Taking body measurements for a pattern

• Wear close-fitting clothes, and the underwear you will wear with the garment — Measuring over a jumper adds centimetres that then live in the block forever. Support garments genuinely change torso measurements and should be the ones you intend to wear.
• Use a fibreglass tape — Cloth tapes stretch with age. A tape that has quietly grown by a centimetre ruins everything downstream and gives no sign of doing so.
• Tie a narrow elastic at the waist — The natural waist is a landmark you will measure from repeatedly, and finding it fresh each time introduces error. Let the elastic settle where it wants to sit.
• Stand normally — Not braced, not held in. A block drafted to a held-in body fits a body that is not breathing.

This is the craft’s one real dependency and it is rarely stated plainly. Back width, nape to waist, shoulder slope and across-back measurements all require you to be still and upright while somebody else reads the tape — twisting to read your own back changes the very measurement you are taking. Front and back waist lengths taken alone are similarly unreliable.

Two solutions. Ask somebody once, carefully, and write everything down. Or pad a dress form to your own measurements, which removes the dependency permanently, makes draping possible, and is the more useful purchase of the two if you intend to keep drafting.

• Write the date — Bodies change. A measurement set with no date is a measurement set you will not trust in two years and will have to retake.
• Note which side — Most people are measurably asymmetric. If you are drafting for fit rather than for a standard, record left and right separately where they differ and decide deliberately which to draft to.
• Photograph yourself in the toile, from four sides — Far more useful than a mirror for diagnosing drag lines, and it gives you a record to compare against after alterations.