How to Alter a Sewing Pattern

Knowing how to alter a pattern for fit or style opens up a ton of new possibilities. Once you have the right tools for the job, it's super easy. You'll need a cutting mat to work on. You'll need pattern paper and you can use any paper that comes in large sheets. You just don't want to be taping little sheets together.

It makes it hard to work with. So I'm using butcher paper. They make pattern paper that has a grid on it that you can buy, which is very helpful. You can also use a lightweight, flexible stabilizer or interfacing, which also makes a good material for test fitting samples. So that's a plus.

You'll need rulers. You got your straight ruler that you use all the time and a French curve ruler which just has these varying degrees of curves for tracing neck lines or hip curves, things like that. You'll need paper scissors. You don't wanna be cutting paper with your good fabric scissors. And you'll need this crazy looking tracing wheel.

And it's different from the tracing wheel that you use to trace chalk onto fabric. It's got these sharp barbs made for perforating the pattern paper. And lastly, you'll need the pattern that you want to alter. And before we make any alterations to the pattern, we wanna make a copy of it so that we have the original set aside to go back to if we need to. So first to copy my pattern, I've drawn a straight line along one edge to line up my center front.

And if your pattern doesn't have a center front on it, you'll just wanna draw a line on the pattern paper to line up the grain line that's printed on the pattern. So you make sure everything straight. So I've lined up my center front with this line that I've drawn. And just taped down the pattern edges. I used this mat scotch tape because it peels up pretty easily but you can also secure the pattern with pattern weights or they also make those little push pins that you can push into your self-healing cutting mat.

And those work really well. So once the pattern is secure, we're going to trace the perimeter with our tracing wheel. So when you trace the corners, you want to make sure you go past the corner a little ways so that you make sure you get that nice even corner point. And then just trace the perimeter. You can use your ruler to trace against if you need to.

Just trace past the corner there. And just keep tracing all the way around. And I've already done most of it, but I'll trace the dart here so you can see. So we also wanna trace all of our markings. So any markings that you have, I'll trace my dart legs.

You don't need to put too much pressure on this. Just enough to make little marks in the pattern paper below. I'll mark my dart markings there with a little X. And mark the dart point. And here we've got some notches that we can mark.

So once you get everything marked, we'll take our original away. Then underneath the pattern, we're left with all these little, little dots there. So you can see we've got the outline of the pattern and you'll just want to come back in with a pencil and trace over all these dart, all these dots. And you can use your ruler to trace along. And this is where your French curve ruler will come in handy as well.

To trace the curves, just line up the right degree of curve and move the ruler as you need to. So I'll just do this roughly so you can see. So there we have our pattern. Label it. Here's our copy that we can make any alterations that we need to and we'll have our original always saved.

So an alteration that is pretty common for fitting purposes is taking in or letting out the side seam. So in order to do that you wanna take the measurements that you need to take in the whole skirt at the waist or the side seam and divide that by four. So you're taking it evenly from each side of the skirt front and back. So say I needed to take my skirt in one inch at the waist. That would be a quarter inch at each side seam.

So I'll mark quarter inch just at this upper edge here. And then take that mark and just true it back down into this line. Trying to follow that curve as much as I can making a gradual mine. When I say true, truing something back down means just to take the altered mark and bring it back down to zero or back into the pattern line. So we'll do that to the skirt back as well so you have it evenly balanced.

And as far as style alterations go, you can do a ton of different things. Something that's really easy to do is to take this skirt and make it into a three gore skirt. And you can make a six gore skirt by doing the same thing to the skirt back. All you need to do for this is to draw a straight line along the pattern and you can draw it anywhere you want but since we have a dart here we can save ourselves a step later on by drawing the gore line from the dart point. So you can draw your line however you want.

I'm going to draw it straight parallel to the front. So just draw a line straight down to the hem and then cut along this line and you'll cut the dart out. And add seam allowances each new cut edge. And then you've just sort of incorporated the dart into the gore seam. So it's kind of a little combining steps there.

And then you've got a whole another skirt style. Super easy. And we can do some other things to this skirt just by drawing a couple of lines. And you can make decorative seams anywhere you want on the skirt just by drawing lines and cutting the pattern apart and making sure you add seam allowances to each new cut edge. So we can take the skirt and it's got sort of an A-line shape to it to begin with.

But if we wanted to make it a little bit wider, a little fuller at the bottom, we can just take this side seam and pull it out a little bit. So to do that, I'm going to mark my flare point up here just below the hip curve. Making sure it's parallel or perpendicular to this center front line. And you can draw the flare line anywhere you want on the skirt, depending on where you want the fullness to begin. It's definitely a personal preference thing.

I'm gonna draw it right under the hip curve there. So our flare's gonna begin from this point. And you can draw your flare as wide out as you want. My pattern paper ends right there. So we're just gonna go there, draw a line to your point.

So that's gonna be our new side seam. We wanna measure our original side seam up to that flare point. And mark the end, the same distance. And then with our French curve ruler, we're just going to draw our hem curve back down into the skirt and that's just a gradual curve. So you've got your curve there.

And then at the hip point we wanna make sure that this isn't such a stark pointless, sort of. Make that a nice curve in there. Then you've got another skirt style. And you can do the same thing by pulling this A-line in a little bit. Pull the side seam in and make more of a pencil skirt.

So you can draw your line from the flare point. Take that in a little bit. Down to the hem and you've got three different skirt styles already. So that's really easy. In some alterations that you can do to a bodice, I wanna talk about darts.

So this pattern has a dart in the waist seam and you can move a dart anywhere on a bodice pattern. You can move it to the side seam or the shoulder seam just by making a few lines. If your pattern had a bust start in the side seam you might want to move it to the waistline. If you wanted to add a skirt to the bottom of it you could make that dart into a princess dart and make a dress. So to do that, we're gonna draw a line from our bust point or from our dart point to the bus point, and then draw a line to the side seam wherever you want your dart.

Keeping in mind these seam allowances. So we've got our lines drawn there, and then we're just going to cut along the outer dart leg going up to, but not quite through, that bust point. We'll cut along the line where we want to move our dart to. You wanna leave this little hinge at the bust point so that we can move this. And just close the dart there so that the dart legs align.

And that opens up a new dart in the side seam. Just tape this closed and add some new pattern paper under this opening there. And you've got a new dart. You can do that up to the shoulder line as well. Another cool thing that you can do with the dart, if you wanted, you could divide that in half or even three, divide it by three and make two or three darts in the waistline seam.

And that's just adds a decorative touch. And to do that, you want to divide the dart width by two and subtract that amount from each side. So we're keeping everything even like we did with making the waistline adjustment to the skirt. So take that in and you'll just redraw your dart lines there and then draw a new dart according to the remaining amount, anywhere you want along this line, along the waistline. So you could draw another dart there.

So that you would have two seam side by side. And you could even cut this completely away. It would become a decorative yoke. And you would add of course new seam allowances to each cut edge. And you've got a new pattern piece here and you could add piping into the seam allowance there or anything and it becomes a new unique style.

So these are just a couple of ideas but once you have a pattern that fits you well, it's really a blank canvas for any type of alteration that you can dream of.