How to Digitize a Sewing Pattern in like 200 not-so-easy steps

Wow I haven’t written anything here in a long time, because I haven’t wanted to. Actually it’s because I’ve been really busy digitizing sewing patterns. Which is why I haven’t wanted to write. Because I’ve been too preoccupied/tired from digitizing sewing patterns.

Today I’ve decided to write about how to do it, because I don’t want to have to explain the process to anyone when I tell them that this is what I’m doing lately. Not that anyone really needs to know or necessarily cares how to do it, but I’m writing about it anyway, because my printer is out of ink and also my kid is about to come back over here from her dad’s, which puts a serious crimp in certain steps of this work…namely, the steps that require the use of the printer and then the dining room table.

Well anyway. To follow will be a ridiculously truncated account of this arduous process.

Here’s one of the latest patterns I’m trying to digitize:

Hollywood patterns were pretty stylish because they often tried to emulate outfits worn by movie stars. This as opposed to patterns by Simplicity, whose entire schtick was to make patterns that were relatively easy to sew, but were often…less stylish. Thus, I like Hollywood patterns better than Simplicity not only because they were often more stylish, but because Hollywood is long out of business, so I don’t have to worry about getting a Cease-and-Desist letter from them if I digitize one of their patterns and offer it for sale on Etsy. I mean, the thing is, you can’t legally copyright a pattern itself, due to some weirdnesses about copyright law. You can’t copyright a “pattern” for how to make something. But you can copyright the artwork and the instructions of a sewing pattern. So I just kinda don’t want to go there. So I tend to hoard Hollywood patterns if I can find them. I resell Simplicity, Butterick and McCall all the time, but not Hollywood. (Although…I sold a couple of Hollywood patterns last year that I really regret selling now, but enough about that.)

Dubarry and Advance were two other pattern companies that have been out of business for decades, and I hoard plenty of those patterns as well. Dubarry patterns were often really fashionable but the instructions were universally AWFUL. Advance patterns always had great instructions, but their designs were usually less…cute. There are other defunct pattern companies I like to hoard, but those are probably the big three.

Anyway, to digitize a pattern, the first thing I do is take photos of all the pattern pieces, all laid out.

But wait. You can’t just TAKE PHOTOS of the pattern pieces all laid out, because of this thing called PERSPECTIVE WARP. Or at least, that’s what photoshop calls it. There’s also a thing called LENS DISTORTION, which is sometimes really bad with camera phones. So, to begin, the photos need to be as perfectly aligned to some sort of a grid system as possible. Then when you take the photo, you try to get it “squared up,” but you will still probably fail to get it perfectly “squared up” every single time:

These are old-school unprinted pattern pieces, note. Most of the patterns I hoard are unprinted. Newer patterns usually have special instruction markings printed right on the tissue paper. Old patterns just had very subtle and hard-to-see cutouts.

So when you take photos of your pattern pieces, you have to make sure those cutouts are all visible, and in old, unprinted patterns, they usually aren’t very visible in your photos, especially for the larger pattern pieces. So you can outline the pattern piece on your whiteboard, but if you use a whiteboard marker it will probably bleed ink all over your pattern pieces, which you probably don’t want. So you can use a grease pencil. Which is what I have been using.

So, the grid you see on the pictures above is a magnetic whiteboard with a 1-inch grid drawn on it with sharpie, and the pattern pieces are held in place with refrigerator magnets. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get the grid drawn correctly on this particular whiteboard, which is now hanging on the wall in my dining room.

SO even when you do get the photos almost PERFECTLY squared and in perspective, it is still almost always a *little* bit distorted, and then there’s the lens distortion thing I just talked about, which means that you have to correct the photo in Photoshop. I have gotten really good at this, but it took me…almost as long as it took me to get that grid perfectly drawn on the goddamn whiteboard. It still takes me between 5 and 20 minutes to get the photo corrected in photoshop. It used to take me at LEAST a half an hour per photo. I’m getting faster!

After you’ve got your photos perfectly in perspective, and also perfectly SIZED so you’ve got an exact inch-to-inch ratio, you put the photos into illustrator. And THEN you trace the outline of each pattern piece, using either shapes, lines, or the pen tool.

This example is from an Advance pattern from the 40’s. The pattern was for a blouse, jumper and hat, but I only did the hat:

After the outline of each piece is rendered, you just “turn off” the image of the photograph by clicking on the little eyeball icon to the left of the layer. To further overexplain what I mean: you can see in the above image that the hat band piece photograph is visible, but the two pieces of the hat crown have been “turned off.”

That beret pattern is really simple because it’s just lines and circles. I didn’t have to use the pen tool at all for the above pattern. But most patterns are much more complex than this, so you have to use the pen tool, aka bezier curves—which is something I learned how to do about ten years ago, and got really pretty good at it. It’s tricky to master that tool at first, but then it’s kinda like riding a bike:

As indicated, you have to be sure to get all the notches and dotted lines and arrows in there, which are things that sewist-types know how to read and interpret, but look like gibberish to other people.

So! That part takes hours, and sometimes even days. THEN there’s the next parts! Sizing, and instructions.

Sizing is a nightmare, and is the reason I’m still very unsure of my own abilities at this process. I’ve written about this before, but sizing, aka grading, is…really hard. It’s hard because it’s not an exact science. There is no “one way” to do it.

When you size a pattern piece up or down, you don’t just expand the entire piece, because then a person with a 42-inch bust would necessarily be treated like they are 10 inches taller than a person with a 32-inch bust. So you have to know where to add the extra inches and where to add the extra sixteenths-of-an-inch. I have lots of books that tell me sort of how to do this, but some of them contradict each other, because—this is not an exact science. Every single “fashion house” and pattern manufacturer did this a little bit differently. They all had their own “secret formulas” for sizing, in other words.

Here is part of a pattern that I’m in the middle of sizing up from a 32 bust all the way up to a 40 bust. I’m color-coding each size.

It’s ideal to do this in illustrator, because illustrator has a feature where you can move lines in perfect increments, by whatever increment you set it to. I set mine to 1/16 of an inch, then move up, down, left or right depending on how big or small I want the piece to grow or shrink. You can also type in coordinates for where you want your line to move, but I usually do it the incremental way because I feel like it’s more precise/I have more control.

This takes a LONG FUCKING TIME.

And THEN you print the whole fucking thing out, one page at a time, and tape all the pages together, and cut out all the pieces, and you measure each piece carefully, and THEN, ideally, you actually sew the thing to make sure the markings are all correct, the notches all match, and the garment itself actually fits. And if some of the notches don’t match, you note where they don’t match, and then you have to go back and make fixes, which yes I have so far had to do on every single one I’ve done.

Oh and then you also make notes on how and where the original instructions are bad or incomplete seeming.

(Here, ideally, I would insert a photograph of myself wearing a “test” dress that I sewed from a pattern I digitized, sized up about six sizes, printed, taped together, cut out and then yes actually sewed from it, but I don’t want to go take a picture of myself nor would I even want to include a picture of myself right now okay so just believe me that I’ve actually done this.)

And THEN I incorporate the instructions, which I usually scan, and then I edit the crap out of the scans to “clean them up” because they always come out really bad. I mostly do that by using the “exposure” setting in photoshop, and blah etcetera it’s too boring to describe, but this renders the text to be nearly unreadable. So I have been retyping them, but then I still use the original illustrations.

(You can kinda see the instructions on the first row of pages in the below screenshot. Sorry this is actually a bad example.)

Oh and then you also edit the pattern envelope artwork in Photoshop to make it prettier. I’m working on the Hollywood pattern I posted above, but so far I’m struggling with it and I might need to rescan it to make it look a little bit better. The black lines aren’t black enough, because I sort of messed up the contrast in an early step…so I might need to practically start from scratch. I spent an hour messing with it last night and it looks sorta shitty so far. (Also, like what is up with that lady on the right, holding like…a hayseed? It literally looks like a stalk of grass or wheat or something. Is it supposed to be a flower? She’s holding it like it’s a cigarette for some reason.)

Here’s one that came out a lot better:

See so it WASN’T a complete waste of time to major in graphic design for a whole goddamn year before I decided to not complete that dumb community college program!

But because I’m much more of a tech writer/instructional designer than I am a graphic designer, I have been adding to or rewriting a lot of instructions so far. In at least one case, I drew extra instruction illustrations, because the instructions were just…SO bad. I’m just one of these people who struggles to do certain tasks unless I can see an image of what I’m supposed to be doing, so I feel like..a lot of these really need extra illustrations. (Especially those aforementioned DuBarry patterns!)

I drew all the illustrations for Step 10 on the below example, which is a 1950’s halter top pattern from a magazine mail order. (These kinds of patterns were super common and always had pretty shitty instructions. Also, I hoard them if they’re good patterns, though most of them were for dumb aprons or really boring dresses.)

I also rewrote the above instructions almost entirely because they were so bad/incomplete.

Anyway. This is what I have been doing in pretty much ALL of my spare time, for the last…many months.

SO then, after you’ve done all this fuckin work, you convert these files to pdfs, and you theoretically list them on Etsy, and people can pay per download, and they can either print them out on their printer and tape all the sheets together on your dining room table (yes, I know it probably sounds insane to non-sewing people, but this is really a thing that lots of people do! I have in fact bought pdfs and done this myself, several times, actually!) —OR if you don’t want to deal with printer cartridges and paper and tape, you can take a flash drive with the pdf to like Kinko’s or whatever (does Kinko’s still exist…?) and have it printed on big paper. OR you can actually email the pdf to some online companies who will print it on big paper and mail it to you, for like, I dunno, nine dollars or someshit, I have no idea how much it costs, but yes that does exist.

Cost per pdf is usually like…six or seven dollars. For all this work. So, you know…you’d better hope you sell more than one! (I mean, or even one!)

RIGHT. So I have done an insane amount of work on these since about April/May when I started doing this, but I still don’t have one that I think is really quite…”done” — in the sense that I don’t think the pdfs are read to list for sale on Etsy. I mean, I have five that are…almost done. I mean, like 80-90% done, or maybe even more like 95%. But.

I do have doubts about the accuracy of my sizing on some of them, and I still don’t know a few tiny logistics-type things about how to make sure the pdfs are… “right.”

Agh you know…the halter top pattern is honestly like 99.9% done. But It’s just not…ready. Or maybe I’m just not ready to put it out there. Because what if it’s wrong? What if…I don’t know what could possibly happen, exactly, that could make it wrong. I’m just an insecure and anxious person. I guess.