Last week I got an almost-last-minute invitation to a cocktail party, and decided it was the perfect time to make a skirt I’ve been thinking about for a while. I already had the fabric: pale grey wool bouclé with tiny clear sequins sewn all over it; I pictured this as the perfect pencil skirt, with a contrast lining that would just peek out from the off-center front slit.

Problem: I didn’t have a pattern for this mythical wonder-skirt, or at least not one that I trusted to fit me.

Solution: I used my Garment Designer software and my own measurements to create a custom pattern.*

Since I was in a bit of a rush to get this skirt made, I didn’t photograph the entire process, but I’ll do my best to describe what I did.

First step: After creating my basic skirt design in GD, and plugging in my measurements, I generated a sewing pattern (the software calculates the pattern using my measurements) and printed it out. Obviously it wouldn’t all fit on a letter-sized page, so it automatically tiles the pattern into multiple pages, so all I had to do was tape them together; the patterns print out with handy guidelines to help align the pages properly. (You can see the pattern for the skirt back in the first photo, below). Continue reading →