Let me start by saying that this post is not for industry professional pattern drafters. This is more for costumers, home stitcher’s and anyone wanting to create and sell digital .pdf patterns. I’ve been drafting sewing patterns since I went to design school in 1993. As a costumer, I had to draft many hundreds of patterns over the years. For a long time I drafted them by hand, but I found that making changes to paper patterns required a lot of duplication of work and it drove me to looking at digital options that would speed up my workflow. But the professional options were very expensive. And I didn’t have the need for size grading or marker making because I was doing custom one-offs.
Enter Garment Designer by Cochenille. A very affordable pattern drafting software specifically designed by a woman that taught theatre costuming. I bought this software maybe in about 2004 or 2005 and it has been a solid part of my work for many years. But I will say upfront that it has limitations. And even with these limitations, I have loved this software for 2 decades! It is not a true CAD based system and operates on pattern templates that you can customize with client measurements and specialty sleeves, collars and other items. Options for true customization are somewhat limited with Garment Designer, though it has added many features and many additional styles over the years. But sometimes you want to curve a hem asymmetrically or create a crazily curved bodice front or split a bodice pattern into pieces to make a corset pattern and you just can’t because there is no draw with points tool or split path tool in this program. You also cannot grade your patterns in Garment Designer. So if you want to create sellable patterns that have graded size sets, you have to go one step further.
Enter Inkscape. This is the free, open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. A lot of people don’t like it when you say that because it may not be as robust a program as Illustrator (not sure I believe that). Also, while Inkscape can do MANY of the same things that Illustrator does, the tools have different names, are located in other places and sometimes operate differently. So if you are used to using Adobe Illustrator there is a big learning curve to change your brain up to using the Inkscape tools. You can do all the things I’m talking about here in Illustrator as well. But I don’t want to pay Adobe’s recurring monthly fee for them to collect all my data (and my client project data!!! NDA’s, you know!) and make more money off of me. Inkscape does not collect your data. And for pattern drafters it is an amazing tool that has everything you need and it costs nothing unless you want to donate to the development team…which you should, because it allows them to add more features to it. The most recent version 1.4 has added some dazzling updates and I really love using it.
My process is usually as follows: I draft the initial pattern for my client in Garment Designer. It gives me a good foundation for fit as it allows me to create a custom sloper inside the program based on client measurements. I love this feature a lot!! I will customize the pattern in Garment Designer as much as I can to get it close to what I’m looking for, then I save that file as a .pdf and drag it into Inkscape to finish my customizing in there. If it’s a pattern that I really like and might want to grade to other sizes, I can do that very easily in Inkscape using a variety of tools inside that program.
I’m not going to go over all the details of that in this post. But if there is interest, I will write some more detailed posts on both of these programs. So let me know in the comments what questions you may have.
Also, if you are already starting your pattern drafting in Inkscape and want some handy pattern drafting symbols to use like notches and grainlines, cutting lines and apex markings, I have created a downloadable file that you can access HERE.
AND I will be offering a demonstration on the Garment Designer software at the GoSew Collective on February 20, 2025. You can register to attend that HERE.
Happy drafting!
