Finally figured out why my jacket patterns were always off by a half inch

I was drafting a wool blazer pattern for a client in Denver and kept having the same weird bunching at the shoulder. My sewing teacher, Maria, pointed out I was adding the seam allowance to the armhole curve BEFORE I did the final shaping. I'd been doing it backwards for like two years. Has anyone else had a basic drafting step they were doing in the wrong order?

3 comments

3 Comments

barbara842mo ago

Remembered I used to cut notches before sewing.

jordan3301mo ago

Oh man, I used to do that too! Cutting notches felt so permanent and final, but I totally get how it helped you keep track. I think a lot of us started out doing that before we realized there were gentler ways to mark things. The worst was when I'd cut too deep and weaken the seam allowance, or cut a notch in the wrong spot and have to work around it. Swapping to chalk or those little fabric marking pens was a game changer for me, even if it takes a second longer.

tarajenkins2mo ago

Wait, did you also have one of those lightbulb moments where you realized you were making things harder for yourself? For me it was marking darts. I used to just eyeball them and hope for the best (spoiler: it never worked out). What finally clicked was tracing the entire dart shape with tailor's chalk on both layers, then pinning through the points before I even touched the sewing machine. It added like 30 seconds to my prep time but saved me from ripping out crooked darts every single time.