Dress designer: plan a dress and check it before you buy the fabric

Choose the pieces, a fabric for each part and the accessories you mean to add, and every style tag, the fabric and colour shares and the cost come out the way the game works them out for a finished dress. Pick a card to tick off its lines. Nothing is bought, cut or sewn until you are sure.

Check against a card (optional)

1. Pieces and fabric

BodiceVersionFabric

SkirtVersionFabric

Sleeve

Collar

2. Accessories

3. Result

Choose a fabric for every part to see the full scores.

Casual

Cool

Cute

Daywear

Playful

Romantic

Simple

Warm

Workwear

0fabric, as the game counts it

0accessories

0materials in all

Shares by area: none yet. Colours: none yet. Tag bars count 0 accessory pieces. Piece by piece shares.

Why the Sketchbook shows different numbers

The tag bars in the Sketchbook are a preview: each bar shows the pieces’ own score (leaving out a detached sleeve on a bodice without sleeves of its own), with a band for the positive tag values of the fabric swatches you picked, and accessories are left out. The finished dress is scored differently: each fabric counts by the part it is on, bodice 35%, skirt 40%, sleeves 15% and collar 10%, and every accessory is added on top. So before accessories, where the fabric part of a finished bar lands inside that band depends on which part each fabric goes on: a strong fabric on the collar lands near the weak end, the same fabric on the skirt near the strong end. Accessories can then take it past the band. This designer shows the finished-dress numbers.

How the scores are worked out

Pieces
Every piece’s own tags count in full. Leaving the sleeves or collar off counts too: No Sleeves and No Collar carry a little Cool and Simple. Details on what each pattern adds.
Fabric
A fabric’s tags count by the share of its part; with no sleeves or no collar, that share goes to the other parts. The fabric finder lists every fabric’s tags.
Accessories
Counted from the strongest down, each worth 0.85 of the one before; trim counts by length; and each piece adds 1 Elaborate. The accessory finder explains the stacking.
Shares and cost
Fabric and colour rules count area, a many-coloured fabric sharing its area among its colours. The fabric cost is the game’s own valuation, each piece’s area plus 10% plus a small fixed amount, at the fabric’s price; with the accessories it makes the Materials line on the sale screen. What you pay in the shop is a separate matter: you buy whole lengths, so the bill can be higher.

The Dressmaker sketchbook: a request card on the left with a Requirements list, a dress sketch and tag scores on the right, fabrics down the side. — The Sketchbook. Its tag bars show a range for your fabric swatches; the designer above weights each fabric by the part it is on.

What it cannot tell you

Quality depends on how well you cut and sew and on the client’s measurements, so Quality lines stay open: see getting 100% quality. The designer uses one fabric per part, while the game lets each piece have its own; for mixed parts, work piece by piece in the fabric share planner. Beaded trims also count their beads towards jewel, tassel and bell lines, and the game shows that number as you place them. Once the dress is made, the pass-or-fail checker reads the numbers straight off the screen.