How to cut out a sewing pattern and preserve other sizes

Another sewing post! I really missed sewing, clearly. I took the day off from work and one thing I knew I wanted to do with the day was at least start the new blouse I have planned. I bought the fabric on Spoonflower and the pattern from Colette patterns. I bought 2 yards and was just able to squeeze the pattern pieces into the yardage.

The pattern is drawn out for 9 sizes, and although I am making the largest size I am hopeful that in the future I'll fit into a smaller one. Denial? It doesn't matter. The point is, I wanted to cut out the pieces in such a way as to keep my future options open. There's a way to do so, and I took pictures to document how I did it.

You would think that because I am using the largest size, all the smaller ones just nestle inside them. You would be wrong; in lots of places they cross each other. Here you can see on the right, all the larger sizes' outlines are outside the smaller ones'. But on the left, there is some crossover; if I were to cut along the largest outline I would lose some of the pattern info for the smaller sizes.

Here I show how I have folded back the other outlines. Because of the curved edge, it won't just fold back naturally; you need to clip the paper several times to allow it to expand along the curve. (This one is a concave curve. For convex curves, not shown here, clipping the paper allows the edges to overlap each other along the curve.)

Clip to the innermost outline, which is going to be the fold line.

Fold the pieces up along the fold line (your cutting line). Then when you cut out the pattern, carefully cut along the edge, making sure not to cut the folded paper.

And at the bottom of this picture you can see that the extra pattern information has been saved! This will also work if you are cutting out a size that is not the largest and you want to keep the larger outlines intact.

Okay, maybe I won't fit into a smaller size, but maybe my mom can use the pattern next time and take advantage of the smaller sizes (she's teeny tiny).

Happy sewing!