Monday, January 13, 2025

Pattern Testing Is Not For the Weak

I started sewing when I was in high school, mostly figuring it out as I went along.  By the time I was a senior, I was confident/foolish enough to decide to make my prom dress.  I LOVED that thing.  The color was outstanding.  I had no idea what I was doing but I did all the hard things: invisible zipper, boning, a crazy version of that off the shoulder thing because I couldn’t quite figure it out.

I think there was a bow across the back of my hips too.  It’s was 1992.  Bows were a thing.

Back in the 1900s, the only pattern options we had were the big 4: McCalls, Simplicity, etc.  We’d go to the fabric store, look through giant catalogs of what was available, and then go to the biggest filing cabinets you’d ever see and try to find the pattern.  A lot of things still surprise me about this process.

1.  We could help ourselves to the cabinets and it seemed like people mostly respected the organization and didn’t move patterns all over the place.
2.  The pattern envelopes had colored line drawings of people in the clothes that sometimes looked like photographs but not really.  
3.  Occasionally, you could find a pattern with a real photograph on the cover.
4.  If you needed help or ideas, you had to ask your grandmother, neighbor, sewing teacher from middle school home ec.  There was no contacting the designer directly.

You’d walk into the fabric store with an idea and then you had to look through the catalogs to see if someone else had designed your idea.  Then, you had to find the pattern.  Then you had to figure out fabric and notions.

I had no more patience in the 1900s than I do in the 2000s, so I wasn’t willing to buy a pattern one day, think about it and analyze it and then go back other days for fabrics and notions.  For me, it was one stop madness.  

Fast forward to the 2010s or so and I got back into my clothing sewing groove when my sister told me about these people who design patterns on their own, sell them as PDFs that you print on your own and do all kinds of things to support sewists.  

Welcome to sewing in the social media era.  

This is not your mother’s home ec class with all of the rules about pre sewing rituals and pressing this and steaming that.  This is a band of wild hooligans who throw sewing rules to the wind and do it their way.  

Maybe that’s a little dramatic. 

We aren’t  all reckless banditos tearing up the sewing world, thumbing our noses at the centuries of sewing experts who told us we have to do it this way, and this way only.  But many of us frequently confess that we “just” did it this way or “didn’t bother to” do this and you know what?  The clothes fit, they don’t fall off, and the world continues spinning with a lot of happy sewists doing their thing.

The best part of this modern sewing community is access to the designers and the design process.  When someone is ready to release a pattern, they ask for testers of all sizes, shapes and abilities to go through the tutorial and the pattern itself with a magnifying glass.  Find all of the errors.  Tell me all of the misinterpretations you had of my instructions.  Make 5 muslins if necessary so I can see how it looks on your body and make the necessary changes.  Stick with me as I feverishly redraw this whole section because eveyrone is showing me that it’s too long here, too short there, just not right there.  I should be done by 3am.  Please reprint no later than 3:10am and make another one.  (Just kidding, it’s not that harsh).

Pattern testing can be brutal for both parties.  

1. You’re mostly working with a bunch of strangers you’ll never see in real life.  On one hand, this means you don’t have to care what you look like, how dirty your mirror is, what the room behind you looks in your pictures.  On the other, you don’t get to know much about the other people and for someone like me with a wild imagination, it’s hard not to imagine life stories for each person based only on a few pictures and their comments.

2.  As a tester, you’re exposing a lot of your flaws.  None of the tester pictures are used except the official finals, so we see everything from terrible lighting to half dressed people to combinations of fabrics that shouldn’t see the light of day.  

3.  Both the testers and the designer see and talk about crotches, butts and boobs more than any other community, I would imagine.  Because no matter the pattern, unless it’s a bag, one of those 3 spots is the undoing of many a  sewist.  Trying to get any of those curves to work for every size is the hardest part of the whole process.  What works for one shape won’t work for another and that’s where the designer and the testers work together to share ideas, visuals and suggestions.  One “expert” says one thing, another “expert” chimes in with the exact opposite suggestion and sometimes we get caught in the middle, not sure if we should burn down the sewing room and call it a day.

4.  I can’t imagine being a designer, developing my idea and making it work for me, and then putting it out to the masses to test.  Especially when a big revision has to happen.  I’ve tested some patterns that seemed to need no tweaking and I’ve tested patterns that no matter the tweaking never looked good on any body except that of the designer.  I’m also one of those people who takes a pattern and then changes things to suit myself.  Designers must die a little when they see what some people do to their patterns.  I don’t think I could deal with that as a designer.

Most of my pattern testing experiences have been positive and I’ve learned a lot.  Most of all, I’ve learned that designing is not for me.  Taking a pattern and doing little things here and there that I think might work?  Definitely me.  But putting pen to paper and drawing out a design and all of the intricacies that go with it and then sharing it for others to make and change and possibly complain about?  No thanks.

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