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Mrs Bowden’s top tip – pattern matching

Mrs Bowden’s top tip – pattern matching

   Blog    May 3, 2018  |  0

Mrs Bowden’s top tip – pattern matching

One of the many advantages of making your own clothes is being able to consider the alignment and placement of the print and motifs of the fabric.  When it’s correct nobody notices – when it’s off it’s really obvious!!
This week I am offering you a few snippets to help you match patterns.  I love my Queenie dress and couldn’t have wonky HRH’s……
Before you even start to pattern match you have to establish what kind of print the fabric has.  You can assess this by taking a good look at your fabric.  Ask yourself the following….

Does the fabric have a direction i.e., are all the motifs  placed in the same way or are they random?  On this fabric all the melons, lettuce and tomatoes are placed on a horizontal line, all head’s up.  All facing NORTH.

This fabric has a ONE DIRECTIONAL print.

This feather printed cotton has a TWO WAY directional print.  The feathers are travelling North and South.  
This pretty viscose has a MULTI-DIRECTIONAL print.  North, South, East, West and inbetween.
On commercial patterns layouts are provided to show you how to place the pattern pieces onto the fabric.
As you can see on this layout, the pattern pieces are already organised to be one directional.
However, you sometimes come across a pattern that has a layout for fabrics with NAP or PILE.  This simply means the layout is one-directional.  The term NAP and PILE refer to fabrics such as velvet or corduroy that have a definite direction but don’t feature a print.  The colour of these fabrics can appear to change if the fibres are stroked in one direction.
Sometimes you will come across a pattern layout that is only suitable for TWO WAY or MULTI DIRECTIONAL prints as the pattern pieces are rotated.

In other words if I was using my melon fabric for this garment I could end up with half of the skirt with melons facing North and the other half facing South.  What a pickle that would create!

Here I am in my swimming print fabric with all my little swimmers in directional order!  Next time I’ll touch upon how to pattern match with lots of helpful snippets.

Until then,

in stitches,

Mrs Bowden x

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