of a working relationship it is hard to know what all the designer’s personal squiggles mean, and difficult to find out too: remember, some designers might not even know the technical difference between a gathered frill and a circular frill, they just know which one they like the look of. Their expertise is in artistic style, not construction – that’s why they hired you. Again, a good way to work it out is to get them to show you an example. Find another sample with a frill, ask – ‘like this?’ and remember the answer – the squiggle will always be the same, and now you know what it means.
Be a Design Team
By far the most important thing about working closely with a designer is to cultivate a good working relationship, so do everything you can to help yours along. Be communicative, friendly, and considerate. Chat as much as possible – talk about fashion, trends that they like, about the clothes they are wearing at the moment, about how the collection is going right now, about fabric, trims, other designers they like, etc. Get to know the designer, and you will get to know their needs and their style. And – who knows? – you might end up having fun too.
Natalie Gowans - Natalie Gowans used to work in Fashion Design. It didn't really work out, but it was pretty interesting and she found out a lot of things ...
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