Ease Considerations
Woven vs Stretch Fabrics​
When you are drafting, you’ll want to take the type of fabric into account. On the previous page I alluded to knit ease briefly by stating that it can have a negative ease. You can intentionally draft your patterns smaller than the actual body measurements. This is common for four-way stretch knits. These have exceptional stretch both side-to-side and top-to-bottom. They also include a yarn for recovery, such as lycra or spandex. These fabrics are used on swimsuits, leotards and other form fitting activewear.
On the other hand, if you are drafting for wovens, you will rely entirely on the ease you add when the pattern is drafted. You won’t be able to move in the garment without it.
Interfacing, Lining & Additional Thickness​
Another thing to keep in mind when deciding on your ease values is whether you will be adding additional layers during construction. Facings often have not only the facing material thickness but an additional interfacing for added stiffness. You’ll need to make sure your draft includes the room necessary to accommodate all those layers.
If you draft a coat, you’ll need to leave plenty of room for the garments underneath. But did you remember that the lining will be a quilted fabric? You have to account for the loft of that lining as well as the clothing.
Dividing your Ease​
You may decide that your garment needs 2” or 5 cm of ease in the chest. That means your 40” or 102 cm chest circumference will be 42” or 107 cm when the garment is completed.
When you are drafting, you will almost always draft in quarters. You’ll do a half pattern for the front and another half pattern for the back. Make sure you don’t add all of that ease to every measurement. You’ll add one-fourth the total ease to the front half and one-fourth the total ease to the back half.
Armhole Deception​
When drafting armholes it is natural to drop the armpit point down, shortening the side length, to leave yourself more room for arm movement. This is actually counterintuitive. If the armpit point is down, the sleeve movement is more limited. You can’t lift your arm as high. When the armhole is too low, lifting your arm pulls the entire torso of the garment up with it, binding at the waist and hips.
If the armpit point is higher, placing it up into the armpit more, you actually have greater arm movement. If you want more movement in the arm, you can drop the armpit point but you’ll also want to compensate by adding sleeve cap and torso ease to provide more fabric to move around in.
Sleeve Cap Ease​
This is a topic we’ll cover in more detail in later chapters, but know that this can be quite a point of contention for people. Highly tailored jackets and coats use general sleeve cap ease to shape the garment so it lays precisely on the body. Some people really dislike sleeve cap ease because it can be very difficult to sew, particularly for beginners.
There is a tool in PatternMaker Pro called Mark Sleeve Ease that makes quick work of measuring your armholes and your associated sleeve cap. At least you’ll know what your difference is before you get to the sewing machine.
Programmatic Integration​
When using PatternMaker Pro, hard coding static ease values directly into a draft is a mistake. If you bake a flat 2” (51 mm) ease value directly into a chest measurement formula, that pattern block is forever locked into one specific fit . Instead, isolate your ease variables within your formulas. You may even want to break out your wearing ease from your design ease, as in this example:
Formula: {Chest Circumference} + {Chest Wear Ease} + {Chest Style Ease})
Create the ease measurements right into your PatternMaker Pro measurement sets. Then you can easily change those values using the automatic pattern memorization recall feature of the program. Even though you are drafting in quarters, I generally recommend that you save the ease value in total in the measurement set. Then the formula would look like this when drafting the front (quarter) pattern:
Formula: ({Chest Circumference} + {Chest Wear Ease} + {Chest Style Ease}) / 4
If you have your front and back measurement separate, it would look like this:
Formula: ({Chest Width Front} / 2) + (({Chest Wear Ease} + {Chest Style Ease}) / 4)
By breaking the formula down this way, you can easily alter the ease parameters to morph a single base sloper from a sharp, modern continental fit into a relaxed, casual sack jacket with little effort.
Note the careful use of parentheses to dictate the order of operations.