Drafting The Male Sloper

Thanks to a kind group of friends who all chipped in together to buy it for me as a birthday present, I have a new little half sized mannequin buddy all the way from the U.S..

Isn't he a little beaut? Beautifully made and compared to my little 1/3rd female mannequin he looks positively gigantic. Well not quite, but definitely a bit larger scale than I have been working in.

Click to enlarge.

As I described in the Initial Steps post way back when, the first step in drafting these patterns is to create a basic sloper. The aim is to have a set of close fitting flat reference patterns that can be used to help draft the finished patterns. Once you have a basic sloper drafted you have a starting point to then make changes such as moving the location and direction of seam lines to change the design.

One of the benefits of drafting a male sloper is that the male form has considerably fewer lumps and bumps than a female form. It's therefore easier to draft the flat pattern shapes required, and no troublesome bust darts to try and remove. As with the female sloper, I did this by draping straight onto the form.

When I was first learning to drape on the stand (whether full-sized, half sized or one third sized) I found a lot of value in the youtube tutorials by tailor Sten Martin Jonsson. I'd suggest these videos as a good starting point if you are interested in learning the basic techniques.

I started by tearing a piece of muslin a bit taller than the neck to waist measurement, and a bit wider than the measurement around the mannequin from centre front to centre back. Once you fold under a neat straight edge at each end, and pin these to align at the centre front and centre back, then it's fairly easy to establish the side seams by smoothing and pinning the fabric in place. The key is to smooth fabric to eliminate wrinkles, while trying to keep the grainlines of the fabric running vertically and horizontally.

I then trimmed the excess away from the side, and clipped into the fabric around the neckline so that I could lay the back as smoothly over the shoulder as possible. After I'd marked the shoulder seam on this, I smoothed the front over the shoulder and trimmed and folded under the excess until I could line it up with the shoulder seam. During this process of establishing the shoulder seam it's important to keep smoothing and adjusting the fabric over the shoulder so that not too much excess ends up in the armhole or the neckline, so that neither gapes.

All I had to do then was mark around the armhole and the neckline and the main work was essentially done.

Establishing the shoulder seam and armhole. Click to enlarge.

Once all the seamlines are marked, including the folded edges of the centre front and back, it's an easy matter to unpin the pieces and lay them flat. I then use a straight edge or curved ruler to smooth out any wonky lines and the finished sloper pattern is complete.

A sloper doesn't have any ease, so it's important to get all the seam placements and sizing right. Once I had cut the pieces with seam allowance I sewed them together and made some minor tweaks to the armhole shape.

I still might tweak the armhole a little further because I think it's a little too round and the front of the armhole probably needs to be cut away a bit towards the bottom. However, the armholes in the patterns are a little different from a modern armhole in shape so it may not matter that much at this stage.

 

I also deliberately cut the sloper with a slightly raised waist more in line with the shape of the final doublet patterns. It's a fairly easy matter to drop or raise the waist line slightly as the pattern calls for it. I probably also need to make some arms for this guy so he can hill out his doublets properly...

Now that I have the sloper drafted, the next pattern I'll be tackling is the first men's pattern (and also the first of all the patterns in the book) which is f.13/f.13a, a man's doublet. It bears many similarities with the woman's doublet f.14/f.14a from Project #2, but has a curving padded 'peascod' belly.

Bust Dart Dilemmas

The next pattern I'll be tackling is a doublet, so in preparation it was time to try and eliminate the bust dart from the basic sloper I made and try and get the best fit possible from a flat pattern shape. All of the patterns in Alcega are what today would be referred to as "flat patterns", a pattern without any darts used to help the fabric conform in 3D to the body. All the shaping comes from the major seams, and so the placement and curvature of the seams are vital in helping the fabric lie as smoothly as possible over the lumps and bumps of the human body.

To add another layer of complexity, the dimensions of my little mannequin are a little off in regards to the bust to waist ratio in comparison to most of the patterns in Alcega. My mannequin's bust to waist ratio is 1:0.7 and in Alcega the doublet pattern I am about to draft is roughly 1:0.8. Or in other words, the generic size given in Alcega is roughly the same bust dimension but the waist is a little thicker. I could pad the mannequin, but I actually like the challenge of drafting the patterns to fit, as I would if I was actually using Alcega's pattern book as a pattern source to clothe a human being.

Original sloper. Click to enlarge.

On the original sloper pattern I had marked the bust point (BP), or the point on each side where the bust is most prominent. (Pretty much where the nipple would sit on a well supported breast.) I had drafted the original bust dart so that it almost reached the bust point, while stopping a little short to avoid the 50's style pointy boob syndrome and allowing the fabric to still curve snugly over the bust.

Manipulating the dart. Click to enlarge.

The BP is a vital pattern marking for a woman's pattern, especially if you plan to modify or eliminate darts. It is the radial point from which all of the darts usually take their reference. The first thing I did was trace my basic sloper onto some sturdier card, and redraw the bust dart slightly so that it started right on the BP (while keeping the width of the dart the same at the shoulder). I then cut along one side of the dart, and overlapped the cut edge to the other side and taped it closed from the underside. At this point the pattern piece cannot lie flat, so in order to allow it to you need to open the pattern piece up at one or more other points.

If you are using darts then normally you would slash a new opening from the BP down to the waist to make a new dart, or from the BP across to under the arm hole (for instance). As we are trying to get rid of all darts though what we need to do is redistribute the fullness from the original dart elsewhere without making the waist huge, or changing the size of the armhole, or significantly distorting the basic shape so that it no longer fits.

Work in progress, checking the fit. Click to enlarge.

Once I had opened the modified sloper at a number of points it became clear that I would need to adjust the fullness all round to minimise making the waist or side seams too large. In the end I used modest openings at the side and waist, and opened a cut across from the BP to the front edge, creating a curved front. Not absolutely ideal as the doublet fronts are all straight in Alcega, but one of the only ways to allow for the prominent bust without deforming the shape too much.

The back sloper piece didn't require modification, so I traced around the back and the modified front onto calico, re-drew the side seam to be straight, and then closed up that seam and tested the fit on the mannequin. I pinned a few small adjustments, and re-drew the armhole slightly to eliminate as much of the fullness gathering there without making it too large.

Testing the back fit, and moving the seam. Click to enlarge.

While I had it on the form I also took the opportunity to re-draw side seam so that it more closely followed the back shaping of the doublets in the book.

Modified sloper pieces. Click to enlarge.

And there we have it. The modified sloper now has a curved front, a narrower back, a slightly reshaped arm hole and the side seam moved further towards the back. The next step will be to trace around this onto pattern paper, and then use this pattern as the basis for drafting the next project, the "silk doublet for a woman". Where the challenge will lie is in keeping the essential style lines of the garments in Alcega, while allowing for the modifications we had to make in order to fit a flat pattern.

Next up, f.14 & f.14a the "Silk Doublet for a woman".

Initial Steps

For an explanation of my project, please visit the Introduction.

As there will be some pattern drafting involved in making these pieces work as a garment, I decided to start with the most basic of first steps by making a simple sloper. If you are unfamiliar with the term it is essentially a basic representation of the body in fabric, a shell which closely follows the contours of the form and can be used as the starting point of pattern design.

This also allowed me to check the dimensions of my little mannequin against some of the basic dimensions of the pattern pieces in Alcega (width of shoulder seams, length of torso, size of waist etc) and confirm that it is pretty much exactly 1/3 scale.

The only problem is the bust. The tricksy, tricksy breast area. Like all modern dress forms, this mannequin has a modern bust line that is considerably perkier and does not conform to the flatter corseted shape of the period silhouette. In making the basic sloper I used a fairly large bust dart, yet no such shaping exists in the pattern pieces, and darts were not a concept that had really come into use in garment construction in this period. (There are some rare and contentious examples of darts in garments of the time, but they were not generally used and it’s an argument for another forum.)

The basic sloper

I don’t particularly want to hack the breasts off my little dress form buddy, so I’ll attempt to eliminate the dart without having the garments fit too poorly. Normally I would close up the bust dart and rotate the top part of the pattern through sorcery and the power of geometry, but all that does is move the dart to another location (under the arm, or from the bust down to the waist usually). If you see any future toiles that don’t sit as neatly in the bust region as they should then just rest assured that this is because I am trying to be HISTORICALLY ACCURATE and not because I CAN’T SEW.

The troublesome bust dart highlighted in blue

Pattern drafting is a large and complicated topic, but if you are looking for pointers on how to flat pattern or drape on the form to create a basic sloper try Burdastyle's links or the first in a fantastic video series of draping on the forms by tailor Sten Martin Jonsson (just for starters).