I purchased a really interesting book called the Building Block Dress. Ever notice a designer sells ten different patterns that are all tweaks of the same dress? Evidently that’s actually a thing in fashion design — you really do have a base pattern and all of your “looks” are modifications of this base. Makes sense from both a manufacturing and a design standpoint. Cars are designed the same way — there’s an underlying chassis upon which a lot of different variations are bolted. This book teaches you to make your own modifications. Which means you don’t need to buy the three different almost-the-same patterns, but rather you can purchase one and modify components as needed.

The book includes a “dress planning” template — for me, “planning” has generally been an e-mail to a few friends or a blog post about the pattern I’m using and the fabrics I am considering. Selecting different components and drawing the dress is new for me … but I’ve got my first dress planned! Now I just need to get Anya’s Halloween costume sorted so I can work on other projects 🙂