An Overlock Stitch in Adobe Illustrator

Hello Everyone,

A Fashion designer generates ideas for the future collection. Patternmakers and sewers should understand how the future garment must be constructed. Therefore, a technical designer has to explain the construction of each garment detail clearly. Sometimes, one accurate technical garment illustration can replace a long explanation.

For example, if you draw a skirt with a vent, it is necessary to draw an enlarged view of this vent construction on the wrong side. It will be best to mark seam allowances, the hem allowance, the angle of the topstitching, the distance between the edge and the topstitching, and so on. The more information you put in your technical drawing, the less you will need to explain. After all, better communication ensures that the garment is constructed exactly as you had planned.

In this post, I will demonstrate how to create an overlock stitch brush in Adobe Illustrator CC.

Below, you can see the illustration of a skirt vent on the wrong side. Let’s draw serged edges. Copy and paste the raw edges you plan to serge at some distance from these raw edges.

Let’s create an overlock stitch brush:

1. Select the Polygon tool in the Toolbar.

2. Click on the Artboard. Enter the following values in the Polygon dialog box as in the picture below.

3. Rotate the triangle at 180°.

4. Drag the Live Corner widget with the Selection tool toward the triangle center until the shape radius is equal approximately 4 mm (R: 4.09 mm in the picture below).

5. Select the Scissors tool in the Toolbar. Click on the shape outline at the same points as in the picture below. Delete the unnecessary part of the shape. Bring the vertical and horizontal guides and position them as shown below.

6. Reflect this line vertically. Move the copy of the line so that the two curved lines touch at the bottom point.

7. Reflect this line horizontally. You can join two curved lines if you wish.

8. Add two short horizontal lines to simulate horizontal stitches as shown in the picture below. Make sure that guides are locked. Group all objects.

9. Reduce the Stroke weight to 0.25 pt. Use the Selection tool and the Shift key on the keyboard and reduce the tile to a necessary size.

10. Create a new Pattern brush and try to apply this overlock brush to any path first.

11. Apply the overlock brush to the copies of raw edges.

If you want to learn more about fashion brushes, read chapter 14 and 15 in my e-textbook "The Craft of Garment Design with Adobe Illustrator". Enjoy the detailed step-by-step explanation of the creation of various seams, stitches, garment embellishments, frills, flounce, pleats, and much more.