Hello!
I thought I should write a little about printing the PDF patterns at home, as there’s a nifty little feature in Adobe reader called ‘Layers’ I’m utilising for all the patterns that I think some of you may like! Not the most adventurous of topics, I know, but I think it’s helpful none-the-less.
The Basics
You can print these patterns on both A4 and US letter sized paper. The pattern pieces will need to be assembled in tiles, and I always provide a ‘map’ for this within the pattern file you print.
I always recommend that you use Adobe Acrobat Reader (free to download here) to open and print the patterns, for some reason not all PDF readers work alike, and that can affect all sorts of things like it not printing to scale, bits cutting off! In the print options review your print settings to ensure you’re printing the pages at 100% scale, you don’t want any ‘page scaling’ or ‘fit to page’.
Printing Specific Sizes!
Now I’ve heard from plenty of people how it can be confusing and frustrating when you have a nested pattern with a zillion dotted and dashed lines and they all converge on curves and you don’t know what the hell you’re meant to be cutting. So with that in mind I’ve utilised the layers functionality in Adobe Reader for the print at home files, so that you can reduce the amount of sizes you print and get a clearer sense of the lines you want to use. So that means, for all Maison Fleur patterns, if you are between size 6-8 on the size chart, you can choose to only print sizes 6-8!
It’s very liberating when you try it out, I can tell you!
Okay, maybe not that liberating.
Here’s how you do it (psst! there’s a video at the bottom): Once you know the size(s) you want to use, open your pattern in Acrobat Reader. There’s a side bar on the left with a bunch of icons, including one called ‘layers’, which looks like 2 horizontal diamonds on top of each other, click on that icon to open it up.
Now you’ll see all the layers listed in the document with an eyeball next to each one.
You can click on the eyeball icon to turn size layers on or off as you need to. 
Leave the bottom layer turned on! I label it an aggressive “leave on” as this contains vital pattern information such as the page outlines, page match-points etc that help you tape it all together. Trust me I’ve accidentally printed without it on and it was a real pain in the arse to match up the pages afterwards! Learn from my silly mistakes. *I’ve also just started locking that layer so in the near future this won’t even be an issue!
Then just continue to the print dialogue as usual, and hey presto, less nested pieces appear!
Here’s a short video I put together for those of you who prefer to see things in action:
