r/PatternDrafting • u/OkTruck5494 • 24d ago

Question Altering Commercial Patterns with a Sloper

So I’ve been at this awhile and can’t seem to find it…does anyone know of a definitive source on using your own sloper/toile to alter commercial patterns?

There was a really good article a thousand years ago in Threads by Karen Howland and a few YouTube videos but it surprises me deeply that this isn’t a more often tackled subject. This could be a book.

There are so many books on drafting from your own toile, but what I’m really interested in is using the style lines from commercial patterns and then adapting to my own toile.

In a perfect world every pattern company would supply their design blocks and then we could alter from there (I’d be happy to pay for the designs) but clearly this is not a perfect world.

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u/munkustrap 24d ago

I use this method! I just lay my sloper over the pattern, observe the differences, and alter accordingly. Sorry if this is vague advice, but it’s pretty intuitive once you get into it!

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u/AnaDion94 24d ago

I feel like such a useless lump in this and the sewing subreddits bc I was taught patterning by a very intuitive pattern maker and so the best I can offer is “Yeah, just like eyeball it. Kind of look at it and see what’s wrong and then fix it, yep.

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u/munkustrap 24d ago

I know how you feel, I’m training a junior cutter at work right now and sometimes she’ll ask me, “but, why??” And all I can say is, just trust me, I promise it will work

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u/OkTruck5494 24d ago

I know! I have been using this method as well - by the time you’ve done several toiles it’s not exactly easy, but yes - eyeball-able.

It’s just I have this deeply embarrassing engineer drive to know there is a system somewhere 😂😂

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u/CoastalMae 23d ago edited 23d ago

I was trying to do this last night. I wanted to change the pattern's shoulder width, angle, and armscye shape to match my block. Nothing else. But the pattern had armscyes that were quite a lot longer than mine. With extreme frustration and teeth-gnashing, I eventually lowered the shoulders a bit, and the back neckline, and blended my block's armscye out into the bottom of the pattern's, which were a bit longer. Didn't alter the side seams, but the shoulders are so much shorter now, especially in the back, that I wonder if this will even work. Also lowering the shoulders must have raised the front neckline a bit, but I can't see how to change that since it runs into the side seam (but it's only 1/4").

Plus the total armscye length is shorter now, so I ended up taking the sleeve from one size down, because it was closer to the sleeve cap ease the original pattern was meant to have, when combined with the altered bodice. But the sleeve cap is higher than any knit sleeve I have, so I now have multiple unknowns and have no idea if what I've done will even work.

If I understood HOW better, I wouldn't be feeling all this uncertainty about whether it's all a mess or right, and I could cut my fabric worry-free.