Garment Designer

As many of you know, Garment Styler for Windows or Macintosh is a garment design program that has been on the market of the past few years. It allows sewers to print a pattern, in tiled pages from a standard printer, to tape together. It also allows knitters to build and chart a garment. Knitters quickly found that the paper pattern was an excellent tool to use for blocking knits into perfect shape. See our Garment Styler page for more information on this version.Styler's 'big sister', Garment Designer is now available. Garment Designer contains all the feature of our Garment Styler program, 'plus more' . Those of you who own Styler may upgrade to the Designer version. Garment Designer utilizes a security process that requires the user to enter a security code upon the installation.

This is a one-time process and is easily done if you have an Internet connection. If your computer is not online you may call us to assist you over the phone. Please call or email if you have questions. Garment Designer provides a multitude of features which make your design world not only simple, but very visual, and in general, a lot of fun. Before we begin to discuss all the new features users will find, let's quickly overview the basic approach to design that Garment Styler provides. Since the Designer version includes all of Styler's features, this will set a good foundation.

The premise of the Garment Styler is that a user may choose a standard size to begin the design process. These include Women's 2-50, Men's 32-50, Children's and Infant's, sizes as well as several dolls and even some stuffed animals. Simply choose the menu, and slide up or down to the desired size. Or, if one prefers, he/she may enter one's own personal measurements and create a pattern that works with the shape of their body. Once you've chosen a style, you see a sloper of your body, in green on the screen. The pattern (in black) surrounds the sloper and with the grid feature tuned on, one can quickly see how much ease is allowed in any given style. For further information, one can turn on the garment's dimensions and quickly see a schematic presentation of the garment.

To build a garment, you simply choose amongst the numerous menu items in each of the sub design groups; body style, neckline, armhole, shoulder, and sleeve. This mix and match approach provides hundreds of thousands of combinations for the user to explore. In addition, you may add bands or ribs to the garment and the software will understand to remove them when charting a pattern piece. Garment Styler allows one to print out knitting instructions (in a knitters cheat sheet format), which is ideal for machine knitters. It also allows you to print the pattern pieces in full scale as well as half and quarter scale. These are helpful for those who want to draw on the pattern and then use a knit leader/radar to shape the garment and apply intarsia, etc.