Seriously, why do you costumer folk love her? Nice books, but she made diagrams of clothing worn by mutant pygmies. Im-freakin’-possible to scale up from for real people, unless you enjoy frustration or are some kind of architectural genius.<\/p>\n
I was seduced into thinking I might use those books for genuine costuming applications (as opposed to “ooo shiny!”) because I had such good results scaling up from Hunniset and the Tudor Tailor books. But those patterns are actually made for human beings, and, well, they’re real *patterns* not drawings of freaky antique clothing items that survived because they were too small to be worn out by people or they were bizarre examples that nobody wanted to scavenge into usable clothing for normal-sized people.<\/p>\n
Oh, so can you guess how I ended up spending my last couple hours? Yeah. The sewing room garbage can overfloweth with muslin and tracing paper now because I tried to use the scale pattern from Janet Arnold for a caraco. Four pieces for a bodice? Who are you kidding? Even my flatter-shaped 16th-century bodice has five pieces. The Arnold caraco back pieces were way too skinny no matter how much I enlarged. Also, the skirting was extremely wasteful of fabric, which struck me as very odd in an era of narrow fabric widths and overall thrift and clever yardage use (according to Sally Queen, anyways). Jackets were supposedly popular with the middle-classes, so why waste all this width?<\/p>\n
Anyway, after much annoyance and one wadding of the muslin in a ball and shoving it in the trash can, I finally decided to do what I’d said I might do in the first place: simply draw long, full caraco-style skirts onto the Butterick bodice pattern I used for Cosi Fan Tutte. The bodice fits like a dream (it’d better, after three muslins last year!) and has quite a few nods to historical accuracy so it does “pass” IMO.<\/p>\n
Dug the muslin out so as to not waste *that* fabric, reused most of the pieces into the Butterick bodice, and *ta da* now I have a great caraco muslin. Just need to even the skirting hem, since I couldn’t decide where I wanted it to end. Plus I have to decide the front treatment — it’ll be zone-like, and I may want some little tabs on the bottom. Not sure.<\/p>\n
Moral of the story: Patterns are my friend. Screw that drafting BS. Not like I’m a Clydesdale, y’know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seriously, why do you costumer folk love her? Nice books, but she made diagrams of clothing worn by mutant pygmies. Im-freakin’-possible to scale up from for real people, unless you enjoy frustration or are some kind of architectural genius. I was seduced into thinking I might use those books for genuine costuming applications (as opposed<\/p>\n