Pattern grading gone wrong
I feel like I’ve been taken to the cleaners by a used car mechanic, only it was a pattern grader. The fit for the original sample size is great, it’s as the pattern gets bigger that it has problems. Mainly in the sleeve length. Everything else seems to be graded ok, but by the time the pattern gets up to a size 6x, the sleeves are almost 5 inches short.
This guy has since gone out of business, and thank goodness I only tried him out with one pattern. But it’s still a waste of money and time. It might have been a waste of money and time anyways because of course I want to change the pattern. Just call me never satisfied.
So why didn’t I notice the grading issue sooner? Mainly because we only produced two small sizes for the first production run. At that point, the original size was a good fit and the sleeve issue on the one size up was, I guess, imperceptible. Now I want to produce another run w/ the larger sizes too and just happened to make a sample in my daughter’s size. It was as if the sleeves had shrunk, and I was shocked. I’m happy we didn’t have them made, especially considering I pretty much just assumed the grading was right on.
This really drove home for me how important it is to double-check everything and also how important it is to gain enough knowledge to know what you are double-checking. If anyone knows any tricks for verifying that a pattern has been graded correctly, can you share??
Add comment February 4th, 2009