Scale up or Scale down?

Today my fellow Leathercraft lovers I want to talk to you about patterns since you might have seen on Instagram that I’ve started a new project. You can recognize the final product since it is a previous project scaled-up. But how do you do that… Scale something up or down?

Making you own patterns

When you’ve just started leathercraft, using patterns from books or the internet is totally fine. Although when you are ready for the next step you might think of learning to make your own patterns. Why?

Well, for me it all starts with an image in my head what the bag should look like. Finding that exact same pattern is not only nearly impossible but also, when you make it yourself, it will learn you so many things. Besides the whole reason you started leathercraft might have been because there are no bags matching with your needs and wishes.

It will learn you how different proportions do or don’t work. It will make you think of the order of construction. But most importantly it will give you the freedom in your design, shapes, and sizes.

Smaller or larger scale

Talking about sizes, sometimes you’ve made a pattern before which would also look great a bit bigger or a bit smaller. But how do you scale your pattern up or down? Well, it depends on how you’ve made your prior pattern.

In a post a while back I’ve explained how you can digitalize your patterns with Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. If you’ve saved your document as a vector file it does not have a unit. So whether you want it be in millimeters or in kilometers is totally up to you. The only limitation would be your printer or your paper size.

The other option is to describe how you’ve made the pattern without any units attached to it. So if you describe your pattern with for example a square with a 45 degrees angle, no matter what size it is, you can scale it up or down! 

Alright, if you’ve made it this far reading this post, I might as well give a small hint on my newest project… what do you think of a big bag-sibling of this lovely one?

As you can imagine is each bag frame different so I’ve applied the latter pattern option. I was so glad I’ve actually written that DIY since I had forgotten how I’ve made it before. But thanks to the DIY archive for my blog I could make the new pattern in no time ;)! Personally, this has been one of my favorite DIYs, so I’m looking forward continuing with this project!!