Tips and Tricks for Pattern Grading

Sometimes we don't always have the right size of pattern that we need. Whether that's because they don't have the size that you want at the store, or maybe at the last minute you wanna make something and you don't wanna run out and get another size pattern. There's an easy way that you can grade up the size of your pattern. So this pattern here, is just for a cute little girls dresses, and you can see that it has the sizes up here at the top and it goes up to a size 4, well maybe you need a size 5. And again, if they don't have it and you wanna use this pattern this is a way that you can grade up your pattern pieces.

So this is just a pattern piece from this packet here and it's just one the process we're gonna do on this pattern piece you would do for all of the pattern pieces you need to complete whatever it is you're sewing. But again, this is just one here. So you can see the outer line all the way around is for the largest size that this pattern piece is which is the four we're going to make it a five. So to do that, we're gonna take a ruler and you're going to measure the distance between lines three and four. You can start anywhere on your pattern piece but I like to start along the straight edges because I find they're the easiest.

So again, you're in a line up your ruler on the edge of the pattern piece and measure the distance between lines three and four. And it's just over an eighth of an inch. So we're going to move our ruler that same distance out past the edge of our pattern piece and we're going to draw a line, make it fairly thick so you can see and this is now our size five pattern piece line and we're gonna do this all the way around. So in areas like here you can see all your lines are sort of running together. So if I had a thicker pin, all I would do is come in here and draw a line just a little ways away from four cause you can see the lines are so close here that they're all running together.

This again is gonna become our number five line. Same thing is gonna happen as we go down. Now, what happens when you get into this section of the pattern piece, rather than drawing out in some areas you may actually need to come and draw on top of your actual pattern piece. Now this is where this technique is good to use If you're sort of in a bind to grade up your pattern piece or like I said, they just don't have your size but not something you wanna do all the time. Just because in areas like this you're gonna have a sort of a a gray area where you may not know where your line is but because they're all right on top of each other when you go to cut this out, as long as you're right in this general area, you'll be just fine.

So again, we'll go over to this next section here gonna measure the distance between our lines three and four. And again, it's just under an eighth of an inch this time so we'll move our ruler up and put a new mark. And we're just putting a mark there because this is a curved line. We're going to need to sort of freehand our line like this. If you have a French curve ruler you could be using a curved ruler as well.

But if you don't just simply tracing it in drawing it in like this works just fine and sort of work your way back into where all the lines come together. Again, this will be our size five. Along this side we don't need to change anything. All of the pattern pieces, no matter what size go right along the fold here, same thing along the bottom this is a straight line we don't need to do anything with the pattern piece size here. What we do want to deal with is the notches.

So you can see how all the notches move over just a slight amount. The end of one notch kind of goes into the other one. So we know our size five notch would start right here and then go over. So we can label that as our size five notch so we know where we're at when we line all of our pieces up, gonna keep moving around the pattern piece. Again, we're going to take our ruler and measure again the distance between lines three and four, again right about an eighth of an inch.

They should be pretty consistent. All of the measurements when you're going around your pattern piece. So if you are measuring and you know one of these is an eighth of an inch and one is a quarter maybe go back and measure and make sure that you didn't get off just a little bit. But so we've got that line that's a straight one. We're going up here.

We know this is also right about a quarter. You can kind of use your ruler to follow the shape if it's a gentle curve but then you're just going to need to use your pencil and sort of sketch that line in. And as we get closer up to here you can see these lines get really close together. So we wanna start bringing our line really close in until it looks like it's about the distance away from line four, that line three is from four and bring that up and connect it just like that. Again, we have another notch up here and you can see how they kind of move out in this direction.

We would bring our notch right here. Just like that and we have our size five notch. And so just by going around the pattern piece like this, again measuring the distance away from the three to four if you're gonna make a five, two to three if we're gonna make a four drawing a new line adding any of the marks in that were there like notches if there's any circles or anything like that you'll have to do that as well. You can quickly and easily grade up the size of your pattern piece so you can make something If they don't have the size of pattern that you need.