Poll Of The Week - Sewing Patterns

I like tracing too - treat it as a puzzle - it helps me understand what goes where even before I read instructions 🌝

I love paper patterns Im very old school! I have a kindle but still prefer real books. I have done print at home from PDF but havent enjoyed it. If I cant get a printed copy I do use copyshop.

Because it's you :) I unpacked the stuff from today's project again lol. First picture shows the book and the pattern piece for the back of the shirt, the ruler is pushed into the X on the wee pattern piece and I've followed the line to mark the dots. The blue ruler is the special XL ruler which goes from 110-170cm, although they'll extend it as far as anyone needs on request. Second picture is how it came out after some adjustments, like I made the neck and armholes slightly wider than the default. Guthrie and Ghani are the UK dealers for the kits, you can buy the quarterly booklets from Germany to get them quicker but it's the same price for the kit to just get it from Lauren.

I would advise against getting the kits from eBay second hand on buy it now, usually people put them on at a very optimistic £60-£100 and are 50 years old, at that price + £40 for the drafting rulers you may as well get this year's kit new. The downside is that the initial investment is admittedly high, although for that you get 280 patterns for under 50p each, but the subscription at £50 a year makes them 17p a pattern from then on and you can project them onto anything, brown paper, old wrapping paper, newspaper if you like. I like lutterloh, can you tell :D

It's all about the symbols https://sewingnhumming.blogspot.com/2009/07/mastering-lutterloh-symbols.html has a fair few explaining what they all mean.

It does click into place when you know that /// means a double layer of fabric, be it a facing, a pocket bag or simply folding the fabric over. You can figure out which is what by looking for ST which means it's a separate facing or a line of dashes which means fold, or a solid line that's thinner than the cut line which would indicate a dart. (It's actually a stitch line on top of a fold line making it solid)

Using all that logic we can see that in the picture going from the bottom up we see what is visually an obvious pleat. So you are folding along the middle dash line to bring the two sides together on the wrong side. This is fold 1. Moving up we see those two dots and a black line going from the top to the bottom. It's thinner than the ones on the outside which indicates a dart, so you sew along that line. Now we do fold 2 which would be to bring the pleat towards the front. We know this because on one side of the black lines there is another line with shorter dashes and this is the symbol for top stitching. And there you have it, a pair of jeans with a massive dart in it because why not that's why.

So there is logic in everything but also a lot of 'we don't care it's up to you' so you can see on the fly front it has a dark line of dashes, that means fold or cut so you can either use a traditional fly method or the easier lifting pins and needles method where you have the fly built in. The other thing is everything is interchangeable, you can just slap the neck and sleeves/armscye from one top directly on to another so if you like a v neck rather than a full collar then you can just swap it out. Back of the ruler kit has symbols on it, you need to match three dots on the ruler following what they suggest and you'll always get the correct shape. :)