According to VoNBBS, the portrait-neckline blouse is "easy-to-make" and "has a way of making you look your prettiest and most feminine." Well, bottle that up and sell it! I'm buying. It's a blouse, a simple one at that. There are no sleeves, cuffs, collars or buttons. What's not to like?
Plenty, when you don't have a commercial pattern at you finger tips. This week, I cracked open the dreaded "Pattern-Making for Fashion Design" by Helen Joseph Armstrong. I felt as if I'd gone back to school...the tables, the diagrams....the exercises...the revelations!
The second chapter is an exhaustive discussion of fashion industry standards, how they are categorized and why they may or may not be used. Next came a five or six page set of exhaustive diagrams on how to take all 38 plus measurements from a standard fashion industry dress form. Many of these, such as bust, waist and center front length are very familiar, but others such as abdominal arc, bust span and strap length were completely new to me.
As I don't have a industry standard dress form hanging around the work room, I took my own measurements and filled out a two page form from the book's appendix. I had it on paper, me in Oct 2014, every roll, ripple and bulge. Then, I turned the page and found a table entitled "Standard Measurement Chart". Across the top of the table ran the headings grade and size, from size 6 to 18 and down the size ran a list of all the measurements I had just painstakingly recorded for myself. For kicks, or a malicious sense of self-inflicted pain, I circled my real measurements as they appeared on the table.
The results were both humiliating and revealing at the same time. All my "vertical" measurements fell into the 6-8 size and all my horizontal measurements fell into the 16-18 size. This explains so many of my fitting problems with commercial patterns and why I cannot find retail clothing that fits. It also scares the heck out of me for pattern drafting.
I won't bore you with all the gritty details of Chapter 3 - Drafting the Basic Pattern Set, but I will say that my 6-8 by 16-18 figure created drafted drawings that in no way looked like the illustrations in the textbook. The result was a lot of self-doubt, many repeated exercises and several rolls of pattern paper and a couple yards of muslin on the work room floor. In the end, I did get a skirt and bodice basic block pattern completed and fitted. I have not attempted a sleeve block. That will come later, perhaps in the spring.
Using the block as a guide and skipping through dart and neckline manipulations, using only those exercises that applied to Vogue 7630 - 1952, I came up with this trial pattern.
Hmmm...trial two....coming up.
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