I can't print from the custom section!

[JediJaida]

Like the title says.

I tried to print the Dr. Strange pants, and nothing came out on my printer paper except the border print.

If anyone else is having issues, please chime in.

Moderator persons and IT, please fix this.

[megoscott]

I don't know what to tell you. I'm holding print outs of Dr Strange's pants and shirt I just ran. Had no problems.

[JediJaida]

I don't know either. My printer is fine, but for some reason, the print preview shows a blank page, and it prints blank.

Fortunately, I found a previous printout I had made a few months ago, and used that.

Oh, BTW, the patterns do NOT print to the correct size. They run about an inch or so shy of the foot itself.

Maybe if they could be converted to a PDF format it might help?

It's a bother having to resize them on the computer instead of having them come out the first time.

[megoscott]

You are right about that, the inch scale printed in the image is smaller than an actual inch.

[megoscott]

I assume that's why Cory put the inch scale on the pattern in the first place. There's often some variation in the way things print out depending on your settings.

[JediJaida]

I cut the original in half, and spread it apart on graph paper, to make sure that it lined up evenly.

I made sure to line it up with the edge of the paper, then traced around the outer edge.

I used a ceramic nail file to provide a nice, sturdy edge for my pencil, then traced around the pertinent parts.

I cut it out, and then placed the new pattern on a piece of folded graph paper, right at the fold line.

I then cut THAT out, and tried it against the doll.

I'll have to hunt down a nekkid leg, just to make sure it lines up correctly. The main beef I have is that the paper is too stiff to go around the leg.

However, I have some Swedish tracing paper, which has more give to it.

If it STILL doesn't work, I might have to adjust for the width too.

Or, wrap the leg in Saran wrap; wrap that in masking tape, trace a seamline, and cut it off the leg.

Fortunately, one of my DM females became unstrung due to dried out elastic, and I have a leg to use.

If that STILL doesn't work, I don't know what the heck I'm gonna do.

Maybe I'm just no good at this gig.

[Tothiro]

It can be a bit tricky... Even putting the sizing issues aside, you also have to bear in mind that different fabrics have different weave patterns and different stretch capacity.

The mego bodysuit polyester is a double stretch (Left to right stretches as well as up to down - some fabrics stretch a lot, some stretch more in one direction than the other (like the mego poly) and some only stretch one direction or not at all). All of that changes how the pattern would have to be cut and how it fits on the figure.

I had the same sizing problems from the printouts that you described, and had adjusted and resized them so that the "inch" actually measured an inch, but even then they seemed a little off in the angles (to me).
I eventually took some parts of outfits I had and laid them out on the scanner, and used that edited outline as a basis for my own patterns.
I've also taken patterns from whole outfits, by laying the thing flat and tracing the part (a leg for instance) and then using that same folded-in-half thing you mention to make the full panel - adding an extra 5mm where needed, since that seems to be about the average fabric overage for seams.

Tracing works for sleeves or any flat garment, like a tinman or spidey jumper, but there's often a lot more going on with the cut than you might notice at first - like a lot of the sleeve seams are deeper cut on the front of the torso than the back, because the figure will have it's arms forward - stuff like that.
I'm pretty impressed with the original mego tailoring on the WGSH.

If you're basing a pattern off of original fabric, you can also use packing tape or something similar as a backing to make the fabric lay flat - just lay it out on the tape and make sure you're not overly stretching the fabric (it should have a pretty neutral pull) then you can trim the excess tape off and either trace a pattern from that or use it directly to mark off the new outfit fabric. You won't always want to make the pattern parts symmetrical - for instance if you look at a pair of Dukes jeans or other pants, the back-side will have more curvature in the pattern than the front. The side angles will also be different to allow for the fold-over seam and cross-over snaps.

[Mego Magyar]

I always save the file to my hard drive, open it and enlarge or reduce to the "rulers" in the program I'm using until the scale in the image is the correct size compared to the rulers.

Oh, have NO idea why you can't get an image to print. Good luck with that.

[JediJaida]

That's what started this whole mess! I was trying to make a tights pattern.

I took an OLD pair of Mego tights, with stretched out elastic, and cut them apart. They came out a bit raggedy, and it was difficult to trace around them. So I decided to use the Dr. Strange pants, which are the tights divided into fourths.

Maybe I should try sandwiching the tights leg between a couple of sheets of Saran wrap, pin the whole mess together, and THEN trace!

I even tried taking the measurements, and drawing them flat.

Didn't work out that well, but I am NOT about to give up on this!!!

If it still doesn't work, I just might talk to the people at McCall's patterns and see if they can come up with some patterns of my design.

Oh, about tracing sleeves, how in the heck would you do a sleeve for the Wicked Witch and Mary Ellen dresses? They have puffy sleeve caps and stuff. That's difficult to do in that scale.

[Tothiro]

No - like I mention in the other post, forget saran-wrap... just smack the fabric against some clear packing tape - that will solve all your ragedy issues because you can trim the tape to a clean line for tracing.

Also - if you're dividing the pattern out into more panels (for different colors, like I will on my Gambit and Greedo outfits for instance) just divide the pattern out and add 5mm of material to each piece along the "cuts" you make.

I just did a Nightcrawler suit this way, largely by eyeballing and basing it on a Green Arrow top I'd flattened, and it came out just right. I added a cut on the top of the shoulders (so the red wasn't all cut from one fabric swatch) and just added 5mm to each side.

I also had to do that when I added a turtleneck and black stripe up the sleeve of my CTVT repro Koenig top.

Mary Ellen:
Yeah that is a problem... which is why the lay-flat trick only works on simple patterns, the rest is trial and error. Like I say, even the basic jumpers have a bit more sophistication to the cut than you'd expect in the shoulders, seat, under-arms and such.
The puff sleeve is all about the pleating... If you want to do big Hamlet shoulders it needs to be a separate cut, pleated both where it joins the shoulder and where it joins the rest of the sleeve. You're looking for about a third extra fabric, pleated smaller to match the sleeve diameter, and sewn at roughly a 30 degree angled seam (so the interior/under arm portion is shorter than the outside of the shoulder) so it has plenty of fabric to puff out. Because it's smaller under the arm where the seams meet, the piece would end up looking more ovoid than straight rectangular. For that I think separating a seam and direct tracing for a baseline is your best option.

Oh and you don't have to cut the tights into fourths unless you want to - you could got the Mary Ellen/Uhura route and do two foldover legs, like the bottom half of a shazam suit. Of course if you want to mix colors (like a Harley Quinn situation) then yeah, you could divide it out.

[Mego Magyar]

The original image on the website is a GIF - I've saved it as a JPEG. Maybe this will print for you.

[JediJaida]

Thanks.

[JediJaida]

Is double stretch the same as double knit?

[Tothiro]

Hmm, no - I guess the official technical term for it is two-way stretch...

Double knit is instead a specific form of knitting that makes a double thickness in one weaving pass by using two yarns at once (hence twice the output thickness). So if you're shopping for fabric online or by name header, double-knit will usually not mean a stretch material, but one that's thicker and has less give.

[ctc]

>which is why the lay-flat trick only works on simple patterns, the rest is trial and error

As an aside: I had some real tough patterns to work out. I put a paper towel over the figure and wrapped them in masking tape, real tight. I cut out the pattern on the figure, cut some seams so's I could get it off, and then sliced the tape pattern so's it'd lie flat, and in a way I could ater sew a new one up.

Don C.