We Don't Believe in One-Size-Fits-Most: Why We Still Draw Patterns by Hand

We're one of the few companies in the world offering free custom sizing on every item in our shop. No size limits. No fat tax. No binary split between “men's” and “women's” cuts. No separate system for kids, adults, straight sizes, or plus sizes.

This is not a normal offering in today’s market. Every custom garment starts with a custom pattern, and every one of those patterns is drafted by hand in our Montreal studio. Just one system built around the body in front of us.

Many people may not understand just how impressive this is. Like most everything in our post-capitalist world, we’re used to walking into a store and having no thought as to how the products were created. Production methods have been standardized to create things as efficiently and low-cost as possible. So what our company does is actually incredibly rare.

Computers Are Great. But Bodies Are Individual.

Have you ever tried something on in a store and wondered why it seems to bulge, pull, or bunch in exactly the same spot? You might think it's your body that's the problem, but we promise it’s not. 

It's one of the side effects of standardized patternmaking, where a single pattern is designed to fit as many bodies as possible. And when you don't happen to have the body that pattern was designed around, it will never fit quite right.

Patternmaking software has been part of the fashion industry for decades. When computerized grading systems started making their way into garment factories in the 1970s and 80s, they changed the game.

Instead of spending hours manually scaling one sample pattern into a range of sizes, manufacturers could do it in seconds. For mass production, that was a pretty big deal. Faster, cheaper, more standardized production is exactly what the system was built to do.

Software is incredibly useful, and knowing how to use it well is a real skill. But a digital pattern still starts with rules. Tell the software to make something bigger or smaller, and it follows the parameters it's been given. It knows how to move a line. It doesn't necessarily know why that line needs to move differently for the particular body you're making a garment for. Real bodies don't scale neatly.

A person's hips might be significantly wider than their waist. Their shoulders might not line up symmetrically. Their chest, torso, rise, and proportions might fall somewhere between several conventional size blocks. Two people can have the same waist measurement and completely different bodies everywhere else. That's where hand drafting comes in.

When we draft a custom pattern, we're working directly from the measurements in front of us. We can look at how those measurements relate to each other and adjust the pattern accordingly, rather than asking a body to fit into the closest digital curve. And that's really the point of custom sizing.

Offering free custom sizing doesn't mean much if we're just squeezing everyone into a standardized pattern and calling it custom. The whole idea is that the pattern bends to the person, not the other way around. So yes, there are computers in our studio. We're not anti-technology. We're just very pro-human-body. 

What Assumptions Get Built Into Plus-Size Grading?

Another reason we rely on hand-drafted patterns is that “grading” (making something bigger or smaller) isn't neutral. The moment you start auto-scaling a pattern from one size to another, you're making assumptions about how bodies change. But bodies don't grow like photocopies.

When someone gains weight, they don't suddenly become proportionally taller, with every part of their body expanding at exactly the same rate. Their waist doesn’t tend to stay narrower than the bust or hips all the way through the size range. Bodies tend to get wider, and they get wider in different places at different rates. Waist and hip measurements might increase significantly while wrists, ankles, and necks change much less.

But traditional grading math relies on a relatively simple set of ratios applied across an entire size range. Take a sample size, increase the measurements according to predetermined rules, and you can turn one pattern into a whole range of sizes. Efficient? Absolutely. An accurate representation of how bodies actually change? No.

This isn't a new problem. Modern mass-market sizing grew out of government-funded body measurement surveys in the mid-twentieth century, when manufacturers needed standardized measurements to produce ready-to-wear clothing at scale. Those surveys measured a relatively narrow slice of the population, and the sizing systems built from them have carried those limitations forward for decades.

This only gets more complicated when you start designing for gender-diverse bodies, “gendered” patterns, and plus sizes. A chart that insists on maintaining the same proportions for a “woman’s” small size through 5XL isn't really describing the bodies it's supposed to fit. It's prescribing what those bodies are expected to look like.

It says that a larger body should still have the same proportions as the original sample, just scaled up. That a fat body should still be hourglass-shaped, still “snatched,” still somehow resemble the body the pattern was originally built around. And some brands avoid this question entirely by simply stopping their size range at XL. That's a sizing decision, too. It tells you exactly who they designed their clothes to serve.

We don't think that's good enough. We're not trying to turn every body into an enlarged version of the same sample. We're trying to make clothes that fit real beautiful bodies that exist.

How Do You Learn a Skill the Industry Stopped Teaching?

This company was started with me drafting patterns on my kitchen floor. It came from seeing how the available products didn’t support my body or the bodies around me. So I taught myself everything I know through trial and error on myself and the wonderful people I first started making items for.

I went to school for sociology, not fashion design. I didn’t study draping, pattern drafting, or garment construction. I learned how to draft and grade patterns largely on my own, and I started learning much later than most people who enter this trade through formal fashion programs.

Learning this way was slow, but it meant that I was approaching solving the problem with an open mind. There were plenty of moments when I had to figure something out by trying it, getting it wrong, staring at the pattern for a while, and trying again. And I began to see all the ways that industrial patternmaking fails bodies.

Why Don’t People Know How To Hand-Draft Patterns?

Hand patternmaking is a skill that used to be passed from one person to another through apprenticeships and on-the-job training. But, as it always is with Capitalism, this was about cutting costs. 

As industrial garment manufacturing moved to countries where labor was cheaper, companies cut production costs by exploiting workers who were paid poverty-level wages and often worked in poor conditions. As those jobs moved overseas, the training and apprenticeship systems that had supported skilled garment trades in North America and Europe disappeared with them. 

Today, formal patternmaking education exists, but it can be expensive and difficult to access. Technical fashion programs come with tuition, time commitments, and other barriers that make them unrealistic for many people. What was once something you could learn by working alongside an experienced patternmaker has become a much narrower path.

I managed to teach myself, but I don't think everyone should have to. That's why training is built into how we bring people onto the Origami Customs team. When someone joins our studio, they don't need to arrive already knowing how to draft patterns by hand. We teach them.

As with every anti-capitalist mindset: If the industry isn't going to make this knowledge accessible, we'll do it ourselves. We get to keep the skill alive, train a queer or trans staff member in a highly valuable skill, and build our garments with a team that understands not just how to make a pattern, but why we make them the way we do.

Why Does It Matter Who Gets Taught Pattern Drafting?

Pattern drafting isn't just a technical skill. Who gets access to that skill has always been tied up with questions of class, gender, and power. 

For centuries, European tailoring guilds restricted the higher-status parts of the trade to men. Women and other excluded groups were often pushed into lower-paid sewing and dressmaking roles, even when their skills were equal to or better than those of the people allowed to move into positions of greater authority.

The modern garment industry has continued to place technical skills like cutting, patternmaking, and garment design disproportionately out of reach for women, queer people, and trans people, even while our labor has been essential to keeping garment production running.

So when we teach our staff to draft and grade patterns by hand, we're doing more than teaching someone how to draw a good curve. We're handing over a skill that has historically been guarded, restricted, and concentrated in the hands of people who already had access to the industry. 

Patternmaking is technical, valuable, and sought after, and learning it gives our team more choices about where their skills can take them. We can't rewrite the history of the garment industry. But we can decide what happens in our studio. If the door to the technical side of the industry has historically been closed to people like us, we're interested in opening it wider.

How We Draft Your Custom Pattern

• I make a drawing for a new design that’s in my brain.

• I get in the studio and cut and sew the item based on former paper patterns and designs I’ve made in the past.

• I do my first fit test, which means I test the design on a real body and make adjustments to the fit based on the size I’m designing for.

• I create the first paper pattern based on this garment. 

• We check the degree of stretch of the final fabric we’re using for the item. If it’s different than what the pattern was originally designed for, then we need to do more math!
  

• Do the math to “grade” up or down (make it fit a larger or smaller body). This is where grading ratios come in. A pattern doesn't expand or contract uniformly; for example, you don’t get taller as you get wider. So each point on the piece needs its own calculated adjustment.
  

• Mark the increases or decreases in measurements onto fresh paper laid beneath the original paper pattern.
  

• True the lines (smooth them out) with rulers and French curves. Every marked point gets connected into a smooth, accurate line or curve. This is what keeps the finished pattern from looking hand-drawn even though it is.

• Fit test. If you’re moving into a fit testing round, you make an entire range of size samples to try on your real fit models! That’s a whole other thing that I’ll make another blog about ;) 

• All the patterns are adjusted and finalized based on what we learned from the garments' movement and functionality on REAL bodies.

• Cut the pattern pieces. We use a rotary cutter, which follows tight curves more cleanly than a large blade or scissors.

• Label the patterns. Design name, piece name, size, fabric grain line, and anything else we'll need to find and use it again later.

• We list the design for purchase! 

• You choose to buy one of our products and send us your custom measurements. 

• We compare your measurements against our specially made sizing chart. We check your body measurements against our base pattern to see exactly where and how much needs to change.

• For custom orders, we write the specific measurements directly onto the pattern, so it stays tied to the person it was built for. (Isn’t that cool?)

• Lay out and cut the fabric. Grain lines get aligned to the fabric's grain and its direction of greatest stretch, held in place with pattern weights. In compression garments, that stretch direction is deliberate. Binders and gaffs are patterned to control tension in different directions across the piece, which is what makes a garment compress safely instead of just compressing.
  

• Sew and serge the seams. Pieces go together with the good fabric sides facing, and seams finished on the serger.
  

• Apply the elastic. We run it through an elasticator attached to our sergers, though there are plenty of other ways to apply elastic depending on the piece and the elastic itself.
  

• Coverstitch the edges. An industrial two-thread coverstitch machine finishes the elastic edges, using woolly nylon in the lower thread so it’s sensory-friendly.
  

• Finish remaining edges. Depending on the piece, this might mean a different technique or machine entirely.

• We package and ship it to you with our Fit Perfect Guarantee!

What Does a Well-Made Extended Size Range Actually Cost?

A genuinely inclusive size range costs more to make. There’s no clever accounting trick around that. Labour, patternmaking, fit testing, and the years of accumulated skill needed to do all three well are part of the cost of making clothes that actually fit. 

A properly graded extended size range can't be created by taking one sample size, scaling it up, and calling it a day. It takes more work, more testing, and more patternmaking. And that's exactly why so few brands do it.

There's another piece of the puzzle hiding in the way clothing is usually priced. Most brands develop and cost their garments around a sample size, which is the size used to make the initial sample, test the garment, and often model it on a runway or in campaign photography. In the fashion industry, that sample is typically somewhere around a US size 0 to 4, or a small.

When a garment is costed around that smaller sample, every size above it can look increasingly expensive to produce. More fabric, more labour, and more resources can make the larger sizes appear to eat into the profit margin. Eventually, a brand might decide that sizes above XL are simply too expensive to produce at the original price, leading them to charge more for extended sizes or stop making them altogether.

We do things a little differently. We cost and sample our garments at a 1XL, which sits right in the middle of our 11-size standard range, from XXS through 5XL. That means the economics work a little differently too. We spend slightly less producing the smaller sizes and slightly more producing the larger ones, and across the whole range, it balances out.

We also offer all 11 sizes. That's surprisingly unusual for stretch garments. A lot of brands skip sizes or expect people to size up or down because, well, the fabric stretches. But stretchy fabric isn't magic. Especially when it comes to gaffs and binders.

If you're making a compression garment, in particular, the difference between two sizes can completely change how the garment performs. Too small and it can be uncomfortable or overly restrictive. Too large and you lose the compression and support you're looking for in the first place. “It stretches” isn't a substitute for actually making the right size.

Clothing that fits shouldn't become a luxury just because your body falls outside the size range that's cheapest to produce. Making a wider range properly costs more. We think that's a cost worth building into the business, rather than passing it on to the people who already have the fewest options.

Thanks for Being Here

If you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to look behind the seams (lol) with us. Patternmaking probably isn't something most people think about when they put on a pair of underwear, a binder, or a swimsuit, but there’s a whole lot of thought, math, skill, and very real human bodies behind every piece we make.

For us, making clothes differently isn't about doing things the hard way just for the sake of it. It's about questioning the systems that tell us there’s only one “right” way to make clothing, one kind of body worth designing for, or one price that matters more than whether something actually fits.

Every pattern we draft by hand is another opportunity to make the garment work better for the person wearing it. Every person we train is another person who gets access to a skill that has historically been difficult to access. And every custom garment is a tiny rejection of the idea that people should have to change their bodies to fit their clothes.

So thanks for being curious about what happens behind the scenes. We’ll keep drawing the lines, doing the math, testing things on real bodies, and occasionally covering the studio floor in scraps of paper.

And as always, if you have feedback or questions, we always love to hear from you!