Pattern Design Pre-Sales are Now Available

Pattern Design is my educational solution to teaching pattern making for beginners. I shared my collection of pattern making books in previous posts, in order to break down the good and bad elements of each book in my stash.

My biggest pet peeve is when a book “tells” to you do a step without explaining “why” you do it. I believe that to fully comprehend what you are learning, you need to know all the facts. Many books make assumptions that you are only making clothes for a size 8, but in many cases, the drafter is not a size 8.

I created the first book in my Pattern Design series to teach the basics and explain why we do what we do. That is also the reason that sewing and construction steps are included in the Fundamentals book. With only half the data, it is impossible to create a completely usable pattern.

As you may have read by now, this book has taken me five years to complete. It is not for trying, because I have, but I had a big wish list of things I wanted to do and I did most of them, except completing this book.

I started my book about 6 months after my daughter was born. She was easy to handle, I just wore her most of the time until she got too tall for me to see over her head. I brainstormed with my supervisor at FIDM on the original outline of this book. It was her idea to name the book Pattern Design.

In that first year of my daughter’s life, I opened a store. Not a big deal really, I had done that before, but this was a different type of store than the one I had previously owned. The big difference, was that I wanted to have my daughter at my side and teach fashion design.

I developed a pattern making curriculum to further develop my book outline, but that is where the book was put on hold – for 4 years. The book went through many changes along the way. I wanted the book to be different, so I initially drafted the pattern on paper then photographed the pattern steps. That took a million and a half years. It was especially difficult when I messed up a step and had to start all over again. Here is an example of this.

A year or so later, I had employees and decided that if I was going to get this book done, I needed to just hire someone to make the illustrations. She was great with her illustrations but again, if one tiny thing was wrong, the whole draft had to be redone. It was not ideal either. In this example, she illustrated the fold of the dart in the wrong direction.

I finally decided to just go with the easiest route which was to use Adobe Illustrator. It still was time consuming, but for over 400 illustrations in one book, this was the best solution.

Over the past year, I have been working on refining this content. I worked with a young lady in my neighborhood who was being home schooled. I presented the content to her as a self-study course. I was there right next to her to resolve any and all issues she encountered and I know I would not have had the motivation to complete this book without her.

After she completed the full draft, I made necessary changes and handed the book over to my dad. He is a writer as well, and knows nothing of my trade. He read through the entire book interjecting questions throughout. That really helped me compile everything that I was missing.

I did what I felt was going to be my final draft back in July, but after taking a month off to give myself a break, I was still making major changes as well as reorganizing the book.

I went through 3 additional rounds of editing and finally, 3 weeks ago, I made my last change. I got the book uploaded to Createspace, KDP, Nook Press and Lightning Source.

I made pre-sales of Pattern Design: Fundamentals available on my website. I will be making the color copy of the books spiral bound for my website. The paperback books available on Amazon are lower priced, but they are also black and white on the interior, while copies on my website are color and spiral bound. The official book launch is November 1st. Get your copy today! Digital versions on my website are available now.