It Feels A Bit Drafty in Here.

Hello! Welcome to the blog. I'm so glad you decided to join me! 

The mockup process is upon us, dear reader! "Mockup" is a sewing and design term for what is essentially a prototype for a finished product. For clothing design, mockups, (or "toiles" if you're nasty,) are fundamental to the trial-and-error of pattern alteration and fitting a garment to an individual. 

For this grant project, I need to figure out how to turn my chosen corset pattern, "The Pretty Housemaid" from the original 1890 size to my own personal 2021 size. Because I don't have a 24-inch waist. 

The Symmington Company manufactured corsets in the late nineteenth century. A large number of the original patterns are available online on the Lichester County website. It's actually really cool to look at the completely unaltered patterns from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras. There's something incredibly unique about how the pattern pieces are laid out and I highly recommend taking a look if you are at all interested in fashion history.

Symmington corsets are also important to the historical clothing folk because the company saved patterns, corsets, and packaging materials from the period so it is possible to look at them now almost as they were over one hundred years ago which is extremely rare in textile history! Among the many extant patterns accessible to the public, The Pretty Housemaid is not one of them. But it's okay because:

I found a version of The Pretty Housemaid pattern in a book called Corsets: Historical Patterns and Techniques by Jill Salen. She went to museums in person and meticulously measured the individual pattern pieces of extant corsets, then redrew and published them for nerds like me. So a massive debt of gratitude is owed to her for this project! 

I also have lots of help from a lovely group called Foundations Revealed. This is in no way sponsored by FR. I just find it very helpful. They are an online community of costume and corset makers from around the world who share industry methods and historical clothing research in abundance. I will post links to the articles I used throughout this project, however, membership is only open a few times each year and unfortunately, a lot of the information is behind a paywall. Though, there are some free resources available including the instructions for scaling a corset pattern up a size or two (or four, or five, or six). 

The founder, Cathy Hay, has published this instruction manual for free to anyone on the Foundations Revealed website called "The Corset Revolution." This booklet includes a lot of precise information and equations for how to adapt any corset pattern for the modern figure. She is trained in math and has decades of experience making historical clothing.

Here is how I fared in the patternmaking portion. 

You'll remember the paper corset I taped together in a previous post titled "This Has Been a Paper View Program." Isn't it the dearest little thing you ever did see? 

After tenderly crafting this wee gift from the corset gods, I absolutely destroyed it and chopped it up into its original flattened state. Why? Because I thought measuring all sides of the wee pattern pieces would be sufficient information with which to immediately draw the pattern, but larger. *current me is doing the Captain Picard facepalm* 

This is what the tiny corset pieces look like taped into my project journal which quickly turned into a madwoman's scribblings that barely make sense to me. And I did this! 

I then realized the inch scale Jill Salen's book provides on the pattern grid, which I then scanned and printed out with a normal printer, did not equate to actual inches because I messed with the size in the printing process. 

This shaky red outline is brought to you by: medication

Thus, it was time to figure out how to get Photoshop without paying for it. 

• Well, I actually did pay for it. My university gives the Adobe to those who ask for the Adobe and gives it to them via a USU student Adobe account. Meaning, it was only the cost of college tuition. 

Fiddling with the scanned images in Photoshop took a lot longer than I expected because, at this point, my mind was unable to separate the dilemma of whether enlarging the pattern first or if making it using the existing measurements and then fitting it to me first would be the best course of action. This is silly considering Cathy Hay has a step-by-step tutorial that essentially held my hand through this. Yet, after reading the full list of instructions, I was slightly confused and thought I could figure it out on my own. 

 

Long story short, I did not figure it out myself. I don't know why I decided on the solo route having never done this before. I recorded myself trying to draft this pattern based off of a few of Cathy's instructions mixed with my own foolish misunderstandings of how math works. And hey, it was a waste of time but I now have mildly embarrassing footage of my family just being themselves in the kitchen where I was working. 

Surprise surprise. I went back to Cathy Hay's Corset Revolution tutorial and things got stupid easy. 

Step 1: Choose a Pattern

• Done and done! This was easy once I learned that the Pretty Housemaid was one of the best-selling and financially accessible corsets available in the most extreme decade of the nineteenth century in terms of waist-to-hip ratio. 

Step 2: Take Measurements

• Cathy highly recommends having a professional seamstress/tailor take your measurements. I had my mom do it. That decision may come back to bite me later in the fitting process but my mom was standing right there in the other room so of course, I handed her my measuring tape. 
• A huge thank you goes to my mom. She even took all the measurements in inches as well as centimeters. What a trooper. 

Step 3: Important calculations

• Because the pattern I end up with is for one half of the corset (I'll just flip it over when cutting out the other side), I had to do some dividing. 
• Also, there were some other considerations like whether I want the corset to meet at the back or have a two-inch gap consistent with many historic corsets. That required some extra maths.

Step 4: Mark the Original Pattern 

• Lady Photoshop was needed after all. I enlarged the images to fit the one-inch scale provided on the pattern and then printed the file as a poster so that it indeed would amount to actual inches when printed out and taped together again.

• I marked important points of the pattern including the center front, center back, side, waist, bust, upper hip, and lower hip. 
• For now, the horizontal waist, bust, and hip lines do not need to be exactly where I want them to be on the finished pattern. This might seem counterintuitive but trust me, it works out. 

Apologies if it's difficult to see, I drew horizontal lines across the paper where I thought the various bust, waist, and hip measurements would lie on the corset. Then the vertical lines were drawn on the center front, side, center back, and halfway down each pattern piece. The hip band intersected with several of these vertical lines and I left it as is.

Step 5: Draw Your Own Pattern Framework

• On a separate piece of pattern paper, I started making a framework for the new pattern using my own measurements. 
• I drew a line down the middle of the paper and labeled it "side." I then used my own measurements plugged into a formula from the tutorial to draw the rest of the lines.

• This is what the paper looked like after drawing in the vertical center front, side, center back, and the additional lines bisecting each pattern piece. And the horizontal bust, waist, upper hip, and lower hip lines following the tutorial. 

Step 6: How to Transfer the Pattern

• This step is more theoretical. The tutorial explains that because I halved my own measurements in step 3, I used some percentage calculations to figure out how much larger each new pattern piece needed to be. 

Step 7: Measure the Original Pattern

• For this step, I had my handy dandy notebook at the ready to record how many centimeters wide each pattern piece was at each point it intersected with one of the vertical lines on the original pattern. This took quite a bit of time but it was oddly satisfying. 

• Can we have a brief interlude to appreciate the centimeter? Cathy highly recommended doing everything including taking my own measurements in centimeters. At first, my American ass was confused by this foreign concept. But as it happens, inches are GARBAGE. I am a convert to the metric system. It's so much easier to deal with numbers in a world where everything is divisible by 10. Yay metric system! That's all. 
• I wrote the centimeter measurements of each pattern piece on both sides of the vertical lines and then I added them all together to get the total which I wrote at the end of each horizontal line both in the notebook and on the paper itself. And then I drew a box around that total so I wouldn't forget. Because there were a lot of numbers to punch into a calculator. 

Step 8: Convert into Percentages

• To find out what percentage the original pattern pieces take of the various horizontal measurements, I used this formula:
• Measurement / Total x 100 = percentage

Here is what my notebook looked like for this step. I did have to round up because there were a few totals that did not equal 100% in the end. So it looks a little crazy but I'm currently running out of ways to describe how I did this. 

• I also made the mistake of initially doing the math for just the waistline and I had to go back and do the calculations for each of the other horizontal lines before moving on. 
• I then wrote each percentage on the corresponding lines of the new pattern approximately where the new pattern pieces will go. 

Step 9: Draw the New Pattern

• This step involved my actual real-life measurements which I will not be advertising on the internet.
• At the end of each horizontal line on the new pattern, I wrote my own half measurements from step 3 in a box. 
• Having written the percentages from step 8 on the new pattern, I had all the information to do the following calculations: 
• Percentage / 100 x total in the box = measurement 

• Badabing babadook, I had the new measurements for each new piece on each horizontal line and I just had to mark them out and connect the dots...Or so I thought. 

Step 10: Measure Out the New Pattern

• Alright. Here's where I am right now. I did the thing. I measured out everything and checked it twice. I marked the new measurements of the pattern pieces and guess what. It doesn't look right. 

These are all the tick marks on the new pattern according to my calculations. This seems fine? Also I'm very sorry it's hard to see. I did this step at a very late hour.

Drawing in the lines and connecting everything became problematic quickly. 

I had pattern pieces overlapping other pattern pieces and I was getting a spooky feeling. 

This is what is supposed to be the back E and center back pieces and it is rough. The proportions are not okay and I don't know where it went wrong. All that's certain is that I need to do more work on this. For reference, here's what the original back pattern pieces look like: 

There are a few more steps to the Corset Revolution tutorial and until it looks like something that will fit a human, let alone myself, I shall fuss with this. I have a few ideas and I might reconfigure the pattern pieces or add more horizontal lines so that I am left with more anchor points that can translate easier. In any case, you will be given a full update when I figure out what the actual hell I'm doing. 

If you read this whole thing, I am so grateful for your interest and would love to hear any constructive feedback on blog posts like this because this is new for me.

Until next time! 

-Rachel