A Festive Thread 2024

[The Seamstress]

Yeah that's pretty much how it works. My own training included CAD stuff (which I've entirely forgotten by now) to efficiently arrange pattern pieces on a length of fabric industrial style, and we also had to try bandsaw cutting once (kinda fun). It's a different story when you have a pattern drafted for a particular person in bespoke dressmaking, of course.

Older books are indeed quite useful (and interesting to study). There are a lot of pattern drafting systems floating around; I don't know about other parts of the world but Müller & Sohn is pretty much the standard here so that's what I was trained in. Of course it's not perfect (no pattern drafting system is, I think) but works fairly well. For historical garments though I'd stick to the original written sources and/or extant examples.

Yup bias cut can be nasty. It always astonishes me how much the fabric stretches when I put a skirt on the dress form before levelling the hem! Joining straight cut pieces to bias cut ones is indeed a clever way to reduce that, I've seen it in Victorian patterns too, IIRC.

[dubsartur]

The couple of German pattern drafting books which I flipped through in Austria were not very helpful, lots of measurements and examples but not principles which work outside a few decades of one tradition of fashion.

One day I would like to make a suit coat without the unforgivable terrible ergonomics of the sleeve cap.  If I can't give a lecture or duel with a longsword, my clothes are not formal.

That website does not work for me, it is greyed out with a giant cookie warning with no option to reject all.

Edit: some back and forth about the various Müller books from 1860 onwards https://fashion-incubator.com/vintage_pattern_book_summary/ Maybe I will see if I can borrow one.

[dubsartur]

You might like the pair Tailor's Tools and Tailors Illustrated.  Figuring how much of Gnagy's instructions comes from him and how much from his sources is a goal, the 16th/17th century Spanish books are hard to get on paper or in translation.  And I suspect that precision drafting based on right angles is a circa-19th-century thing but it works for beginners from my culture.

[The Seamstress]

The Müller & Sohn website seems to have some problems, unfortunately, yesterday it worked just fine for me, today all I get is a blank page. Ugh...

Thank you for the links, I'll have a look!

Sleeve caps and sleeve fitting are rather tricky for me, too. In bespoke dressmaking I was taught to always add a few centimetres to the sleeve cap on a mockup sleeve and then pin/fit it in while you/the person is wearing the dress/jacket/whatever, so the few centimetres extra allow you to let out some length at the top if needed and provide you with a bit of wiggle room to make it sit right. And once it does, you mark the seam line and transfer that to the final pattern piece.

You cannot view this attachment.
Here's what I mean by adding a few centimetres (random sleeve I grabbed from the internet), usually 3-4 at the top of the sleeve and tapering at the sides. Crappy MS Paint picture, but you get the idea.

Then again, this is geared towards modern aesthetics on how a sleeve should fit, it might be vastly different for historical dress. The 18th century for example has a quite different sleeve look in women's dress due to the undergarments: A pair of stays usually will make your torso cone-shaped and draw your shoulders back, all of which impacts the fit, obviously.

And yeah, that "mathematical" precision stuff is very much a 19th century thing, that's where you get a lot of books on the topic which claim to have invented a somewhat scientific method of pattern drafting. I think it's only natural that drafting methods follow the fashions of the time period they were written in, I'm not sure if there even is one method/sytem in book-format that would work universally.

I hope this makes any sense, my brain is a bit wobbly today, lol.

[Jubal]

Happy new year, friends!

[The Seamstress]

Happy new year, everyone

[Rob_Haines]

Happy new year!

[Spritelady]

Happy New Year!