Texture Size

I've been trying to texture a shirt with a plaid pattern, but the plaid is always too big looking. How do I resize it so it's smaller on the shirt?

are you working off of the clothing templates provided by LL, and even better ones provided by Chip Midnight?

It's working on top of those templates, in a graphics program, where you need to resize your texture. While you can change the size of clothing (how baggy your pants are) with the SL client, you cannot resize the actual texture.

Actually I just uploaded a picture of a plaid pattern I found on google as an image and was using that as the fabric texture.

After rereading the second post there, I figured I'd add a bit more info.

This is using a blank "new jacket". My problem is that I took this picture of a plaid pattern and the grid is appearing too large on the clothes. Like one square is about as long as the arm. Instead of a small grid covering the whole shirt like a real one.

Take a look at the clothing templates. You can find them on the downloads page if you haven't seen them before.

Notice how parts of the image correspond with parts of the body. The reason your plaid pattern was too big is because it spans the whole image at a large size. SL has no idea what "plaid" is. All it knows is that it's supposed to put whatever's in the upper left section of the image onto the chest, whatever's in the upper right section on the back, and whatever's across the bottom on the arm. That's it.

So, if you want your sleeve to be 10 squares long, you need to make sure the sleeve section of the image is filled with 10 squares. If you want 25 squares across your chest, you need to make sure the front torso section is filled with 25 squares across.

Well, I made the pattern smaller in comparision to the image size itself and solved the size problem. Now if it's possible to make the jacket not skintight that'd be nice. I'm guessing it can't be done with the default jacket object, right?

yes that's true -- the jacket will hug your body. You can make a shirt "baggier", although this is kind of just expanding certain parts of your body. But experiment with a shirt and see if that does the trick.