There is a shortage of patternmakers in the fashion industry. For anyone interested in having a career in the fashion industry, becoming a fashion patternmaker is a wise decision for a number of reasons:
-it’s great pay
-you won’t have much competition to deal with
-you could get to work closely with professional fashion designers
-you’ll be doing the very important bricks and mortar work in fashion design
Without fashion patternmakers there would be no fashion designs being made into clothes. So if you’re thinking about getting into the fashion industry by the way of patternmaking you can either teach yourself patternmaking following any of the methods below;
Buy designer clothing patterns at sewing supply stores and study the pattern blocks
Go to your local library, or bookstore online or offline and order the patternmaking teaching manuals such as Connie Amaden Crawford’s ‘Patternmaking Made Easy’ she teaches you how to produce 22 of the most important pattern blocks, or ‘slopers’, that all other blocks are made from.
Get your hands on some fashion patternmaking software like the CAD kind from Etelestia or Wild Ginger’s ‘Pattern Master’ software.
You can get started even faster with a low tech innovative product like the Lutterloh patternmaking system and easily learn how to use their ‘Golden Rule’ system. It’s a great place to start because they’ve got a online free learning video on how to use the Golden Rule. Basically, how it works is you take your bust and waist measurements that you’re making a pattern for and use those measurements to develop a ‘connect the dots’ outline based on one of the many interchangeable pattern block templates. To create your own unique fashion pattern blocks you would just customize the necessary pattern blocks Lutterloh provides in their pattern books.
