A Tutorial on how to use e-Patterns

 2 A Tutorial on how to use e-Patterns
By Jill Case for Sew News – Originally posted on the Sew News Blog
There’s no denying that e-Patterns for sewing, quilting and crafting are here to stay. They
offer the chance to get many patterns for free as well as present to you new styles that you
may not have considered before or wanted to pay for. At Sew News we offer e-Patterns
with almost every issue. However with a few changes recently in software and technology
sometime downloading these e-Patterns isn’t always so clear cut as it once was.
This tutorial will attempt to make the process of getting these e-Patterns hassle free.
All of our e-Patterns are offered on our websites – Sew News, Creative Machine
Embroidery and Sew It All.
We’ll use the Sew It All site as the example. But, the steps will remain the same regardless
of whatever website. Please note this tutorial is for downloading sewing e-patterns, not for
embroidery design downloads, that will be addressed later.
Step 1
Click on to the article that contains the pattern. There will be a link to the pattern as well
as a reference guide for printing out e-Patterns.
Sometimes the pattern will come in two or more links. But, each link will be clearly
marked as such.
3 Step 2
Right click on to the link and a dialogue box will pop up on your screen.
Step 3
Click on to the “Save Link As…” option.
4 Step 4
When you click the “Save Link As…” a dialogue box will open from your computer. This
is where you can save the e-Pattern to any location on your computer’s hard drive. You
can even rename the file to something else.
Step 5
Open up Adobe Reader. This is a free software program that you can download if you
don’t already have it on your computer.
While in Adobe Reader retrieve the e-Pattern from where ever you saved it.
5 And open it. The e-Pattern will be visible in the screen. Mouse over to the “File” tab and
go to “Print”.
6 Step 6
The Print Dialogue box will now be visible in your screen. Your screen may not look
exactly like mine but the box should have the word “Print” on it.
7 8 Step 7
These next steps are very important for printing out the pattern correctly.
1. While in the Print Dialogue box, select “Poster” under “Page Sizing & Handling”.
2. Check that “Cut Marks” and “Labels” are selected.
3. Check that “Documents and Markups” is selected under the “Comments & Forms”.
You can see towards the right of the box it will show how the pattern is laid out and how
many pages. e-Patterns can take a lot of pages to print, just as regular commercial or store
bought patterns use large sheets of paper for their patterns. It’s the nature of the beast.
If you do not want to use your toner and printer to do this, download the e-Pattern on to a
thumb drive and take it to your local copy shop where they can print it out accordingly.
Step 8
Laying out the e-Pattern
When you print out the e-Pattern guide that is located along with the e-Pattern there will
be a guide as to how to lay out and tape the pattern together.
It will look like this.
9 10 Every page that is printed will have a series of numbers and title of the pattern
and, what is known as “Cut Marks” (circled in blue below).
After you have followed the numbering sequence your pages will look something like
this. But, you’re not done!
11 12 You must overlap the cut marks. As you will notice below, I have overlapped the left
side and the right side of the pattern is not overlapped at the cut marks. Once you have
over lapped at all the cut marks you would then tape the pattern together. After it is all
tapped you can opt to copy the pattern on to pattern paper, Swedish tracing paper or
other type of pattern paper.
I hope this helps! There are a lot of steps, but once you get the hang of it it’s a great way to
get free and low cost sewing patterns. If you have any questions please leave them in the
comment section below.