Why Patternmaking?
A Key for Creative Freedom in Fashion Design.
Last update: 21/06/2025
When you don't know what you don't know.
Perhaps, like me, you’ve experienced wanting to make a design that only exists in your imagination and not knowing how to get it out of your mind to materialize it… Since it can’t stop being present and continues to be a dream, it almost becomes an obsession, and it has to be done; it’s a moment of illusion and fear, but it doesn’t matter… At all risks, you must go for it, conquer it, and overcome the doubts about how it will turn out… You get to work, and with a thousand doubts, or not so many, but certainly, with mistakes that are ignored when you don’t know what you don’t know, you start a project, a dream, a design, that ends up “almost good” but doesn’t work…
Something happens: the size doesn’t adapt to the body; some measurements coincide, but others don’t (in my case, often suitable in circumferences, but large in torso length, for example). All this is because of using a pattern taken from a magazine or some other source; although in some cases I made it exactly the same, and other times I modified some details to personalize it and try to achieve the dream design, the truth is that something was failing.
I began to understand that you can’t alter a pattern without knowing what you’re doing. Almost no pattern offered me confidence, but those that did undoubtedly used a sizing different from mine and then everything I made and turned out perfect, I couldn’t wear it because it didn’t adapt to my body:
When you know what you don't know.
The results are promising, even if they fit someone else, and I keep going, with a bittersweet taste and with an increasing interest in finding the key, which undoubtedly had to be there, to achieve materializing that dream of making the designs that over time were more and more and were accumulating in my imagination.
In developing the following projects, changes are determined according to the chosen textile. Another cycle of discoveries begins because the pattern that worked in a flat textile doesn’t work in a knit one or vice versa, to cite one of the multiple variables… A series of projects and experiments, all empirical, all memories of much effort, work, illusion, investment in time and money, follow… Days of victories, days of frustration… Much ground had been gained in learning, but every project was a total box of surprises; I never knew before finishing it if it would turn out or not, and that’s when:
When you know what you know.
The conclusion is obvious: pattern-making is a technique that must be learned. It’s nothing more than using logic after the attempts and days passed. Because someone knows how to make from a blank paper, the strokes capture not only a determined body with its specific size but a determined design. Someone, before drawing those lines that we observe in a finished pattern, lines with different shapes never arbitrary, had on their table a blank paper and a clear idea in their mind… A design that they knew how to materialize, and I wanted to be that person from now on because the ideas were still there in my imagination, multiplying every day… So, I studied pattern making, and it must be highlighted that I’m passionate about it (I call it “the engineering of fashion design”). It has clear rules and an infinite power of creative construction, but that doesn’t mean it can be taken for granted without going through a process of tracing, making a test in fabric and correcting or rectifying again on paper if necessary. And then it’s: When you know that you know.
Because pattern making makes it clear that you always keep learning, as well as the satisfaction of finally getting out of the mind and imagination the designs that now materialize quickly, fluently, without depending on third-party patterns that have captured their designs but have not traced the patterns of the projects that appear in your or my mind as a fixed idea, perhaps this reading answers the question of why study pattern making and the creative freedom it provides. To be part of my story, I share it with you!
Ileana Hernández
Fashion designer, educator and founder of "Anaely Academia", where she guides entrepreneurs with her DPE methodology—Design, Production & Entrepreneurship—helping them create, produce and launch their own fashion brands.
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