The size range: why you can't just scale up

What you take from this lesson: Understand what it means for a pattern to come with the full size range and why that is what makes serial production possible.

What a size range is

It is the set of all sizes of a single style, drafted from one base size. In a digital sewing pattern they appear as nested parallel lines: the smallest is the lowest size and the largest is the highest.

When a pattern "comes with the full size range," it means that work is already done: you don't have to draft a separate pattern for each size or pay for grading separately.

Grading is not enlarging

This is where beginners go wrong most often. Enlarging a pattern by 10% on a photocopier gives you a misshapen garment, because the parts of the body don't grow in the same proportion.

From one size to the next, the bust circumference grows four centimeters, but the shoulder width grows half a centimeter, the sleeve length grows one centimeter, and the neckline barely moves. A larger person doesn't have a proportionally larger neck.

That is why every measurement on the pattern has its own increment per size. That is grading.

What grows and by how much

The usual increments from one size to the next, in adults:

• Bust, waist, and hip circumference: 4 cm (1 cm for each quarter of the pattern).
• Back width: 0.5 to 0.8 cm.
• Back length: 0.5 to 1 cm.
• Armhole depth: 0.5 cm.
• Sleeve length: 0.5 to 1 cm.
• Neckline circumference: 0.2 to 0.4 cm. It barely moves.

Why the full size range is what makes production possible

A sewing workshop that produces doesn't make one garment: it makes a series. And a series without a size range can't be sold, because the customer doesn't buy "a t-shirt": they buy their size.

That is the practical difference between a catalog pattern with the size range included and an ungraded one. The first lets you cut production today. The second makes you pay for grading work before you can cut anything.

Every Moldey pattern comes with the full size range inside the same file, and the price doesn't change because of it: XS to 4XL in adults, 2 to 18 in kids.

Common mistakes

• Enlarging a pattern on a photocopier to get the next size: the garment comes out misshapen, with an exaggerated neck and shoulders.
• Applying the same increment to every measurement.
• Producing only the middle sizes "as a test" and ending up with nothing to sell to customers who wear an XS or a 3XL.

In short

The size range is the same style drafted in every size, with its own increment for each measurement. Grading is not proportional enlargement, which is why it can't be done on a photocopier.