Finally figured out why my jacket patterns were always off by a half inch

I was drafting a wool blazer pattern for a client in Denver and kept having the same weird bunching at the shoulder. My sewing teacher, Maria, pointed out I was adding the seam allowance to the armhole curve BEFORE I did the final shaping. I'd been doing it backwards for like two years. Has anyone else had a basic drafting step they were doing in the wrong order?

2 comments

2 Comments

barbara841mo ago

Remembered I used to cut notches before sewing.

tarajenkins1mo ago

Wait, did you also have one of those lightbulb moments where you realized you were making things harder for yourself? For me it was marking darts. I used to just eyeball them and hope for the best (spoiler: it never worked out). What finally clicked was tracing the entire dart shape with tailor's chalk on both layers, then pinning through the points before I even touched the sewing machine. It added like 30 seconds to my prep time but saved me from ripping out crooked darts every single time.