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From Reference to Pattern – A Case Study, Pt 1

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So far, I’ve written a lot of tutorials about

general patterning advice, and I’ve released a few
patterns, but one thing on which I haven’t elaborated
much is the intuition and the process by which I make
a pattern. I haven’t written anything about this
because the process of drafting a pattern is something
which inherently varies from plushie to plushie;
unless you’re making the same types of things over
and over, the procedure of how to construct a pattern
for one plushie may be completely irrelevant for a
plushie with a different body shape. For instance,
amongst the plushies listed to the right, it seems hard
to imagine that you could obtain the pattern for any
one of them by making moderate alterations to the
patterns from any of the others. One has a
monster/dragon-like body, one has a simple body
with a complex head, and one is literally a giant
sphere with cat ears. How is it possible, then, to give a
general process for how to start patterning?

It isn’t! However, every project has a number of
conceptual first steps which are essential to getting a
pattern taking off. In this tutorial I’m going to run
through the process which I used to pattern one of my
more recent plush,

Yukito-kun

, who has a fairly simple

human-like shape. Throughout this process you’ll be
able to see the sorts of steps I take in assessing a
potential subject, taking measurements, transforming
those measurements into a preliminary pattern, and then applying incremental changes to
develop a more robust pattern.

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Taking Measurements

The first step in any plush-making endeavor is to obtain consistent references of

your model! If you have access to a 3D model that can help out a ton, but for most plushies
with simple shapes, a front and a side view should suffice. These are the references I used
for Yukito-kun (thanks to

Channing

for the millionth time!):

Now the first thing we want to do is to make measurements. You can choose to do this in
whatever units you desire. Usually I pattern entirely on the computer so my reference is in
pixels, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll have the reference be in inches for this plush. Let’s
assume that the desired height of the final product should be about 18 inches. Let’s go
ahead and mark all the important features on his body:

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It’s up to you to decide what features you think are most important on a plush, but typically
you’ll want to understand how the shape of the body changes, as well as locating important
areas where other parts will be attached. Here’s a rundown of the features I’ve marked:



The neck: The neck will be left open, and has a width of 2.2 inches and a depth of 1.9
inches. Since we assume the shape of this neck will be an ellipse, the resulting
circumference is about 6.45 inches.



The arm and leg holes: It’s good to determine in advance where your arm and leg
holes will be. I’ve marked these measurements in red; again, assuming elliptical-
shaped holes, we get that the arm hole should have a circumference of 5.41 inches,
and the leg hole should have a circumference of 8.45 inches.



Body curvature: Looking at the side reference above, I want to take a measurement
of the depth of the body at its widest point; this is the part reading 4.6 inches. I also
note that the convexity of the body changes as you move down from the neck to the
belly, which is something we should incorporate into our body pattern as well. We
also notice that the length of the curve around the belly in blue (9.7 inches) is
different from the perceived height from the front (7.8 inches).



Gap between legs: Important to preserve this because this is where the front body
piece will connect to the back to form the leg hole.

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A Naïve Patterning Approach

Once again, I would like to emphasize that “naïve” does not mean “bad”; it simply refers to a
style of patterning which is intuitive but tends to miss certain key aspects of the plushie
being designed. So what would be a naïve way to start off the pattern above? Let’s just trace
over the body and consider how using the resulting pattern would go:

The idea here is that we take 2 of the white pieces I’ve just traced together and just attach
them to each other, leaving the neck open. Ignoring the lack of arm/leg holes for now, what
could possibly go wrong?

Recall from above that we had that the neck should have a circumference of 6.45 inches.
However, if we sew the body pattern together as shown above, the total length of the neck

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would be 4.4 inches, leaving us 2.05 inches short of the actual target. A similar discrepancy
occurs at the middle of the body. Finally, we note that the height of the body pattern piece
is 7.8 inches, which matches up with the perceived vertical height from the front. However,
that blue line is actually the perimeter of the front half of his body, which from the side
view we determined to be 9.7 inches. Therefore, we see that we actually numerous areas
which are missing lengths.

Again, this happens because when we look only at a 2D projection of a model, we lose
information on one dimension of its shape. For instance, consider what would happen if we
were to look at a cylinder from the front:

Essentially, what we have is that an orthogonal projection of a cylinder onto the XZ or YZ
plane is a rectangle. However, it would be impossible to start out with this 2D projection
and deduce that it was the projection of a cylinder; it could just as easily be the 2D
projection of a box, an elliptic cylinder, or something different altogether! This is why it’s so
important to have at least 2 different viewpoints of a plush.

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Step 1: Building Up From Our Measurements

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s try a different approach. First of all, notice
that we intend for the body to be symmetric across the vertical axis, so let’s only focus on
half of the front body. Let’s build a preliminary pattern using the following knowledge:



The center of the body corresponding to the blue line in the markings should be
about 9.7 inches long.



At the bottom, we mentioned that the gap between the legs should be 1.2 inches
wide. Since we’re dealing with half the body, this means the bottom of the body half
should have a 0.6 inch area to connect to the other side of the body.



We established that the opening for the neck should be 6.4 inches in circumference,
so on our half-body, we will leave a 1.6 inch section at the top for the neck.



We also established that our body at its widest point should be an ellipse with of
width 5.1 inches and depth 4.6 inches; this translates to a circumference of 15.25
inches, a quarter of which is about 3.8 inches.

Once we mark down these
measurements, we can draw a super
preliminary body pattern which
matches up with these reference
measurements. Let’s ignore the arm
holes and leg holes for now. Here’s
what comes out of that.

Now, this pattern might already be
making some of you nervous. “Isn’t
this pattern too big compared to the
reference pattern? The answer is, it’s
not! What you should imagine is that
the edges of this pattern are folding
into the background, and that when
the body is all put together, you
won’t see the edges from the front.
This will be easier to imagine once
we start adding other features.

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Step 2: Adding Holes for the Arms and Legs

Our next step is to add holes for the arms and legs. Since our body piece is intended for the
front and back of the plushie, this means that we need to add half hole segments for the
arms and legs. From above we determined that the circumferences of the arm and leg holes
respectively are 5.41 and 8.45 inches; we cut them in half and determine that each half hole
needs to have length 2.7 and 4.2 inches.

Now, remember the Right Angle Rule? Of course you do! If you aren’t familiar with it, read
my

second patterning tutorial

. Essentially, what it states is that if we want any seam to

continue in a smooth path, the angles of the pattern pieces need to meet up at right angles.
This will affect how we choose to position our leg hole. The leg hole should be positioned
with so that it meets the following criterion:



Leaves the 0.6 inch gap at the bottom



Has length 4.2 inches



Meets up with right angles with the body pattern

Figuring out the precise leg hole
shape can be difficult, and
honestly I sort of just draw curves
randomly and hope that they
match the desired length until I
get one that works and looks
natural. Here’s the result of that
process (also done for the arm
hole).

Now that we’ve added the arm and
leg holes, notice that it’s a lot
easier to imagine how the excess
part of the pattern piece which
goes beyond the border of the
reference will actually fold into the
background. Think of them as little
flaps that will fold nicely once we
add the limbs and connect the two
sides of the body together.

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Step 3: Adding some Curvature

This body pattern piece is usable as is, but we might find that having some curvature on the
body would suit us well. If you look at the side reference, you see that there is a bulge in the
plushie at the belly, and nothing in the pattern so far really gives that bulge. Let’s fix that! In
order to fix this, we’ll need to modify the blue line to give us the desired bulge we want.

How should we approach making the belly rounded? Remember that are a few key features
we need to preserve from before, mainly the 3.8 inch quarter circumference at the belly
and the neck and leg gap lengths. Essentially what we would want to do is to deform our
pattern piece so that most of the lengths are preserved, but that it curves a bit. I’ll admit
that I’m going to dance around this step a little bit (that’s where you’ll have to use your
intuition a bit!), but the resulting transformation looks something like this:

Notice that most of the
important features have been
preserved: the length of the
neck and leg gap, the length of
the center edge, the length of
the widest part of the belly,
and the length of the limb
holes. Some of the lengths
actually changed a tiny bit (I
think I shrunk the leg hole a
bit), but that’s OK! Changing
the lengths a little bit
shouldn’t affect your final
product noticeably. (If it does,
that’s what pattern testing is
for!) However, now we have
that the center of the half-
body pattern piece is curved;
this will allow the front of the
body, when viewed from the
side, to have some curvature.

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At this point, the body pieces are pretty much ready to go! In the final project I actually
used the curved body piece for the front of Yukito-kun’s body and the uncurved one for the
back, simply because I didn’t think there was as much of a need for his back to be curved;
that might cause his body to turn out somewhat gourd-ish. That’s another sort of decision
where you’ll have to use your own judgment. Also, one other thing I did with the curved
body piece is that I let them overlap a bit in the center; this was to avoid having a seam
running down the center of his belly. It technically reduces a bit of the curvature, but a
small overlap doesn’t reduce the curvature too much and quite significantly reduces the
length of the seam showing up on the belly.

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Here’s some reference pictures
showing how the body turned out
compared to the reference! As you
can see not everything is 100%
perfect, but again, that’s OK! With
plush-making it’s impossible to
recreate a model 100%; the
important part is to preserve most of
the important features. As you can
see, in the front view, the overall
proportions are correct (although the
final plush probably could’ve used

just a tad bit more neck), and in the
side view, the belly exhibits a nice
degree of curvature due to the curved
front (although the curvature is in a
slightly different area than shown in
the picture, it still looks fine!).

Thanks for reading this! In the next part I’ll go over how I patterned out Yukito-kun’s legs.
Legs are a feature which come up a bunch over the course of making plushies and there’s
actually quite a lot to say about them, so they get their own tutorial.