Sewing Tutorial | Quick & Easy Plaid Matching
I've gotten a lot of questions about plaid matching since the release of the Archer Button Up Shirt and especially now with Archer Appreciation Month.
Today I'm going to show you a really easy quick way to make sure your plaids match up. Personally I'm of the camp where I don't worry too much about the general placement of each vertical stripe on my garments, I kind of like a bit of a random look with that, but I do want my stripes to line up horizontally across my shirt from front to back to sleeve. This is a really quick way to make sure that happens. Draw a straight line connecting the underarm points across the front, back, and sleeve. Since the pattern is drafted for these points to meet up this will make sure your plaids meet as well.
When cutting plaids I find it best to cut a single layer at a time. Actually I almost never cut double, you can get such a better yield with cutting a single layer! With plaids cutting one layer at a time will ensure that your plaids match exactly where you want to without the excessive time suck of lining and pinning the two layers of plaid together.
If you do cut this way though be sure to flip your pattern pieces so you don't end up with two of one sleeve or anything like that. For the center back and other pieces generally cut on the fold you'll want to make sure you trace out one half, then flip and trace the other half.
This Archer is for my class at Lillstreet so I don't have any finished photos of how the plaids match, but I do this method for all of my Archers so any previous plaid one I've made I've cut with this method. The above photo demonstrates how it works out. Pretty nice I think! If you're looking for something more in depth than this simple method you might want to check out this series Amy over at Really Handmade did on plaid matching.
She gets super in depth with it and just had an article inspired by the series published in the current edition of Sew News. Check out her posts here, she has links to all of her previous plaid matching posts, the article, and downloadable templates for if you're still feeling nervous about plaid matching!
