teacher-made-resources
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- PaperEdArXiv (OSF Preprints)20 Jul 2026
Teaching Formula-Based Garment Pattern Drafting: An Illustrated Guide for Beginners and Tailoring Students
Basker Palaniswamy
This article provides a step-by-step guide to formula-based pattern drafting for garments, with illustrated instructions for adults and children's clothing. It includes a section on using pattern making in early childhood education settings for teacher-made resources, embedded mathematics, and fine motor development.
Original abstract
Pattern making is a way of changing body measurements into shapes that can be cut from cloth and stitched into clothes. Many books explain pattern making, but they are often difficult for beginners to understand. This article explains the steps in a simple and clear way. It teaches how to make patterns for common clothes such as shirts, T-shirts, pants, shorts, cargo pants, churidar pants, chudithar tops, blouses, vests, trunks, bras and panties. For each dress type, the article explains what measurements are needed, how to take them, how to use simple formulas, and how to draw the pattern step by step. The article also explains how to draw parts such as sleeves, collars, cuffs, pockets, belts and waistbands. Twenty-three labelled drawings are included to make the steps easy to follow. At the end, common stitching mistakes are shown with simple ways to correct them. This article is useful for students, beginners, home sewers and small tailoring shops who want to learn pattern making in an easy and practical way. This edition extends the adult wardrobe with material written for early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. It explains how to measure young children safely and respectfully, gives a height-based size chart for ages one to six, and adds two fully worked children’s drafts — an elastic-waist play short and a classroom art smock — that follow the same formula style as the adult blocks. A dedicated section then shows how educators, pre-service teachers and family-engagement programmes can use pattern making: as a source of teacher-made resources (dress-up costumes, doll clothes, puppets and dramatic-play props), as embedded early mathematics (measuring, halving and quartering, symmetry, and turning flat shapes into three-dimensional objects), as support for fine motor development and practical-life dressing skills in the tradition of Froebel and Montessori, and as low-cost professional development for practitioners. Safety rules for children’s garments, including the restriction of cords and drawstrings, are summarized so that everything an educator makes from this guide is safe for young children to wear and use.