Pattern Alterations Session 2: Shirt Neckline & Upper Back Alterations

The first area of pattern alterations we're gonna focus on is the neckline area. Now this is just, uh, example piece of what the bodice front might look like on whatever pattern you're using. They'll generally have the same shape. If it doesn't look somewhere similar. You'll have your front. You're going to have the neckline area. You'll have a shoulder area, arm's eye, side, and bottom. Yours may or may not have darts on them. If they don't, we're not gonna talk about this one over here at all today. The only one we're gonna talk about is the one at the bottom, because it's going to help us. If your pattern does not have darts, we'll show you how to incorporate them a little bit. So that way you can utilize them when making this alteration. So up here on the neckline, there's a lot of things that you can do to change this. Whether it's for fit reasons or to change the way the neckline looks. This is a pretty standard neckline. Almost looks the same as maybe like, a basic t-shirt or something. There's not a whole lot fancy about this neckline but you can change it to literally anything you want. If you wanted to make it into a v-neck, all you would do is take your ruler, start up here at where your neckline starts, decide how deep you want that V to go, and draw a new line. Super easy. Anything else you wanna do to your neckline, you wanna go ahead and do that obviously before you cut out any of your pattern pieces. Whether you want to make it more rounded, even make it straight across, whatever you wanna do, very easy to do that alteration on this pattern piece. If you're going to make any changes that require you to add something to it, so whether you wanted this to be less sloped, maybe something like this, if your front pattern piece has any kind of facing, has any kind of color, anything that is going to be attached to this upper neck line, you'll obviously need to also make those adjustments there. But if you have just, say a basic shirt front, nothing attached to it, then you don't need to worry about it. Make whatever changes you want and you're good to go. A common problem with a lot of shirts is that the neckline just doesn't quite fit right. Whether that means it's too tight or maybe it's too loose. So you're not comfortable wearing the shirt. Maybe when you bend over, the neckline gaps a lot. So to make that alteration is really pretty easy. What we're going to do is we're going to be drawing a line from our upper neckline area all the way down to the center of this dart. Now I mentioned you don't necessarily have to have a long ruler. If you do, it makes it a lot handier. 'Cause you can see, I can lay this ruler down and it's going to go the entire length of the pattern. If I don't have the long ruler and I have a shorter ruler, I still want to maybe get another ruler, something else that has a straight edge, so I can line up my shorter ruler, but still know it's in line with where I went down here. Because I don't necessarily want to eyeball this. By that I mean, if I'm, say right there, and I think that, that looks like it lines up to the center of the dart but I'll-- I'll go to move my ruler down here and I see that it doesn't. Well then you're not gonna have a straight line. You're gonna have a line that has a weird little bow in it, and that's not gonna work for your alteration. So if you don't have the long ruler, get either a second ruler or something else that has a straight line and use that to help you line up, so you know you're exactly at the center of this dart in the bottom. So again, this is assuming that your pattern has a dart in the bottom. If it doesn't, we'll talk about that in just a minute. So you want your line to go from the center of the dart to about the center of the neckline at the top. Now, all we're going to do is draw a line. Now, if you have made multiple alterations to this pattern piece or making different alterations in different lines all over your pattern piece before you're actually going to start cutting and taping back together, either get multiple colors of Sharpie markers, or label them somehow so you know what they are. Maybe I have a sheet of paper off to the side and I can write a big A up here and say a B right there. Then over on my little cheat sheet, I'll write A, neckline adjustment, B is I'm going to take in or out the neckline. That way I don't get all of my lines confused if I've drawn a lot of them. Now that I have this line drawn, we're gonna do some cutting. The first thing I'm gonna do is cut open this dart. All I have to do is cut right along this line. And I'm simply removing this little triangle piece here. Just like that. Now I want to cut directly along this line. Doing your best to stay as on the line as you possibly can. We're gonna cut all the way through. Now for this alteration, and pretty much all the alterations I'm going to make throughout this class, I'm going to assume we're making all of our adjustments in one half inch increments. Now that's just a good place to start. However, if you are making this shirt and you're making it, and you know you want it to fit perfectly, you're gonna make a muslin first. You're gonna try it on, and you're gonna be able to see either how too big or too small the neckline or area you're making the adjustment is. And then you can make your half inch either bigger or smaller. But for this class, we're going to do everything in half inch increments. So I'm gonna say that my neckline is one half inch too big. So up at the neckline area, I'm gonna take my ruler, lay it down. And I want to mark one half inch in, only for the first couple inches up here. I just only need it at the top. That's the only area I need to know where my half inch is. Because I'm making the adjustment to the neckline only. If I were to cut this apart and overlap it the entire way, that's taking the entire front in and it may not fit the way I want it to. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take, and at the top part of my pattern, I am going to keep my neckline edge nice and even. I'm just going to bring it in. So where I see my half inch line. So the edge of the pattern piece I cut right here is right next to my half inch line. And all I've done is sort of bring that in. Down at the bottom, we want our pattern piece to only open up a tiny bit above this dart area. We don't want it to be a very big dart here because what we're essentially doing is making our dart larger and that's what's going to accommodate the extra that we're taking out from the neckline. So I have my neckline sloped in a bit and I have my dart area still mashed up at the top there. I'm gonna put a couple pieces of tape in place just to hold it. Still got my dart lined up here. I have overlapped it going up and now I have my neckline mashed up, too. So I have made my neckline one half inch smaller and it's made a little tiny bit smaller moving down into the top of your bodice piece and that's okay. If your neckline is too big by a lot, you probably need to bring in that entire area just a little bit. So, by about right in here, you're down to about a quarter inch maybe, even just an eighth inch that you're taking out. And as you move further down to your pattern, you're still lined up exactly. So nothing has changed here, but your neckline is now that half inch smaller. So that's how you're going to take your pattern in to adjust for a gaping neckline. Now you've made your dart just a little bit larger. By that I mean, since you've pivoted the top together, it's kind of brought the bottom out just a little bit. So your dart may be a little bit bigger but just by the tiniest amount. Then you can take this piece and use it just like you would for any other pattern. It's good to go. You can cut it out. So everything just like normal. You can pretty much do the exact same alteration in reverse if your neckline is too tight. So we can take these pieces to tape off and we can do the exact same thing. We would keep our bottom together like so, and then we would take our-- our ruler and we would measure out, say our half inch again, all the way up to the top. We could take and add some tissue paper in there and we can make this neckline a little bit bigger. Again, that's also gonna make it a little bit bigger moving out into this top area of your, um, your front bodice piece. But odds are, if your neckline is that tight, you may need to add a little extra ease into other areas up along that neckline as well. So, some very easy, basic alterations you can make to the neckline area of a garment. You can change it up to change the entire look of the piece or you can, with simply one line, you can make the neckline larger or smaller. Now our pattern piece already had this dart at the bottom. If yours doesn't, say it's just a flat piece here, no dart on there at all, you can add a dart. You can do that by deciding how big of dart you want to have. So we'll bring our ruler in here. And this one is about two inches at the bottom. So if I'm going to take in two inches along the bottom edge of this pattern piece, then I need to add two inches in somewhere else. So I would take, and I would bring another piece of paper, pattern paper behind, right here. And I would measure out two inches right here. I can use my ruler or I can just freehand depending on how curved this line is. You want your new mark to gradually go up into the edge of your pattern piece. That way, when you add your dart in here, you're going to bring in two inches that will automatically bring that two inches as you add it in, back into the bottom of your pattern piece and you'll still have the same fit. So whether it is neckline you want to change for look or being too big or too small, this is how you make those alterations for that pattern piece. So give it a try and I think you'll find that next time you have a shirt that you're making, the front will be exactly the way you want it to be. So I've moved away my front pattern pieces and brought in my shirt back pattern pieces. Now, while the front is an area that you can do a lot of different alterations to, to change the look of something, the back is where you're gonna do a lot of alterations when it comes to fit issues. The first thing we're gonna talk about is shoulders, because a lot of commercial patterns just have a general slightly sloped shoulder. And that's how all of the pattern pieces come. But there's a lot of different shoulders out there. You could have really square shoulders, maybe you have some sloping shoulders, and how you draft your back pattern piece or the alterations you make to that pattern piece can help your overall garment fit better on your shoulders. So the first one would be if you have sloping shoulders. So this is up here in our shoulder section is where we're gonna be dealing with. But by that, I mean, rather than having, like a really square shoulder or high shoulders, your shoulders sloped down more which means you have extra fabric on your-- in your shirt when you make it, if your shoulders slope a lot. So again, we're gonna use the same half inch alteration for this pattern piece. And I do want to point out that when I'm saying half inch, if your pattern is something where you're cutting to, cutting on the fold, so with the front and the back, if you take a half inch on one side and a half inch on the other, that's an inch total you're taking out of your pattern. So if you're, again, if you're making your muslin and you've measured that you need to take out a total of an inch and you're doing it on the front section, you're gonna divide that number in two. Same with on the back. So just remember if you're making the alteration in more than one place, divide your overall amount that you need to either take out or add into how many sections you'll be doing that over. So if you have sloping shoulders, this is a very easy alteration to make. We're gonna start at the upper edge of our pattern piece, measure in half inch, and I'm going to make a mark here. Now I'm gonna take in from the point of our shoulder over here, I'm going to slope this line down a half inch. So I have my ruler lined up here on my half inch line, and just like that, I have changed the overall shape of the shoulder, from something a little more rounded to something a little more sloped. If you do this alteration, as you can see, I've taken out a half inch here. I can also take out a half inch on the front side of my pattern piece as well. So I'm taking a lot of fabric, a lot of area out of this arm's eye. If my arm's eye wasn't already too big, I need to make sure I'm still adding that back in. So what I would do is take my ruler again, down here on the bottom of the arm's eye, I'd measure down a half inch. And then if I wanted to have her had one of those, we're gonna call them our fancy French curve rulers. If you had something like that, use that, or you can simply take and free hand your line. And all you're doing is adding that half-inch right back into your arm's eye like that. So even though you're taking it out from up here, you're adding it down here. The overall arm's eye opening will still be the same. Your sleeve should still fit in. It will just fit your body better. You can make the same alteration if you have more of a square shoulder. You can do that by simply taking your ruler, lining up the top two points of your sleeve, depending on what it looks like from the commercial pattern already. And either straighten that line out, simply removing this little area here, that extra little slope, or if they're even more square, really straight across, you can take measure up half inch from the outer edge of your shoulder and you'll redraw this line. So again, it's from this point, the inside of our shoulder piece out to the outer edge and then you could extend this up and we have added a half inch to the top of the shoulder. So again, if they're very, very high shoulders or straight across shoulders, that's where you can add an extra half inch to. If you do that, you would do, need to do the same thing into your arm's eye. This is gonna make your arm's eye half inch bigger or an inch, if you're also making this alteration on your front piece. So you would also need to take and add or raise that arm's eye up by a half inch in the shoulder area or in the underarm area doing the same thing. Measuring up a half inch, but extend this up here. And then you just incorporate this line back into the arm's eye. So whether you are raising it up or lowering it down when it comes to either straight across shoulders or narrow shoulders, sloping shoulders, this is how you do that alteration. Just remember whatever you do to the shoulder, whether you're adding fabric or taking it out, you need to do the same to the arm's eye, so you're not making it too big or too small. The next thing I want to talk about is making the pattern bigger for a broad back. So what I mean by that is that you are broad in this area across here. Just the upper back area. It doesn't mean that you necessarily are broad around the mid-section. If you-- if that was the case and you were broad all over, you could just draw a line and spread this pattern. But if you wanted to make the shoulder section only a little bit bigger, I'm gonna show you how to do that. This doesn't mean that it is making it that much bigger appearance wise. But if you think about, maybe you're making this out of a a fabric that has really no give to it at all, and you even do like this movement here and it's really tight across your shoulders, this alteration is gonna help alleviate that. What I wanna do is start with a mark that is right around the center of my upper shoulder area here. And I've already made a little pencil mark that I can see. So I'm just gonna color over that with my Sharpie so you can see it a little better. And we're gonna start here. The other area that I need to mark is just underneath the arm's eye area. You want to go down at least five eighths of an inch because that's your common seam allowance for commercial patterns. And I like to give myself just a little bit of extra wiggle room when it comes to making this alteration. I don't like things really close to the edge. So I'm gonna come down an entire inch and make a little mark. So what I need to do is I'm going to be drawing some lines in this area. I need to essentially just highlight the shoulder section only. I'm gonna start with a line that is gonna go straight across the back of my shoulder here, lined up with this mark I just made. It doesn't need to go all the way across just about halfway. I'm then going to connect that with the other mark that I made at the center of my upper shoulder area and bring that line to right here. So this is the section I want to either make bigger or smaller. So to do that, I need to cut along the lines that I just drew. And I'm actually gonna cut all the way through everything. I want to entirely remove this piece. Okay. Right like that. So now with this piece free, that we can move it around, first we'll start with making it smaller. So say we need to bring in the shoulder section just a little bit. Again I'm gonna use that half inch for an example. Again, this is a back piece either this is gonna be cut on the fold or you're cutting two because it has a seam that goes all the way up the back. So our half inch made on this side will be an inch total but I'm gonna take my ruler, lay my half inch line along the edge of where I just cut and I'm going to draw a line right like that. Then, I simply take this piece that I cut away, bring it in, and line it up with the new line. Like so. I'm just gonna lay that in place 'cause I'm going to move it again when we do the broad shoulder sections. I don't quite want to tape it. But this now makes your shoulder area a little bit smaller. Now, if you'll notice over here on this side, this no longer lines up. All you need to do is get rid of this extra little bit that's overhanging. Do that by taking your ruler, lining it up with the edge of where your new pattern piece is. Once you have it lined up there, you can simply just bring that line and gently taper it into the side seam. Now, if you want to more closely follow the curve of your pattern piece, you can. If your pattern piece slopes in a lot, I would recommend doing that. But generally back pattern pieces are almost kind of boxy anyway. So even just a straight line in that area is just fine. So that's how you're going to take it in by a half inch. Exact same thing if you wanna make it bigger by a half inch. Again, this would be what will give you that little extra room across the back of your shoulders if your garment's a little bit too tight. Same thing. I would do my same horizontal line here. Same vertical line here would cut across it and I would move my pattern piece over the half inch. Now I have one here that I've already taped. So go ahead and bring that one in. So you can see, I have my piece here that I cut out. I've moved it over a half inch, taped it in place, still lines up along this line that I've drawn, but rather than my top piece being in too far, now it was extended too far. You can see this black line is where it used to be. This new black line is where it is now. So instead of tapering it in, I have added paper all on the side. Different ways that you can do this. And it depends on your body shape. For this, for me, in general, I find that I need to add extra all the way along. I have broader shoulders but I also have a pretty broad back all the way down. So I go ahead and extend this all the way down. Meaning if I added a half inch up here, I add a half inch all along the side. If you have a very broad back but a very narrow waist, you would want to taper this line in. So you're not making the bottom waist area of your garment any bigger. So that is how you're gonna make adjustment for broad shoulders or narrow shoulders. Now, as if cut that one apart. I'm gonna bring in a new one here and we are gonna talk about how to make an adjustment for the back being too narrow in just the back area. Meaning that, if it was all over, I would cut down the middle and either overlap or extend out if I wanted to increase the size of everything. If I just wanted to take it in or out in the back area, I want to make similar lines to what I just did. Again, we want our line, that is an about an inch down from underneath our arm's eye area, you can measure that or I'm just gonna approximate. That's about an inch. Draw this line. Like so. And now I need my line from the center of the top of my shoulder area perpendicular to the line that I just drew. But instead of only drawing it down to this right here, I want to extend the line all the way down the pattern piece. Right? Like so. Now I'm going to be cutting on these lines again, but I want to do it in a way that I don't actually cut it apart entirely. What I mean by that is I want to try and keep all areas around the outer edge of my pattern piece still attached. That's harder to do at the starting point than at the end. So I'll admit what I will do is actually cut apart one side and then just tape it back together and I'll show you what I mean. So I'm gonna take and cut along this line here. And I'm gonna cut all the way to the top, except I'm gonna try not to go all the way through my pattern. So since I've drawn the perimeter of this pattern piece in a pretty fixed Sharpie, it helps to just sort of stop where that Sharpie mark stops. I'm also gonna cut along this line here. Again, I am trying not to cut all the way through the pattern piece. So I'll go right to the inside edge of my fixed Sharpie mark. Now I have cut apart my bottom. So while I'm working with it, I can either hold it in place or I can take a tiny, tiny little piece of tape, tape it back together just along my little Sharpie mark like that. I find that's a little bit easier than trying to make a slit and then get your scissors in there to cut along that line and cut along it straight without cutting everything apart. So now, again, we're gonna use that magical half inch. So if I want to bring this back area in a half inch, right where this little cross hatch was formed with my lines, I want to measure over a half inch. I'm gonna draw a line. Like, so. And now what I wanna do is bring this section in to those half inch lines. Like, so just like this, and again, my paper is very stiff. So if you're using tissue paper, you wouldn't have quite these bubbles like I do. So you're gonna bring that point into the half inch, put a little piece of tape, like so, you could see that just gonna overlap it a little bit all the way up to the upper area of your pattern piece. Same thing along the bottom here. I want to bring my area at that cross mark into this half inch just like this. And then when these kind of get folded down, pressed flat, just like so. So again, if your paper was the standard tissue paper, you wouldn't have quite the bubble I have here but now I have brought the back section in just by a half inch. I still have the same amount up here. My shoulder seam has not changed down here at the bottom edge of my pattern piece that has not changed either. I've only brought it in a half inch right at the shoulder area, and then tapered that out. If I was a half inch too small. So I needed to take it out a half inch, I would do the same thing. I would make the same cuts and I would simply pull it apart by our half inch. So I'm just gonna do, bring my ruler in. You could have your piece of paper underneath your pattern that you're working on, or you can just use your ruler like so, and I'm going to bring that out about a half inch and I'll just tape that to the table to show you, bring it out about a half inch right there next to our cross hatch mark. And just like that, that makes the shoulder area a half inch bigger. So whether you're gonna make it half inch bigger, for like this one here, you're gonna make it half inch smaller, you only have to draw two lines. Again, two straight lines one that goes the entire length of your pattern piece and one that comes in from underneath the arm's eye. Either overlap or extend that by the desired amount, if you want to make it bigger or smaller. And just like that, the back of your garment will now fit even better. So whether you have a narrow back, broad back, sloping shoulders, square shoulders, broad shoulders, narrow shoulders, or your neckline just doesn't quite fit, you know how to make all of those changes, so now the front and back of your bodice will fit perfectly.