in this video I'm going to discuss how to draft patterns corset patterns from the variety of pattern books that there are out there this is industry standard this is by Nora wah it is corsets and crinoline and she did research and meticulously drafted patterns from actual period garments and they are not adapted for modern bodies but it certainly gives you an indication of where the seaming and the boning and the construction might how that might all be this is Jean honey sets books she does the same only she does adapt the patterns to a modern body and this is in scale it's on a grid one square equals one inch and that makes it very easy to grade this is another great book that shows you the patterning and talks you through that as well this is an excellent basic construction book and it tells you takes you through all of the steps of cutting & fitting the corsets there are also patterns that you can buy that are quite good this ones industry favorite the book that I'm going to be teaching from is this book it's in those beautiful pictures which we all love it has diagram in his some description of it and then in inches there is a scale and you can grade this up or grid this out which is what I'm going to be showing you today so working out of this book this beautiful corset is the one we're going to be working on in our class and this is the description and a drawing of the front and the back of the description of that and then here beautifully meticulously done is a scale drawing of the pattern pieces and this is in inches which for us in the United States is very handy as opposed to centimeters many of the European books are in centimeters so you just need to do that conversion I started by drawing a waistline in my book then I realized that I wanted to keep my book clean so what I do is I make a copy and start drawing my 2 inch grid on this just with the ruler and a pencil there are small eighth inch grits and then every inch there's a slightly darker line so it's very easy to see where you're at as we plot out the grid for this corset so there are a couple different wit methods you can use to grid up this pattern this has grids fine lines that indicate on the scale every one inch every square here is one inch you can either use just plain drafting paper and grid that up yourself some people like to use written up paper this happens to be a pellon product Pelham is the brand and you can see it has the one-inch grids on it printed on it already whatever you want to use is fine I tend to use the brown paper so here's the Xerox copy from the the book and I've drawn a waistline here and then with my ruler every two squares and each square indicates one inch so every two squares on this paper I've drawn a horizontal line all the way up to the top and then every two squares all the way down to the bottom then I'm going to draw step beside that and I'm going to draw a pencil line all the way across the paper and this is going to be my waist line so I'm going to gray grid up this pattern I'm going to start the waist and grid down to the bottom and then I'm going to grid it up to the top and then down on the next piece up to the top and so on I'm going to replicate this in the larger scale on the brown paper so let's do the front piece so let's begin by plotting or gridding out the center front line from the waist down I've already marked at two inch increments on these very light pencil lines so I can count how many squares this this is and it is two four six and a half squares so the center front edge is six-and-a-half inches below the waist line so let's March six and a half inches there's six and a half since I'm at the center front why don't I mark all the way up as well 2 4 6 8 so 8 inches up makes that cent percent front I'm going to be brave and mark this in sharpie so that you can see it better but normally I would never draft patterns in the sharpie there's my top there's the bottom there's my waist while I'm at it so that you can see what that waist so that's my waist so from the center front on the paper over it is one two and a quarter inches two and a quarter squares on the scaled page here which corresponds to two and a quarter inches here so that's how wide this corresponds to here so from the waist down two inches we are at two and three eighths so I'm moving my ruler down here's a two inch width of the ruler and moving this over I'm going to make a little dot at two and three eighths the next two inch increments down is the same two and three eighths so I make a little dot there and then the next this corner doesn't go all the way to the two inches it's about at five eighths so that is one and five-eighths so the next dot is one in five to eight inch down and it is ever so slightly that way b1 and almost so how that plots out then in the marker is this way and with the ruler and then you can see in this page there's a curve still three times that something like that and there is my center front and my side front there so let's plot from the waist up so two inches up it is one two and 3/8 again two inches up from there or four inches up from the waist it is one two one two and three quarters so two and three quarters so that is one to the third increment up from the waist is one two three and three eight three and three eighths that is this one one two three and then the fourth increment from the waist is 1 2 3 and 7/8 3 seven eighths and it is a half an inch above that for that quarter so there's our corner Claire you would repeat that function all of those steps for each of the other pieces and across the back replicating this in the scaled up for the gridded up scale on the brown paper that's how you grade this up alright so here I've gridded up graded up whatever you want to call it we have expanded these two pages from the Jill Salem book page 72 73 and here is here's the pattern in in scale to a human form here at centre-back this is where a bone goes the boning pattern is shown on the page from the book so I like to note where all those bones are I like to mark where my waistline is I like the safety of an arrow and when I cut I do a small arrow pointing up in my seam allowance just so that all my stitchers know which ways up I think that's important how you number or letter so that the seams will always go together the way you want them to how you do that it's entirely up to you I do Center back side to back back side back side seen other people do numbers 1 2 3 and so on it doesn't matter as long as it helps you keep track here on the front I like to measure the bust and write that in the waist and write that and the hip and write that in that way I always know what size this draft is and it's nice to give some credit to the book and the author where you found this so that you can find your way back to it should you ever need to now what I do is I save this draft and I copy it so that I have a fist draft at all times for the rest of my career so that's how you grade up from a book the patterns that you find there