The new edition of Hecklinger's _Dress and Cloak Cutter_? It's typical
of my old friend Robb Shep's books. (He recently moved back to San
Francisco, in a neighborhood near mine! But Fred Struthers is still
distributing Robb's books from Fort Bragg, for those who want to buy
direct; the URL is www.rlshep.com.) The _Dress and Cloak Cutter_
contains a solid selection of women's pattern drafts primarily oriented
to tailored clothes, probably drawn to true scale but I haven't done the
math to check. Anyway it includes all the period drafting instructions
and a supplementary section on clothing etiquette.
If you want sizing, our two-volume anthology _Fashions of the Gilded
Age_, which contains several hundred patterns for women's garments from
1877 through 1882, includes many patterns that use an apportioning scale
system. Volume 2 also includes a dressmaking manual with information
drawn from many sources. Both volumes contain extensive quotes from
fashion columns and other sources on construction, fabrics, trimmings,
what was worn when, etc.
Paper patterns, in the sense of Butterick et al, are just not a suitable
production format for a book. Basically you've got a trade-off. You can
buy individual full-sized patterns in modern sizes and get the
convenience of that. Or you can buy a book, and enlarge and size the
patterns (even if they are drawn to _a_ modern size, it's not
necessarily the wearer's). And you get a much larger range of styles at
a lower per-pattern price. But book and full-size pattern publishing
formats can't do all the same things; think of a book's sizing and
binding issues. Aside from the shelving issues that make a book larger
than 8 1/2” by 11” significantly harder to sell to both bookstores and
libraries, the more you put into a book for each pattern, the fewer
patterns will fit in it. You also have to realize that if you want a
book that is a direct reprint of an original source (like most of
Robb's) or based on original sources (like ours), there is not an
infinite number of original sources. The further back you go, the fewer
there are. The best books in English with women’s clothing patterns that
I know of (and I’ve been collecting for decades) are the Hecklinger that
Robb reprinted (and Robb’s also collected for decades), and an extremely
rare US source that we used for parts of _Fashions of the Gilded Age_.
The German book that we used as a source for the apportioning scale
patterns, and some others, is a bigger (many more patterns) and IMO a
better book than Hecklinger’s. But, we had to pay a professional
technical translator quite a lot. And I still had supervise her very
closely using my knowledge of period patterns and clothing, and what's
left of my college German. And there isn't an infinite number of foreign
sources either, nor are they, as a general rule, hugely different from
the ones in English.
Fran
Lavolta Press Books of Historic Patterns
http://www.lavoltapress.com
Does anyone have this title, or have comments on the contents? The
description says pattern diagrams and illustrations but I'm wondering
if it has real intructions or if it's just copies of old scale diagrams
that I have to interpret myself. (Like a lot of other books)
Dawn
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