It’s unfortunate that I I like plaids. I spent all of a Saturday cutting out the fabric for my Springtime Seersucker Shirt.

Some Other Ways to do Plaid Matching

It seems like there’s several methods for matching plaid patterns, so that the pieces nicely match each other at the seams in the finished garment. No matter the approach, all of them have to work at the cutting stage. Once the pieces are cut, the way they will match each other in the finished garment has already been determined.

Tasia at the Sewaholic Blog offers this tutorial for matching plaids, which is well worth reading. Her approach has two major steps: first, you fold the fabric, then align and pin the two sides together at each repeat point of the pattern. Secondly, you mark the pattern piece, with pencil, where the pattern lines fall on a pattern piece. You extend those lines onto the adjoining pattern piece, then use that as a guide for cutting out the subsequent pieces.

I kind of like this approach – it’s pretty simple to follow. But it’s also a lot of pinning, since you end up pinning the fabric everywhere, then pinning the pattern piece to the fabric. And I’m not sure what you do when the fabric anchoring pins fall on the cut lines of your pattern pieces. I guess you have to carefully remove them so you don’t cut over them, and it’s even more work.

The Reader’s Digest New Complete Guide To Sewing offers a really thorough discussion of this topic. Also, I found some really helpful hints in the book How to Use, Adapt, and Design Sewing Patterns by Lee Hollahan, which I checked out from the library. My method for handling patch pockets came from this book.

How I do Plaid Matching

I sort of invented this plaid-matching approach after looking at the references I listed above, and making things up. It’s a work in progress. Continue reading →