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What are Slopers?

Fittingly Sew uses the tried and tested method of first producing a “sloper” garment for a given set of body measurements. The prime purpose of the sloper is to test whether the body measurements are correct and produce a well fitting garment. If adjustments to the sloper are necessary, they can be made on the screen by dragging the piece edges and thereby redeveloping the measurements automatically.

A wide variety of patterns can then be based on the sloper with complete confidence.

The body measurements may be based on standard sizes, your own measure data, or a mixture of the two.

Your own patterns can be started in any of four ways :-

• From a sloper garment.
• From one or more ready-made templates that adapt to the body measurements of a sloper or a standard size.
• From a rectangle and then shaped.
• Traced from a background image (using a photo of an existing garment, a scan of a paper pattern from another source, or a screen capture from other pattern design software). By using the mouse to add points with the background image as a guide, pieces can be constructed easily from a wide range of sources.

What are Templates?

Templates are patterns which adapt to the measurements in a sloper file - or to a standard size. They are short cuts which remove the need for some of the more difficult pattern construction procedures. The templates include:

• A shoulder princess line dress - this saves the user from having to adapt the bodice block to a princess line: it automatically transfers the dart, converts the darts to seams, rounds the edge of the seam, converts the waist darts of the skirt to seams, cuts the skirt block, and joins it to the bodice block.
• A waistless shift dress - this has had the waist dart on the bodice block transferred to the side seam, the darts removed from the skirt blocks, the bodice joined to the skirt and the waist shaped to produce a dress pattern block with no waist seam.
• Pleated trousers (pants) - these have had pleats added to the waist line, and waistband and pocket pieces drafted for a side-seam pocket.
• A basic blouse - the sleeve sloper has been adapted from a body-fitting block to a sleeve block, the sleeve-head modified and the armhole seams of the front and back bodice pieces adapted to fit the sleeve head.
• An A-Line Skirt - the basic skirt sloper for a straight two-dart skirt has been modified to a single dart A-line skirt by transferring the outer dart fullness to the hemline. A waist band is included.
• A One-Dart Skirt - in this version, the basic skirt sloper has been modified to a one-dart version by transferring the outer dart fullness to the inner dart, keeping the side seam straight.
• A variety of collars which you can adapt to the body pieces you have designed. There are flat collars, stand collars and two-piece collars…

Computer aided pattern drafting

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