Wow! It’s been a loooooong time since I did an FAQ Friday!
(Fun fact: I wrote the majority of those FAQ Fridays between 2012-2014 because I was in a terrible place with my then-job and it gave me something to write and focus on to relieve the stress…)
Anyway.
There’s been a question I’ve been getting a loooooot lately mostly on tiktok and occasionally on instagram, and that’s “I know you don’t do commissions, but you should sell your costume patterns!”
First off, it’s a really cool idea. I’d love to be able to do that. But, t here’s a lot of reasons why (at least for now) aren’t doing that. So let’s go through those reasons one by one.
1. I use a lot of commercial patterns as a base.
Let’s look at something like my most recent lake dress, because it’s a mix of patterns and pattern-making. My underdress I used a commercial pattern for. I changed it a LOT. But even with all those changes, it wouldn’t be right for me to profit from or give away someone else’s work. (Plus, I still wasn’t happy with that underdress, so I wouldn’t recommend it for someone else making the same costume).
This is why on my costume breakdowns I try to go into all the changes I made to commercial patterns, so if you want to follow my footsteps, you can.
2. When I do fully pattern something from the beginning, I’m actually just draping it with mock-up fabric.
When I “pattern something” myself, I’m actually just draping the pattern with scrap fabric. I keep a lot of scraps of fabric around so I can do this, or I go buy really cheap fabric just for this purpose. I pin it on my dressform and just start cutting and pinning until I have something that looks kinda right. This is what I did with the outer dress for Padme’s lake gown. I draped it in scrap lining material. I do write notes on it in sharpie, but see next point.
There’s been a handful of times I’ve transferred these mock-up patterns to paper but I can count those times on one hand. Actually it’s probably only like 2 or 3 times. It’s a step I generally don’t waste time with because of point #4.
3. Those mock-ups usually still get changed quite a bit when I move into the real fabric.
And yeah, the notes I write on the fabric mock-ups aren’t cutting instructions… it’s usually “extend this edge 1 in” or things like that. I use the mock-up as the pattern to cut my real fabric, but I almost ALWAYS still do adjustments as I’m cutting out the real fabric. It’s not worth going into another mock-up phase just to slightly change the angle of a collar point when I can do it on the fly. Then I’m still often doing adjustments as I assemble the actual costume.
So even if I did move those fabric mock-ups onto pattern paper, it still wouldn’t be exactly what my finished product was.
4. 80% of the time, those mock-ups become lining.
I really don’t like wasting fabric. So more often than not, I incorporate the mock-up as the lining for the costume. So once the costume is done – there’s no remaining “pattern pieces.”
And even when there are exceptions to that – when I do still have the mockup pieces because they could not be used as lining – I keep them to reuse for other mockups. IE – my initial mockup for Hera was made out of the mockup pieces for my Bespin cape. My Padme lake gown mockup will also be reused, because it was large pieces that will be great for smaller mockups.
5. Pattern Grading
And finally, unfortunately I know nothing about pattern grading. I’d LOVE to learn it, but it’s not something in the cards right now… so if I did offer any of these patterns, they would be to my size only, and it would be up to each person to resize. And that would lead to… a lot of questions and trying to help people. Which I do love doing, but trying to help someone fit something remotely is a nightmare!
All that being said. I’ve been asked about this a lot and it is something I’ve been considering for the things I did 100% create. But it’s also not high on my list of priorities right now… it lives in that nebulous state of “maybe one day…”