My niece is eighteen-months-old, bright, bubbly and gorgeously cute. She’s about to be blessed with a baby brother in January and I’m on a mission to make a wardrobe of clothes for each child.
I make adult wear. I design, make patterns and sew samples for my range of PDF sewing patterns, but making babywear is an entirely new direction for me, and I learnt the hard way that making patterns for babies is not at all the same as pattern drafting for adults.
This resulted in having to go back to basics and buy a very expensive book on pattern drafting for babies. The book is the foundation for almost all professional pattern drafting courses on offer worldwide and although I’m glad I’ve bought it, I’ve found it frustratingly slow to sit down with sets of instructions and make slopers from scratch (a sloper is a basic pattern from which a designer constructs individual designs - for instance a bodice sloper would be used to make a tracksuit top or a hoodie.)
Anyway, making a few garments for the babies has started pulling at my heartstrings - the clothes are so adorable and tiny. The cuteness factor has me wanting to do more than simply make digital PDF patterns for the Internet; I WANT TO MAKE A RANGE OF BABYWEAR!
However, babywear manufacturing demands a steep financial commitment - specialized machinery ( like industrial studding machines to insert poppers), tons of expensive trimmings and, also, 100% cotton fabric (very, very expensive). I have a great contact for fabric, but still this is going to take a good deal of introspective thought.
Basically, I’m going to document my journey into this new direction and, hopefully, receive feedback on people’s thoughts as to which styles look good and which are just nasty.
Once all the digital patterns are made, I’ll post links so that interested people can download the sewing patterns and test them out personally.
