Garment Designer Pattern Software Top: African Influence

Design with imagery in Garment Designer Pattern

African Culture Transformed into Fashion

Recently, I oversaw a project at Mesa College in San Diego, which involved a partnership between our Fashion students, the Mesa African Art collection, and Visions Art Museum in San Diego Liberty Station. There were several aspects to the project, but the final activity was a fashion show featuring African-influenced clothing. 

Many of the garments came from my Textile Design students in my Fall semester class. I decided that I too needed to get involved, and so embarked on two different
design projects. In this blog, I’ll share the first with you.

My source of inspiration was a piece of carved wood. Sad to say, I don’t know future details, only that I took the photo while we were visiting the artifact collection.

Since the original wood piece was rounded, I had to use Photoshop to straighten it out a bit.

Photo of Inspiration: a piece of carved wood

I wanted the garment to be relatively simple, free of internal structural lines, so that the wood imagery would be seen as it was designed.

Below is the pattern I settled on. This was modeled after a top I own that I purchased in Japan.

Pattern created in Garment Designer pattern software

=In Garment Designer, I set the page size to be the size of the pattern, and then saved the pattern as a PDF.

Then.. on to Photoshop.

There I opened the large pattern pieces (each on a separate page), and I brought them together into one document. The width of this document was set up to the width of the fabric I wanted to print on (which was a polyester chiffon, 58” wide).

Layout in Photoshop (sorry this is a LARGE file and so doesn't downscale well)

Working between the imagery document and the Garment Designer pattern document, I used Selection tools, and copy/paste to bring the images in. I orchestrated a border
effect on the bottom and stretched the imagery to fill the space above. You can see the results below.

Garment Designer pattern in Photoshop with the imagery engineered into place

Once I had the layout ready, I threw in some variations of the pattern off to the side of each pattern piece, so I would have fabric to trim the neckline and armholes during the sewing process.

Extra imagery is added to the file to provide trim fabric

The next step was to upload to Spoonflower in North Carolina.

The order process on Spoonflower a company that digitally prints fabric

And then to wait until the fabric arrived, which of course was only a few days before the fashion show… so time to sew!!

One of the beautiful things about engineered design, is that you don’t ever print a paper pattern. Instead, your fabric arrives with the garment piece all laid out and ready to cut. Here is my fabric just before cutting.

Fabric ready to be cut. Note how similar this is to a cookie cutter approach!

I used some of the trim areas to make the binding for the neckline and armholes. These were cut on the bias and applied to finish the edges. The most challenging part of the construction was sewing chiffon on a bias grain. I simply serged the edge, pressed it under and top stitched it in place, attempting to have minimal handling.

The garment was complete, and ready for the show.

See how the back cut is different from the front

The final garment, yea! and in time for the show

I only have one shot from the show, a rear-view, but as you can see, it was modeled.

Alys modeling the top at the Fashion Show at Visions Art Museum in San Diego, CA

So, another ‘done’ project. I love to have a motivator (such as a fashion show) which gives me the reason to move ‘To Do’ items up the list of priorities.


And I course, I love Garment Designer. It is such a creative tool; I can do most anything with it and in very short order, and of course, because it knows my body measurements, I never have to alter. Can life get any better?

Creative with Garment Designer: Engineered Pattern Design

One of the great pleasures of working with Garment Designer is discovering new ways to push the boundaries in design. For me, combining a second love (Photography) with pattern design, allows even more creativity to flow, and well, it doesn’t get much better than that. The best way to mix Garment Designer with Photography is to utilize a design technique which involves ‘engineered design'. You choose a silhouette that suits the imagery, create a full-scale pattern in Garment Designer, then save it as a PDF. Then, you take the pattern into Photoshop. There, you lay the photographic imagery into the garment, controlling its placement. The last step of this process is to print the full-scale photography pattern. I originally started with sublimation printing, utilizing Kid Neptune, a local company here in San Diego. Now I am printing my patterns using Spoonflower (www.spoonflower.com).

Let’s walk through the steps.


The Concept:
Desert Escape
 – which was the theme for our Fashion Show at San Diego Mesa College.

Choose your Photograph
Or at least narrow it down.Since the theme of this project was Seize the Sunset, I needed to find imagery that spoke to that. In looking through my photographs, I decided to use one of my shots of the sunset here on the beach in the San Diego area. Note the person on the bicycle!

Sunset on Cardiff Beach, San Diego area

Develop the Pattern in Garment Designer
It helps if you know which photograph you are wanting to use, because sometimes the photo directs you to a silhouette.In choosing a garment silhouette, I knew I needed to keep it relatively simple so that the imagery would be the focus. It is important to pay attention to the amount of ‘real-estate; you have in relation to the imagery you want to lay into the pattern.I chose to create a simple A-line dress with an empire seam. In Garment Designer  software (www.cochenille.com) I used the Top Plus Bottom option to develop the pattern. Then I saved my full scale pattern to a PDF file, using a document size of 38.5 x 58.5 (which was the maximum size of the sublimation press.

Empire style dress in Garment Designer

Prep your Photography

For my main garment, I turned the sunset vertically. In addition, I build a stripe pattern by splicing a strip of the sunset; I wanted to use this for the empire bodice.

Sunset image turned vertically

Stripe pattern built by splicing the sunset in Photoshop

Combine the Photo with the Pattern
Next, I loaded my PDF pattern pieces into Photoshop and combined the pattern pieces into one large document (set to the size of the press). Using Selections and Cut and Paste, I then moved my photography into the garment. I could pan my imagery around inside the garment to determine where to place it.

Working in Photoshop

Final layout

Print, Print, Print
The last step was to send the imagery to the Sublimation company. They printed it using special sublimation paper and ink, and then they pressed it onto my polyester fabric.


Sew..
What is really cool here is that you can see the entire pattern in the fabric and simply cut out the shape of it... completely engineered.

Repeat....
Since I was having so much fun, I did a second garment.
You can see both here on the runway of our Golden Scissors Fashion Show.

Raglan design in Garment Designer

Layout in Photoshop

On the runway with Garment Designer!!