Charlie pattern generates too loose waist for my measurements

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1

Hi all,

i sewed the charlie pattern with my measurements and the waist turned out way to loose and i had to reduce it by around 6 cm. I measured the pattern in InDesign and the waist circumference was also around 6 cm larger than what i had provided as measurement, so i didnt make any mistake while sewing.

For experimentation i also created the pattern for the public Ghislain measurement set and measured again in InDesign and the waist was only a few millimeters larger than the waist measurement given to the software.

So there must be something wrong with my measurements that makes the pattern generator add too much length to the waist related parts. Can anyone give me a hint what that might be? I attached the measurements i used below.

InDesign Screenshot - I determined the waist length in the created pattern by adding up the length of the pink lines and multiplaying by two.
InDesign Screenshot - I determined the waist length in the created pattern by adding up the length of the pink lines and multiplaying by two.922×471 30.8 KB

The used measurement set which results in a loose waist:

measurements:
  crossSeam: 820
  crossSeamFront: 360
  knee: 360
  seat: 935
  seatBack: 500
  waist: 840
  waistBack: 420
  waistToFloor: 1080
  waistToKnee: 630
  waistToHips: 90
  waistToSeat: 200
  waistToUpperLeg: 330
units: metric
metadata:
  setName: John
embed: false
2

charlie is designed to have the waistband sit somewhere in the lower half of the area between hips and waist. The length of the waistband needs to be longer than your waist measurement (waist is defined as your narrowest circumference along the torso). titan (which charlie is based on) does not use a hips measurement, so instead, we kind of interpolate between the seat circumference and the waist circumference.

It seems like in your case, this approximation isn’t working all that well. (Ghislain’s circumference delta is much smaller than yours.) You may get a better result by lowering the ‘waist ease’ value, even making it negative. (The slider won’t allow it, but there’s an edit button and then it works.)

1 Like
3

I played with waist ease and was able to generate a pattern that had an appropriate circumference in the waistband. I will try to make it in the next weeks. This has solved my problem with the pattern, thank you very much @anna_puk.

Just out of curiosity, do you know why the hip circumference is not taken into account when calculating the appropriate circumference for the waistband?

4

Because the design is based on Titan, our trouser block which fits the waist and seat.

It is almost always better to draft a smooth curve from waist to seat, than to risk overfitting by trying to hit every individual measurement.

When the Titan block is developed into a relatively low-waisted design as charlie, this logic becomes a lot less obvious, and not fitting the waist seems like an oversight.

In practice, fitting the waist would be tricky to accomplish. Especially because charlie gives you plenty of leeway to change the waist height.