Garment Designer Window
 
Upon opening Garment Designer, you will see that the window is divided into two areas: the upper horizontal Style and Size Bars and the lower Garment Display Area.
Style and Size Bars

The Style and Size portion of the window generally consists of three bars. These vary somewhat, dependent upon which garment category you are working with.

• The top bar consists of the Garment Category bar (pink) and the Size bar (yellow).
• The middle bar is the Garment Styles bar (periwinkle). It is here that you choose the style details of the body of the garment.
• The lower green bar is the Sleeve bar, and this will only be visible if you are working in the Top, Dress or Top Plus Bottom categories. It does not appear when you choose the Bottoms category.
• If you choose either the Tops Plus Bottom category, a fourth bar appears for the Bottoms (lilac). The upper periwinkle bar shows you the Tops style options and the lower lilac bar shows you the Bottoms style options.

The various style bars contain menu items that are technically called drop-down lists on Windows and pop-up menus on the Mac. However, for the purpose of simplicity, we will refer to these as pop-up style menus in this manual. We will also refer to the various menu commands as style options or menu commands.

To choose a style, you first need to choose a category. For example, if you choose to work with Tops, you need to choose this menu command in the Category pop-up style menu. As you do this, the various style options in the purple Top bar change. Now, you can choose among the various top options in the purple bar.

In the garment display area, you will see a garment front and back pattern drawn in black, and a green ‘body’ or Sloper sitting inside of each pattern piece. If you like, you can request to see each pattern piece displayed in one of the following ways: Left, Right, Independent, Adjacent and Joined. These are found in the Garment Pieces dialog box, accessed through the Garment Pieces command of the Display menu. This will be discussed more fully later in this chapter.

Garment Display Area
This portion of the screen displays the pattern pieces of your garment. In addition, you will see a sloper of the body you are designing for. The pattern appears in black and the sloper appears in green.