Not whimpering.

[thanate]

I keep buying Reconstructing History patterns, because they are for awesome clothes that no one else has patterns for, but thus far every one I've tried to use has been to some extent an exercise in frustration. I've been sewing for the last twenty years, with a bit of hand-work experience before that, and I find these instructions to be mad scavenger hunts for what in the world I'm supposed to be doing. Admittedly, this is probably not historically inaccurate. (Does anyone else have this problem?)

While I fret over mysteriously appearing interlinings and tabs that don't line up with anything, grauwulf is re-routing the plumbing... to run over the old basement stairs. Fortunately, the nice new stairs are about to be useful, because we have drywall.





Tomorrow may yet include tile, plumbing fixtures, and a bathroom door. Tonight may or may not include a hard freeze. So it goes.

Comments

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

Historical patterns drove me crazy. In one instance (a doublet, iirc), I ended up cutting the pattern pieces out of muslin so I could stitch, rip it out, and re-stitch until figuring out what the instructions meant. Then I just started making my own patterns out of muslin, which was far less stressful.

But I was costuming for theater rather than historical accuracy, so could get away with tweaking to fit my tastes and abilities.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I've done historical stuff from internet patterns, making up my own patterns, and from the sort of books that deconstruct the garments for you, and not had much of a problem. It's just this brand, where I want to love all the work the lady has put into making seriously awesome patterns, but she needs about three more rounds of clarity & copyedits, and better aliasing software so the pattern edges actually line up.

Part of the problem, of course, is that in period it was all hand-tailored by people who knew what they were doing, which doesn't translate that well into paper patterns-- so a lot of the tweaking to make this work on a human being is perfectly reasonable. :)