The marker isn’t color coded. It doesn’t need to be. Or… well, I guess it could but it would be pretty hard to mess that up, an incredibly huge major gaffe. A marker is made for each fabrication type (pg. 114-120 of my book explains how to make markers yourself) so the pieces that belong together are cut together. The marker is made first (or at least planned) so you have a spread plan. Fabric is laid to length to match the marker length. For example, a fusible marker would be so much shorter/smaller than a shell/self marker, there’s no way you could cut fusible from the shell marker and vice versa. So, that’s why no color coding on markers.

Persons responsible for implementing color coding varies, dependent on the given operation. Most important of all is the pattern maker, everyone else follows their lead. If they get it wrong, everyone else could too and it’s not their fault. Oh wait, scratch that. The most important person is the designer/owner/manager of the operation. Plenty of DEs think this is overkill or it doesn’t matter. Most likely to fail are DEs who went to fashion school because they don’t teach this in colleges. Or didn’t. I notice Armstrong finally added this info in her *5th* edition and a lot of professors are using my book to develop curriculum.

The stitcher at a machine may or may not know the color coding of the pattern pieces, it depends on the management style of the place. If it’s a huge operation and operators are the equivalent of machine cogs (boo hiss), they probably won’t and it probably doesn’t matter that they don’t because larger operations are pretty good at managing operations. They wouldn’t have gotten so big if they didn’t. At a smaller company, I think it’s a very good idea to make sure everyone is cross trained to know stuff like this. That way they can help out with cutting protos or small lots when making a marker isn’t a priority.