After writing my 0.0.8 post, I measured my original Acronym/Nemen J28-K and imported those measurements into CLO.

First I spread out my jacket on the floor and crouched down with a measuring tape. Then I annotated a screenshot of my pattern pieces as I took each measurement. Eventually, I wound up with this, which looks like something you might be forced to hang up on your fridge after your kindergartener brings it home from school:

Using this masterpiece as my guide, I adjusted my existing pattern, entering each measurement into CLO. You can easily change the segments of lines, but as you change line length, this can mess with your angles, which requires manual readjustment. Here’s how things looked after I finished my first pass:

It’s hard to see because the two screenshots above aren’t at the same scale, but the proportions of most pieces underwent a subtle shift.

And not all the measurements quite worked out. Even though I carefully took original measurements, I was forced to make tweaks to allow the pieces to fit together without mismatched lengths.

I also updated the avatar’s measurements in CLO to more closely match my own, which would make the simulated jacket look more realistic on the body.

I left the existing defaults for most of these but ensured height, chest, and sleeve length were accurate to my measurements.

And then, I simulated, to see how things would go!

(Note– at some point while I was adjusting measurements, something happened in CLO. The avatars lost their skin texture and color and became a uniform dark shadowy texture. It seems like a bug? I have no idea how to fix it.)

Hey, this is looking decent (is it me or does this avatar look like an absolute unit? Does this mean I look like an absolute unit?!):

Now that the silhouette is generally looking good, we can tackle specific problems that remain.

For example, there seems to be some extra fabric blousing outward in the jacket’s back. You can see the problem more clearly here:

To me, this indicates that the jacket’s back may be an inch or two too wide.

However, the width near the armpits looks pretty good. There’s not enough fabric to make the armpits narrower, which tells me we don’t want to remove an inch of width uniformly, just towards the bottom.

Yes – the excess fabric bulging out gets bigger toward the bottom. What happens if we remove more width at the bottom of the pattern, but not the top? That looks something like this:

Yes! Once simulated, this is starting to look more ‘normal.’ The blousing in the back is totally gone.

Well, it turns out my revelation about the T-shaped Kimono Block was slightly misguided. Going fully T-shaped in the 2D pattern causes excess blousing in the back.

After our tweaks, and rotating the pattern pieces, we arrive at a “slanted T” shape whose horizontal crossbar droops slightly, similar to my original physical copy of the pattern.

  • Left: my original attempt based on my handmade masking tape pattern. The shape was decent, but the gusset/armpit area didn’t make any sense.
  • Middle: the “T-shaped” revision based on my ideas about the Kimono Block. The armpit gusset makes sense, but excess fabric blouses out severely in the lower half of the jacket.
  • Right: Now, still T-shaped, but adjustments that avoid excess blousing in the back.

We’ve solved the problem of excess back fabric!

But the front still looks like it’s blousing out (in addition to removing avatar color/texture, CLO randomly turned the background green and I have no idea why):

The blousing issue in the front seems similar to that happening in the back.

I went back and forth making more tweaks. Long story short, I decided on a looser silhouette overall, and further slanted the “T” crossbar. I also made sure the armpit area of the main body piece is positioned at a right angle again.

Now it looks very similar to what we originally started with. Except we added an armpit gusset. All this writing, all this tweaking? Sometimes you gotta go on a whole journey just to end up back where you started. If you haven’t read The Alchemist, congrats, I just saved you $14.99.

The silhouette is good enough for me to move on. At some point, you keep making tweaks and everything just looks fine. Next time we’ll talk more about revising the photo panels to hopefully look cooler and function better.