Pattern Magic

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by cutting and opening out the pattern, but a flare that is subtly concealed on the underside of the fabric. Making a pattern Íor the kakurenbo design with a drawing is easier than you think. The first book teaches how to insert knots, twists, cubes, holes, craters etc into your basic bodice. A version of the bamboo-bodice is in this book, too. Some techniques are surprising, as you literally attach the element with tape or pins on the garment and use style-lines to melt it into the pattern. As you can see, the second book has inspired quite a few designs for me! And to be honest, now that I was leafing through it, I started planning a couple of new ones, too… There isn’t much information to be found about the author Tomoko Nakamichi. I searched on the internet, but I could only find the same information that’s also written in the Pattern Magic -books: She was a professor at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo and now delivers lectures and holds courses both in Japan and internationally. All the garments in the pictures are actually in half-scale. Nakamichi created them with trial-and-error approach and they served to help her students understand better how patterns work. Basics

If you’ve mastered the basics of pattern cutting, have caught the bug and are eager to experiment with complex 3d designs, you should definitely take a look at Pattern Magic‘ Tilly And The Buttons Blog All the projects include step-by-step instructions with diagrams and lots of photos. Some are more difficult than others to understand, depending on your experience. Personally, I often use the books as inspiration, even just by looking at the pictures. It’s a fairly well known series of patternmaking books from Japan. There are others, too, but what I love about these in particular, is that instead of just giving you the finished pattern to copy, the book explains how to draft it yourself! That way you have the possibility to make all kinds of different versions of your own using the various techniques explained. Ffareconceafed in a curve Thisdesignmakesyou wonderhow the flarehas beenconcealed. The foldedand layeredlook that hasso much depth is structurallybeautifuland exciting.With that ideain mind, I beganby drawing somecomplexcuryes. Here you can find garments inspired by the various geometrical shapes: circle, triangle and square. There’s a chapter on accordion-technique, with examples of that being inserted both in a sleeve and into a bodice. I’ve done a few designs using this technique and I love the way it creates really sculptural shapes. Here’s one. Accordion-sculpture

I’ve had an explosion of inspiration, and I’m not even an expert in sewing!…I’m sure that many of you, fashion designers or not, can learn a lot from these tutorials’ ImaginativeBloom.com The relationship between the flat pattern pieces and the three-dimensional structure of the garment never changes. Easy-to-follow, detailed instructions make it easy to create stunning, sculptural clothes with a couture look

I’ve tried almost every design in this book and then I made my own versions of some of them by changingYou can create a garment by cutting, moving and reassemblingthe piecesof a pattern, just like the pieces of. a pazzle.

How about you? Do you have the Pattern Magic -books? Have you made, or planned, any garments with the patterns? Links: Here’s a picture of a vanishing tie I made with some changes to the pattern. I think this way the pattern became more simple. I added stripes as well. Vanishing tie with stripes Take the pieces of a three-dimensional garment apart and flatten them, to get individual pattern pieces. The first Pattern Magic book in Japanese was published in 2005. The English edition came out later, in 2010, published by Laurence King Publishing Ltd. Nowadays you can find Pattern Magic also in German, Spanish and French. Currently there are three books on woven fabrics and one on stretch fabrics. The Author The designs in these books are pretty unique: not exactly your everyday garments! The approach is definitely creative. It opens your mind to a completely different way of constructing patterns. It’s mostly flat-patternmaking, although many times it looks like one would have to drape to get such results.

I first discovered these books during a sewing course. One of the fellow-students had brought the first two books with her in class and we were all leafing through them, amazed by the designs. Of course I then had to get the books myself, too. Then there’s a design called ” Like a jungle” where the bodice front is separated with stylelines into slices that overlap each other. I had an idea that I wanted the overlapping area to create a flower-shape in the middle by leaving little holes in between the slices. Well, I’m not too happy with the result, but probably I could make it work by editing the pattern some more. Jungle-flower