This will be the final post in the series on using Wild Ginger’s PatternMaster software to edit my pants pattern.  I’m currently making a wearable muslin based on the pattern, but I’ll save that for my next article.  (You can see sneak peeks of my progress on my Instagram feed).

Altering the Side Seams

As I noted last time, the pants are still too snug at the widest part of the hip.  It is easy to draw a new curve to widen the side seams in Pattern Editor. This was a bit of guesswork, not having the hip curve from a physical ruler to trace against.  I just tried to draft a nice curve that would add to the seam.  I also took the opportunity to smooth out a kink in the old side seam, right where you see the notch in the screen shots below.

The green curves show the new side seam line.

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A lot has happened with my pants project since my last update – more than I can cover in a single blog article.

Today, I want to cover some of the more advanced things I’ve been doing on the computer with Wild Ginger’s PatternMaster.  But I also want to get back to working with fabric.

Walking seams

Walking and truing seams is an important part of patternmaking; you want to make sure that matching seams are the same length unless you’re intentionally doing so, in order to shape the garment in some way.

Wild Ginger’s Pattern Editor makes it easy to compare two seams; if you select the lines and curves that make up a seam, it will tell you how long the seam is, and it even has a tool that will compare two seam lines and tell you the difference between the two.

You can also use Pattern Editor to simulate the way you would walk seams on paper. (You can click/tap to see closeup versions of all the screenshots).

I started by flipping the back pants piece (in red outline) left-to-right using the Mirror command, then used the Align command to align it with the front piece at the bottom inseam.

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When I left you all at the end of Part 2, I had just printed out a pattern I digitally traced in Wild Ginger’s Pattern Editor. I left you with the impression I was ready to cut out fabric and start sewing.

That was when I encountered The Problem.

The Problem

I figured it would be a good idea to take the prinout and compare the pieces to the original tissue I scanned into the computer.  This would be a sanity test to see just how faithful the digital version is, compared to the original. I overlaid the tissue atop the printout, and lined them up.

And – they didn’t match.

Let’s take the back pattern piece, and align the tissue and the printout at the bottom hem and the grainline.  Right away you can see a discrepancy – the printed pattern seamlines are about 1/8 of an inch narrower than the tissue.

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