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The glossary.
The words the trade actually uses, defined plainly. Open to everyone, customer or not.
Sloper
A sloper is a basic pattern fitted to a body or a size chart with no seam allowance, no style lines and no ease beyond what the body needs to move.
Block
A block is the master pattern a style is developed from — the same thing American drafting calls a sloper.
Toile
A toile is a test garment sewn in cheap fabric to check a pattern's fit and proportion before cutting the real cloth.
Muslin
Muslin is the American term for a test garment sewn in inexpensive fabric to check fit — what British and European workrooms call a toile.
Ease
Ease is the difference between a garment's measurement and the body's measurement underneath it.
Dart
A dart is a wedge folded out of a flat pattern so the fabric takes a three-dimensional shape over the body.
Notch
A notch is a small mark cut into the edge of a pattern piece that tells you which point on one seam meets which point on another.
Seam allowance
Seam allowance is the margin of fabric between the stitching line and the cut edge.
Truing
Truing is correcting a pattern after it has been altered so the seams that must match still match and the lines that cross a seam still run smoothly through it.
Walking a seam
Walking a seam is stepping one pattern piece along another, a short distance at a time, to check that the two edges are the same length and that the notches meet.
Grade rule
A grade rule is the instruction that says how far a given point on a pattern moves when the pattern changes size.
Size run
A size run is the full set of sizes a style is produced in, from the smallest to the largest.
Marker
A marker is the cutting layout — every piece of every size in the order, nested together on the fabric width to waste as little cloth as possible.
Yield
Yield is how much fabric a marker consumes per garment, and marker efficiency is the percentage of the laid cloth that ends up inside a pattern piece.