Pattern Notebook

What’s with the absence?

I have a very valid excuse. I’ve been busy helping out with this year’s Innovative Pattern Cutting course at Central Saint Martins. It’s the same course I did last year and I felt so nostalgic when I saw all the course notes and exercises.  The course is on its last week and the final toiles are all finished and the studio transformed into an exhibition space.

I’m sure the current students will have a long chat with the tutors about their future after this course. I remembered my long chat and my goal was to continue making lots of stuff and I managed to keep this promise in a form of a pattern making technique notebook.

I love to day-dream or as I call it ‘constructive thinking’. This is especially true when I see details on garment or on my sketches and I start imagining how the pattern could be put together to create the final toile. But I tend to forget about it after I have found the solution so I thought to myself that I should actually be recording all of this down in case this detail happens to be something I will be working on in the future.

So far, I have managed to fill a significant amount of pages and I take this notebook with me everywhere I go. Boring trains journeys feel really short now and it’s amusing to see fellow commuters looking over my shoulder at my sketches. I wonder if they know what I am actually drawing.

My past engineering experience also plays an important part in my pattern making techniques as I use mathematical formulas to determine the dimensions of the patterns. I believe that this actually improves the accuracy of the first draft and reduces the amount of trial and error. However, some patterns are based on actual work that I have done. I write down the tricks that i have discovered for future use.

I’ve included a snapshot from my notebook but the chances of this notebook being seen by anyone is small. After all, these are techniques that I have developed myself and until all the pages are filled with marvellous pattern making techniques, I will keep it very close to my heart. Hey, you might never know that one day you will see my book on the shelves!