Beginner’s Guide to Using PDF Sewing Patterns: Tips for Printing and Creating Patterns with Adobe Acrobat and Illustrator

If you wanna start printing your own PDF sewing patterns but you’re really not sure how how to go about it here’s a quick little crash course for you. So if you’ve downloaded a sewing pattern online you need to look at what these are so this is a PDF file and that is the most common file that you’re going to get. Now that file needs Adobe Acrobat to open it up and you’ll be able to use all the different functionality of it. This one here is my sewing pattern. It’s one that I made um for a corset an overbust corset. Now you can see all of these lines here this is actually all the different sizes that are available for this pattern. Now if you use Adobe Acrobat you can use this little function right here called layers. Now here is all of the different sizes available for this particular corset so if I just wanna select a size 20 I just have to make all the rest of these invisible just like that and I can just print out the one size and that is one of the reasons I really like using Adobe Acrobat. Now this is not something I am not sponsored. I really wish I was but no um this is probably one of the best functioning software to use for PDF sewing patterns but if you wanna start making your own sewing patterns I do suggest Adobe Illustrator. I have tried Quite a few other types of programs out there they’re okay they’re pretty good but I always found I need to go back to illustrator to sort out a few things in the pattern itself as well as to print them out so what I’ve done here is that I’ve created some art boards here that are exactly A4 size and when I print these out it means that I can put the two pieces of paper together and just sticky tape right along the edge here so it’s just edge to edge and that way it makes it a lot easier for my students who wanna print out this one because this is the pattern for the intro to dressmaking sewing class that I’ve got um so all of my students can print this out and use all the different sewing techniques that I teach them in that particular course on this pattern and that makes a lot easier for them so I’ve got the instructions here I’ve got the instructions and the um the course itself on how to print it but this is a really simple one so I would highly suggest Adobe Illustrator for making your sewing patterns Adobe Acrobat to look at downloadable patterns especially if they have the PDF after it and printing it just making sure that you are printing in actual size and it is set to the correct file size as well you have to make sure that you if you’re Printing on US letter that you have selected US letter and actual size or A4 size, actual size. If you’re printing any larger than that like A3 or if you have to go to a print shop for A0 size, make sure that you have collect corrected, make sure that you have the correct file size ready to print and they absolutely print it with actual size.