How to Plan a Quilt or a Garment: Fitting and Planning Tools Compared

Planning is where both sewing and quilting begin, long before you switch on your sewing machine. But how you plan a quilt and how you plan a garment are different. One works with geometry, colour, and a flat surface. The other works with the body, measurements, and a three-dimensional result that needs to fit a real person.

This is the final part of the Madam Sew series comparing the sewing and quilting tools each craft requires. In this post we look at how they approach planning and fitting, whether you quilt, sew clothes, or do both.

Missed the earlier parts? Catch up here: Cutting Tools, Measuring & Marking, The Sewing Machine, Pressing Tools.

Quilting is a craft with a lot of planning. Just like any sewing project, the planning happens before the sewing, but depending on the difficulty level of your quilt design, it can be very intensive. A quilter's planning process is both visual and mathematical. There is the (geometric) design, the colour placement, the block layout, and the composition of the quilt.  

You either start from a quilt pattern that has all these details. Quilters who plan their own quilts either start drawing and calculating with pen and graph paper or digitally. Quilt design software like EQ8 (Electric Quilt), Quilt Pro, Block Party Quilt Co and PreQuilt allow you to design and visualise quilt patterns on screen, test colour combinations, and calculate yardage before buying a single piece of fabric. It is a significant investment, but for quilters who design their own patterns it is worth investing. You can also use Excel or Adobe and of course, the pen-and-graph-paper way has been the quilter's planning tool long before software existed and still works perfectly as well.

The planning process in quilting is also closely tied to the cutting phase. Once a layout is decided, you calculate the number of pieces needed, cut them all (sometimes hundreds of pieces), and then sew. The cutting table, which we will come back to in the room setup section, is therefore indispensable to a quilting workspace in a way that is different from garment sewing. If you want a practical checklist to get your next quilting project started on the right foot, this blog written by Ernestine Grant is worth bookmarking.

When you cut all the pieces and have your blocks assembled, the design wall plays an important role as a physical planning tool. It is a large surface covered in flannel, batting, or design wall fabric mounted on a wall or leaned against one. Quilt blocks and fabric pieces stick to it often without pins, which means you can arrange, rearrange, stand back, evaluate, and change your mind as many times as you need before sewing everything together. The design wall does something no table or floor can do: it shows you the quilt at eye level, the way it will probably hang or be seen, giving you a true sense of the colour balance and visual impact. Also, very often you don’t have a surface available that is big enough to position all the pieces and leave them there for some time. Many quilters say a design wall changed the way they design entirely. If you have the wall space for one, it is worth getting one. The one in the image below is from Connecting Threads.

A design wall doesn’t need to be complicated. A large piece of batting or flannel fabric pinned or stapled to a foam board, a wall, or a door does the job just as well as a commercially made version. The key is size: the bigger, the better. A design wall that only fits a few blocks at a time limits your ability to evaluate the whole. Here is a tutorial by Shannon Fraser who has a tutorial explaining how to make a quilt design board.

Curious about quilting but not sure where to begin? The design wall, the graph paper, the cutting plan… it will all fall into place once you work through a first project. Our guide to taking your first steps in quilting is a good place to start.

Garment sewing plans around the curves of a body rather than flat geometry. The fitting and planning tools reflect this.

The dress form, also called a tailor's dummy, is the garment sewist's most iconic planning tool. It represents the body in three dimensions and lets you drape fabric, pin pattern pieces, evaluate fit, and check proportion without needing to put the garment on and take it off repeatedly. Adjustable dress forms work for many home sewists, allowing you to dial in measurements for the bust, waist, hips and torso. For serious pattern makers or anyone with a figure that differs significantly from standard sizing, a custom-padded form that matches your exact measurements is the more accurate option.

That said, a dress form is not the first thing a beginner garment sewist should buy. Many home sewists just buy commercial patterns and adjust them to fit. I’ve sewn clothing without a form for years. But even if you start from a pattern, adjusting it to your exact size, involves measuring, redrawing, and testing. You can manage taking body measurements with a tape measure, using the measurement chart of the pattern, and with some patience, compare the measurements to a pattern's finished measurements. If you are measuring your own body, having a body self measuring tape at hand, is more helpful. You can easily wrap and attach it around your body, leg or arm and get the right measurements at a glance. If you need more information about how to take exact body measurements, check out this blog that explains how to tackle that.

A full-length mirror is probably even more important than a dress form if you are making clothing for yourself. You need to be able to see the garment on your body from head to toe, from the front, the side, and the back. A three-panel mirror gives the best view, but even a single well-positioned full-length mirror is essential..

Making a test version of the garment sewn in inexpensive fabric (a muslin or a toile), can probably be compared to the quilter's design wall when it comes to testing the outcome. It is how you evaluate and adjust fit before cutting into your good fabric. Making a muslin takes time, but it saves frustration and expensive fabric, especially for complex garments, like fitted bodices, or trousers. For simpler pieces in a size you know fits well, you can skip it. You learn this judgment through experience.

Other smaller basic pattern drafting and alteration tools are pattern paper, a pattern notcher, a pencil and eraser, specialty rulers like a French curve (ruler), a hip curve (ruler), and a grading ruler, pattern weights, pins, an awl, a precision knife and a tracing wheel. These all belong in the garment planning toolkit. Let me explain:

Pattern paper is usually a large, lightweight paper. Sometimes it is plain white or yellowish paper, sometimes printed with a grid. Garment sewists use it for tracing, copying, and drafting pattern pieces. You want to avoid cutting directly into a commercial paper pattern because you want to preserve the original for future use or for other sizes. If you don’t like the feel of tissue paper and you don’t need to trace a pattern, you can also use craft paper. It is sturdier. Butcher paper, freezer paper or dressmaking paper are in the same category as craft paper. To make slopers or durable copies of your tried-and-true patterns, use heavier paper like manila pattern paper. This material can hang from hooks directly.

A pencil and eraser sound obvious, but in pattern work a pencil is specifically the right tool. Pattern drafting involves measuring, drawing, adjusting, and redrawing. Pencil lines can be erased and corrected cleanly.

The tracing wheel is a small serrated or smooth wheel on a handle that you roll over a pattern piece placed on top of fabric, with a sheet of dressmaker's carbon paper in between. The pressure of the wheel transfers the lines of the pattern onto the fabric below, marking seam lines, dart legs, and other construction details without cutting into the fabric. The serrated wheel works on most fabrics, while the smooth wheel is better for delicate materials that could be damaged by the serrated edge. A spiked tracing wheel can be used to copy the shape of a garment or pattern piece directly by leaving tiny holes in the paper to trace and true up into a pattern. This way you don’t need transfer paper.

An awl is a pointed tool used to pierce a small hole through a pattern piece to mark construction details: the tip of a dart, the position of a pocket, a button placement. You place the pattern piece on the fabric, press the awl through the paper at the marked point, and the small hole it leaves transfers the position accurately to the fabric beneath.

A precision knife (such as a craft knife or scalpel) is used for cutting into the paper pattern itself. You can cut out traced pieces cleanly, cut slots for grading, or make adjustments that require a clean straight edge. A sharp knife against a metal ruler gives a cleaner cut on pattern paper than scissors, particularly on long straight lines.

A pattern notcher is a small tool that punches or cuts a tiny notch into the edge of a pattern piece to mark seam allowances, match points, or construction details. Notches are the little triangular marks you see on the edge of pattern pieces. They tell you where to match two pieces together when sewing. A pattern notcher makes these marks quickly and cleanly without having to draw or snip them by hand each time.

The French curve ruler is a curved template used to draw smooth, accurate curves like armholes, necklines, curved hems, and the shaped edges of bodice pieces. The curve has several different radii along its edge, so you can match it to the specific curve you need and draw a clean, even line. The hip curve ruler is a longer, more gently curved ruler designed specifically for the curves of side seams, hemlines, and hip shaping. Where the French curve handles tighter curves in smaller areas, the hip curve handles the longer, more sweeping lines that run down the side of a skirt or trouser leg. The grading ruler is a specialist ruler used to scale pattern pieces up or down between sizes. It has multiple parallel lines printed at set intervals that allow you to add or remove width evenly across a seam line without distorting the shape of the piece.

Pins remain useful in pattern work for holding pieces temporarily while you check fit, mark adjustments, or pin a traced copy before cutting. In the fitting phase, pins are also used directly on the dress form or on the body to adjust seam lines and darts while evaluating fit.

Both crafts share one fundamental truth: time spent planning before you cut saves fabric, frustration, and unpicking later. That planning can happen on a design wall or in a muslin fitting session. The logic is the same. Both quilters and garment sewists also rely on accuracy. Quilters measure their fabric and blocks meticulously, garment sewists measure their body and adapt their pattern pieces accordingly. And we all know that a plan that actually works out the way you imagined it is one of the best feelings ever! That part is universal.

And that brings us to the end of this series. Five posts, two crafts, one love of fabric and more overlap than most people expect when they start comparing.

If you quilt and you're curious about sewing clothes, you already have more than you think: a precision cutting setup, a pressing habit, and an eye for accuracy that garment sewists take years to develop. What you'll add is a tape measure that lives on your body, a few fitting tools, and eventually perhaps a dress form, but none of that needs to happen before you sew your first seam.

If you sew clothes and you're drawn to quilting, the patience and comfort with fabric you've built serves you beautifully. You'll need to add a proper quilt ruler, a wool pressing mat next to your machine, and the willingness to cut a hundred of the same shape before sewing a single seam. The precision will come.

And if you already do both, welcome to the club! Your sewing room is probably a wonderful, slightly chaotic mix of sewing and quilting tools from both worlds, and that is exactly how it should be.

Want to go back to the beginning of the series? Start here: Part 1: Cutting Tools / Part 2: Measuring & Marking Tools / Part 3: The Sewing Machine / Part 4: Pressing Tools

Happy sewing and quilting!

An

Blogging for MadamSew