On 03/06/2006, at 12:59 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
..... And lots of clothes were still made by hand, and the patterns
reflect this, up until the late 1860s [they all were until the
1840s...and then it was considered sorta low life to have machine
made clothes, especially women's, until the 1870s].....
Um, sorry, but you may want to re-think the bracketed part of this
statement. It was, as far as I can verify, only un-tailored,
ready-made (as in, "Take your chances with good fit") clothes that were
in any way looked down upon -- and that was *not* by the people who
never could afford tailor-made before sewing-machines came along. For
them, machine-made was cheaper and better-quality than home-made, and
thereby a direct improvement in their quality-of-life!
All sorts of written opinion from the time can be quoted that enthuses
mightily over the superiority of machine-made over hand-worked clothing
(and everything else). I won't quote any of it here, unless I'm asked
(and my reply wouldn't come back up for a week or two -- I'm working on
a different set of tracks this week!) --- but please consider that the
whole Industrial Revolution could not have happened if the prevailing
societal standard had declared machine-made as inferior.
Consider also that, even now, in a time when the craftsmanship of
things hand-made is frequently (if not usually) regarded as superior to
machine-made and mass-produced "ticky-tacky," machine sewing is *still*
considered to be superior to most hand-sewing: the seam-lines are
much more easily kept straight when they should be, or more accurately
made to follow a curve; the stitches lock more tightly, and, when a
stitch breaks, the ravelling doesn't extend as far and as fast under
continued stress as hand-stitched; and the time it takes to assemble a
garment is vastly shorter when done on the machine. If this opinion
were not the prevailing one, there would be a market for hand-sewn
apparel and home-wares, at least among the most moneyed "discerning"
folk -- and there isn't. Personally-tailored apparel has a body of
people who will pay for the work. Hand-sewn goods do not.
Now, after all that, do I dare confess how much I enjoy sewing things
by hand? --- Even to the point of sewing quite a bit of my mundane
clothes by hand, purely for the fun of it. Very soothing! Really
easy to slip into a blissful Zen state!
Beth S.
--- in cold and frosty Kambah, in Canberra, the big-city small town
capital of Australia
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