The Fashion Design Toolkit: 18 Patternmaking Techniques for Creative Practice

With The Fashion Design Toolkit you’ll learn how tried-and-tested techniques like gathers, pleats, tucks, and twists can help you adapt patterns and create your own original garment designs. Tracy Jennings walks you through 18 patterning tactics to inspire fresh ideas, demonstrating how embracing pattern drafting skills can lead to innovative and effective collections.

Each technique is illustrated in a variety of contexts, showing how and why it has been used by other designers, so you can use the history of each tool as inspiration for your original collections. Ethical practice is woven throughout the book, with tips on how to implement techniques in an environmentally sustainable way.

The 18 essential techniques are divided into 5 categories:

- Establishing Fit and Flare: Darts, Slash & Spread, Seaming, Insets
- Channeling Fullness: Gathers, Ruffles, Pleats, Tucks
- Fashioning the Fluid and Unstructured: Arcs, Flounces, Drapes, Twists
- Engineering Fabric and Form: Contouring, Structure, Textile Designs
- Focusing on Concepts: Adaptation, Reduction, Zero Waste

Online resources include a downloadable pattern block is available in US sizes 4–18 as a printable Adobe PDF file and software-compatible Adobe Illustrator and Optitex files.

About the Author:

Tracy Jennings is a professor of fashion at Dominican University, USA. She teaches courses in apparel design, clothing construction, textile science, and computer-aided design. She incorporates years of experience as a patternmaker and designer of women’s career wear into her classes. Her research interests include aspects of fashion and design related to creativity, technology, and sustainability.