Reply To: altering patters

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

I’m assuming that we’re taking about general marks and notches for matching up with other pieces and not necessarily for darts. Think of your pieces as puzzle pieces and thesse notches or dots are there to simply help you match one piece up with another piece. If you cut your fabric pieces out perfectly, you could possibly get away without having these, so really, you can put your dots or notches anywhere you want, as long as it will match up with its corresponding piece. So I guess for the armhole, you’re talking about the dots and notches for matching up the sleeve? Just realize if you alter the armhole too much you may need to also alter the sleeve width. If it’s just a little, you can probably keep the marks in the same position without adjustment. These marks though are just to help you ease the sleeve so that the sleeve fabric in the cap is evenly distributed around the top of the armhole, so that one side of the armhole won’t be perfectly smooth and the other side has a bunch of gathers and puckers. You can even eyeball this and as long as it looks good and the fabric is evenly distributed, you can go ahead and stitch it and not worry about the dots. I hope that helps a little bit and doesn’t make things too confusing.