Best Patternmaking Books to Elevate Your Skills in 2026
Are you interested in building a patternmaking reference library to refer to as you build your drafting skills? Today we are sharing our favorite patternmaking book recommendations!
Victoria’s Recommendations
Fashion Patternmaking Techniques Series by Antonio Donnanno
This series is my top recommendation both for comprehensiveness, affordability, and compatibility with the pattern drafting methods we teach in Confident Patternmaking & Grading (CPMG).
I suggest all of my students pick up as many of these books as they can get their hands on. If I’m looking for an example of how something is patterned or a diagram to get a student started, this series of books almost never lets me down.
The Fitting Book by Gina Renee Dunham
For fitting, I encourage you not to rely heavily on books and diagrams to adjust your patterns, because when you understand how patterns work from the ground up, adjusting fit becomes truly intuitive…
But sometimes you need a little reassurance! That’s where this book comes in.
Pattern Cutting for Lingerie, Beachwear and Leisurewear by Ann Haggar
I’m a firm believer that you don’t need to draft a new block for every different thing you want to pattern.
A well-fitting basic block can be tweaked to be a block for anything, including swimwear and lingerie.
This book approaches pattern drafting in that way and has an uncomplicated approach that I really appreciate.
Il Modellismo by Fernando Burgo
This is the textbook from Istituto di Moda Burgo where I did my Master course in patternmaking. The techniques are masterful and the patterns you’ll create from it will be epic, but I recommend it with some hesitation around the high price and the abundance of errors throughout.
The book is bilingual in Italian and English.
The book is available here directly from the school: https://www.fashiontechniques.com/pattern-making-book.html
If you’ve tried to learn pattern grading from books and failed, it’s not because there’s anything wrong with you. I’ll be honest: I have not found a book on pattern grading that breaks it down in a way that makes sense for beginners. Period.
Someday I’ll turn what I teach into a book on grading for beginners, but for now, the best place to learn grading in a way that’s straightforward, intuitive, size-inclusive and universally applicable is my Size-Inclusive Pattern Grading course.
Graduates of my course will love this series of books on grading from ESMOD Editions, because they provide a whole host of examples that make perfect sense with the method I teach in my courses. These books are bilingual in English and French, and they’re worth a try for beginners, too, because you may find a diagram that applies precisely to what you want to grade! Et voilà, you’re grading!
Nat’s Recommendations:
Patternmaking for Fashion Design by Helen Joseph-Armstrong
This book is what I used in my very first Patternmaking class back in college. It covers a wide variety of styles and patternmaking techniques, and it is one of my favorite places to look when I am beginning a new pattern project.
We did a full review of this book on the blog, which you can find here.
Metric Pattern Cutting by Winifred Aldrich
This book, as the title suggests, teaches using the metric system.
I first learned about this book from my Tailoring instructor in college. One of my favorite aspects of this book is the way it shows you how to draft sleeves. It takes a unique and math-minded approach to draft a sleeve off of an existing armscye, which results in a very well-fitting sleeve. It is a great book to reference, especially if you prefer to work in the metric system.
