#learning to break stuff into shapes also made my drawing skill improve dramatically

[tj-crochets]

Heya! Do you have any tips for pattern making? Specifically a long sweater for a doll?

Loads! It varies a bit between crochet and sewing patterns, but surprisingly not that much?  The easiest, most basic pattern making (aka like 90% of what I do) is breaking the thing you want to make down into basic shapes. For a sweater, the most basic shape would be rectangle for the front, rectangle for the back, and two (or four) rectangles for the arms.  There’s some refining you can do based on style of sweater, neckline, desired level of positive or negative ease, sleeve style, etc, but all that is more towards clothes designing than general pattern designing which is something I absolutely don’t know the right terms for.  So! To design a basic sweater, you’ll need a few things. Mostly, you’ll need a doll to size it to, fabric with some stretch in it (like fleece or minky or an old t-shirt or something) or yarn if you are crocheting, and some paper (either to make the sewing pattern or to write crochet notes on).  I’m going to put the rest below a read more because it will be long:

All these notes are specific to a very basic rectangle-based design, but you can easily make alterations to change up your pattern. The design will be two main rectangles for the front and back, sewed up the sides to the armpits to make a tube (either from crochet or fabric), sewed a bit from the top outside edges towards the neck (making an almost boatneck style neckline) and with either two piece sleeves (two rectangles sewed along long edges to make a tube per sleeve) or one piece sleeves (one rectangle sewed together along long edges to make a tube per sleeve) The absolute easiest way to design a pattern is to base your measurements off of a piece of clothing that already fits the doll. Barring that, I’d take flexible measuring tape and find measurements for how wide you want the sweater to be at the shoulders, and see if that measurement will also be wide enough that that measurement times two (the finished circumference of the sweater with the back and front sewn together) will be enough to fit over the doll at all points; you might have to make the rectangle shape more of a trapezoid to make it fit over the hips, or make the shoulder measurement of the rectangle a little longer and have what I think are called drop shoulders? Depending on the shape of the doll, it might be easier to design the sweater to be pulled up from the doll’s feet instead of pulled over the doll’s head. Either way, it might be wise to not finish up the shoulder seams until you can test how difficult it is to get it on the doll.  Also measure the length you want to sweater to be. Now that you have the size for your rectangles (or trapezoids, if you are going that route), you either need to crochet two panels from any stitches you want that are that size, or add a seam allowance (I usually use 1/4″) and cut out the fabric (including that seam allowance!). Once you are done with either method, I’d pin the shoulder seams at the corners to check the fit on the doll and have a start point to measure from to get the size of the arm rectangle. For crochet, you absolutely could crochet the sleeves in the round. For sewing, you pretty much measure the circumference of the widest part of the arm, add however much positive ease you want (to make the sleeve wider so it doesn’t fit like a second skin), use that by the length you measured earlier to make a rectangle, add a seam allowance, and sew up the long ends. Then sew the sleeves to the body of the sweater, sew up the side seams of the sweater, check the fit and mark where you want to stop sewing along the shoulders to make the neckline, and sew that.  Other notes: if you don’t have flexible measuring tape, you can use a piece of yarn or string to figure out the length you want and then measure the yarn or string with a ruler. Depending on the fabric you are using and the look you are going for, you’ll either need to sew a hem at every unsewn edge (and thus account for it when adding your seam allowances) or decide you don’t want to hem and don’t include a seam allowance on that edge because there will be no seam. When using minky for the one shirt pattern I made (for a teddy bear wearing a Star Trek red shirt) the sleeves and bottom of the shirt were hemmed but I left the neckline unhemmed to curl under a bit In my experience it’s easier to hem the sleeves before you sew them into tubes, but easier to hem the bottom body edge after it’s assembled, unless the sweater will be super tiny.  For crochet you don’t really need seam allowances but you will have to account for stretch; something all in dc will have more stretch than something in sc. If you’re making a tight, stiff fabric you’ll probably need to make it a bit bigger than you think you will to be able to actually put the sweater on the doll. I hope this helps! Pattern making seems to vary a lot between different pattern designers and some of my plushie pattern making skills don’t seem to transfer over into clothes pattern designing, so I’m hoping some other sewing and crocheting friends chime in to offer other strategies and tips.