At the beginning of the COVID-19 lock-down in Belgium I felt a bit lost. Of course. Like a lot of us I think. But I figured this could be a good time to do some things I don’t always have enough time to do. Like making clothes, and trying out new patterns.
So I decided to try out a pattern from Tomoko Nakamichi. I’m just in love with these books. This is why I love pattern drawing, because of the math and geometry behind it. So flicking through these books always gives me a lot of inspiration. And although I have every book, I haven’t draw a lot of patterns from it. Some techniques I have used in a similar way in my own base patterns, but this time I wanted to make a pattern, and garment, as instructed. I choose a pattern from the first book of Pattern Magic.
My eye fell on the twist, or nejiri. The idea behind this is to create a fixed twist in a garment by shifting it over either a horizontal axe, vertical axe, or both. For example, if you lower the left side-seam of a top 2 centimeter in comparison to the right side-seam, you will get pleats going from the right side-seam to the left, once the top is worn. I decided on making the pullover which uses both a horizontally and perpendicularly twist.
The base pattern of the sweater was really easy to draw. Especially because it’s a two piece pattern, so no separate sleeves to draw. I did however changed some of the measurements of the base. Because the fabric I had chosen is more of a tight sweater fabric with less stretch, I changed the waist, hip, chest and head measurements to fit my own. So after drawing the base pattern, I just follow further instructions in the book.
The first twist to create was the perpendicularly, and the easiest of the two. Basically you mirror the pattern over the centerfront line, and shift everything 5 centimeter (or per your choosing) down. The second twist was the horizontal, which was a bit more challenging at this point. You start with shifting the hemline of the base pattern to the left (or right) with 10 centimeter (or per your choosing), and you redraw the centerfront line from bust-height to hip. You use the amount you shifted the centerfront line compared to the original line at bust, waist and hip to determine how te redraw the side-seam. You do the same for the mirrored half of the pattern, which is lowered already. So by this time I had a lot of lines on my pattern, mainly around the centerfront, which caused me some mistakes when redrawing the side-seams. But all turned out fine. I just used my eraser a lot.
Next was mirroring the pattern over 1 sleeve, and creating a seam at the back, to not have a seam in the second sleeve. This was all real easy, until I had reached the end of my table, and I could barely fit the entire pattern on it.
Since it was a one piece garment I also only had to stitch 3 seam for the garment to exist. I finished the neckline with a small facing, and the sleeves and hemline with ribbing in another colour.
Number of seams I had to redo: 0
If I recreate this I will: Use another fabric, or make the pattern a bit wider in the sleeves and hip area. Because this fabric doesn’t have a lot of stretch the sleeves are a bit to tight. And the sweater has a tendency to un-twist at the bottom. It hink choosing a thinner fabric could help.
