This is a cosplay panel for intermediate to advanced skilled seamsters. Cosplay stretches a seamster’s skill in ways that most home sewing enthusiasts never even have to think of. Character’s clothing may have unique designs, strange shapes, and completely baffling seam line placements, and we as cosplayers have to find a way to recreate it. Most of us get very good at fudging commercial patterns or draping the patterns on a dress form, but there is another way too. Flat patterning doesn’t need to be intimidating once you know the basics, and this panel aims to introduce the basics of how to manipulate a sloper to create a flat pattern from scratch.
In the first half of this panel we will be talking about what a sloper is, different methods for customizing one, and fit and design ease. With the bare basics out of the way, in the second half, we’ll be diving straight into pattern manipulation with how to move darts and seam lines to showing examples of more extreme ideas of transformational reconstruction by Shingo Sato and Tomoko Nakamichi.