Childen's wear drafting and trying to find information

     I recently needed to produce a few garments for a child, and it occured to me that I had only one drafting book to reference for children's wear.

That book is the Winnifred Aldrich's  Metric Pattern Cutting for Children's Wear and Babywear. 

I have an older edition so out of curiosity I borrowed a newer edition just in case. I found there were  some changes to some of the basic drafts which made me wonder. 

Things like the calculations for neck width used 1/5 neck minus 2mm now its 1/5 neck plus 2 mm on some drafts.Were there errors in the older drafts or just typos? Strange.

     I wanted to find a draft for a one piece snowsuit. It is not a garment covered in the Aldrich book. The child would arrive after quarantining, go for fittings, alterations would be done there, and then be on camera two days later.   They didn't want a waist seam in the snowsuit, so I had to get it right the first time. I needed to find basic torso girth measurements for children so I could have some kind of reference point. "It shouldn't be difficult" I thought to myself....... Anyway, it sent me down a rabbit hole of internet searching.

I did finally find a study of children's measurements here, done in 1939. So I waded through all of this and got a number range for height. 

I called friends with children too! "how tall is your child? Can you take a measurement of his torso girth for me?"

What a run around for information! Oh I forgot to mention, all I received was height and a chest measurement taken by a parent. That is all I was working from. What a business! and let's not talk about the deadlines.

What else did I find? I found a snowsuit draft on a Russian website, which I downloaded for reference and I could follow along looking at the diagrams. My desktop translated the pages, except for the sizing tables!! because they are photos not text! Drat!

I was on Pinterest and I found an Italian children's cutting book. In Italian, of course. Again, I could follow along by "reading" the diagrams. But I don't think there was a one piece snowsuit draft there either. That book, by Antonio Donnanno is available here in English.

I decided to basically stick with the Aldrich using the flat overgarment blocks for jackets and the flat two piece trouser block, and melded them together so they looked right ot me.

Once I made the basic draft, one of the things I had to take into account was the thinsulate lining. My base pattern was for the lining, but the outer fabric layer needed to be bigger than the under layer. I think I read somewhere about re-calculating the draft for the amount and type of insulation being used, maybe it was on the russian drafting site, maybe on a german site....I can't remember now.

Anyway, in the end, I figured out how much bigger to make the shell and made a pattern for that too. 

It was lots of work mentally and then a lot of work just cutting and sewing them. (yes, plural! I needed to cut two of them) I think they turned out really well, The best part is that they fit. I breathed a sigh of relief. 

We did get stuck waiting for zippers to arrive, but all in all it went fairly well. 

The shutdowns have made getting supplies a bit more challenging! So many things are being shipped its a miracle everything gets to where it is going.

Books and references

Since I cleared out all my books from the theatre workspace, I had to find a shelf and space at the studio for them. Its rough but but at least I can see them. It was quite a job moving 30 years of stuff out of there and finding room for what I wanted to keep; patterns, tools, books, memorabilia, thank you cards,,,, you know the kind of things I am talking about.

I still have a box of vintage catalogues and the like which I am not sure how to store, so for now in a box they shall remain. I still have a box of vintage catalogues and the like which I am not sure how to store, so for now in a box they remain. 

I have not purchased many new books recently, trying to cut down on all that as I am more at the end of my career than the beginning, but I do love books. 

I try to keep track of them on Librarything .  If you are a member there, I am TTailor if you want to have a peek at my modest list. I think I say modest because there are some people there with vastly large collections! where do they keep them all?

Have you purchased any new costuming or tailoring books recently? Do you have any worthwhile books to recommend? Tell me about them, old or new books, no matter! do you want to see more of any of my books? Let me know.

sleeves

Sleeves.
Sleeves are the bane of some people's existence, or maybe it's armholes.....
I find them fascinating-they can be many different shapes and they can be challenging or simple.
I have a number of drafting techniques I use for sleeves depending on the garment. These will be the sleeves for the doublet in the previous posts. I decided not to do a "period sleeve" per se, but adapt a general sleeve technique for my purpose. I started with drafting a one piece sleeve block, and I use the Natalie Bray basic technique for women's sleeves to do this.
(I generally tend to adapt patterning techniques to suit my purposes and generally, women's sleeve pattern basics and manipulations are what is required for many men's period sleeve shapes.)


Then I make a two piece sleeve from that. This gives me a front seam that is quite forward unlike a tailored suit sleeve which has the front seam lower or more under the arm.
This will be the sleeve base.


This is the "puff" and the lower forearm pattern that will go on top of the sleeve base. The upper section will gather or pleat into the lower close fitting section. This sleeve will be able to be buttoned closed from top to bottom along the front seam. In the sketch, the forearm section is closed and the puff is open to display the shirt underneath. Except that there is no shirt proper-I've been asked to fake the shirt underneath. OK. That just complicates things, but ok. There will also be a lace decorative cuff that will look as though it is a shirt cuff that turns up over the hem of the doublet sleeve.













The complications I can see are:
I think that I need the sleeve base to control the extra length that is gained in making the puff sleeve.
The forearm section is quite fitted, and will have to unbutton a bit for the actor to put his hand in and out
The decorative cuff doesn't open at the same place as the doublet sleeve.
The sleeve base also needs to undo for putting the garment on and off. I don't want it to fasten at the front because then there will be closures on top of closures.

The inner sleeve base could open at the back seam, and the decorative cuff could attach to it. Maybe.

I think we'll make it up in the real fabric leave lots of seam allowances in case of designer changes and see what transpires. I don't know if I've made it big enough, or if I've allowed enough extra length in the puff along the front seam either....
We'll see.

Reference books

There are so many books and not enough time or money to look at or buy them all!
I'd divide my reference materials into two categories: pictorial/design and technical. Some books straddle this divide too.













Lets have a look at the technical first, since they give some insight into how the patterns are made.

Its not as easy to find men's drafting and pattern making books as ones for women. Women's drafting books seem much more common, and they have their place when making men's costumes because we are not always just making suits.Patterns for big sleeves come to mind almost immediately.

I have a stash of drafting books that I use mainly for historical reference to what the pattern shapes looked like and I would never really expect to draft directly from them and call it a finished pattern. I think that many people expect to be able to use these drafts as is and make garments that fit. Wrong. There are many complex reasons for this. Everyone who published a book was convinced that their methods were highly superior to the next guy's and they had various theories, calculations and sometimes contraptions for drafting that can be difficult and tedious to understand and if you don't have the contraption, almost useless. The drafts can be misprinted or not proofread. They usually contain seam allowances within the draft but they assume you know where. You need to know something about traditional construction techniques to understand how they manipulated the fabric once it was cut. Modern wool rarely will behave like the wool of old. Modern bodies are shaped differently. Our aesthetic has changed. I've rarely run into a designer who really wanted to see the baggy crotch of a period breeches draft front and centre onstage.

I have had the opportunity to run a few pattern making classes and one of the most interesting and valuable things we did was to take 5 different period drafting books and actually draft trousers, waistcoats and jackets from them for one fit model and see exactly what you got from those period references. It was really enlightening. It gave students the opportunity to learn to look at the pattern shape and see the silhouette of the resulting garment.

The books were: The Blue Book of Men's Tailoring, The "Climax" System for cutting Gentlemen's garments, The Modern Tailor Outfitter and Clothier, The Modern Mitchell System of Men's Designing, and Metric Pattern Cutting for Menswear.
Apologies for my bad photography! I had a really bad day.

Tools of the Trade

Nice clean table- it won’t stay that way for long- it will get so crowded with stuff, that I will find myself working down at one end and in frustration will concede that I must reorganize and put things away so I can start messing it up all over again.
You know what they say after all, a clean desk is the sign of a sick mind. lol.


Here’s a photo of my tidy (for now) table and the usual tools of the trade-

brown paper for patterns -we don’t use oaktag because almost everything is a one off garment and patterns aren't often reused.

Scissors-my old Henckels for paper and my Wiss 20’s for fabric. My old Henckels were a gift more than 20 years ago and I love them! I think that they are on their final legs and won’t take too much more sharpening, but they are the best scissors, they’re elegant and pointy and sharp and they slide through paper like a knife through butter.
I have two pairs of Wiss 20’s. I tried a larger size tailor’s shear but I find that my hand is too small to fully open the blade so I’ve stuck with these ones.

pencils, erasers and tape, needle point tracing wheel

tailor’s square (metric) I might have to get a new one someday because I’ve had this one for 20 years and some of the markings are fading! I grew up with Imperial measuring but I draft most everything in metric, and have been known to use both systems when convenient

metre stick

pattern notcher

C-thru ruler in inches and centimetres- I like this one because I can see thru it better

tape measure- I swear that all of the tape measures I have stashed are mine and not the ones from the fitting rooms - really!

push pins - my table is cork under the paper and I can pin into the table to hold patterns and fabric in place

graphite chalk to draw beautiful curved lines (Dixon 900 ) I never had a set of french curves nor a hip curve ruler to be honest - I just drew the shapes by “rock of eye”as they call it- I don’t know if I would want to change my ways now although many people use them to great advantage. The graphite chalk edge works so much better than a pencil point for drawing.

Tailor’s chalk- wax and chalk based for marking on fabric

reference books-
Here’s the old standby, The cut of Men’s Clothes by Norah Waugh and, new in 2008, Patterns of Fashion 4 by Janet Arnold.
My copy of The Cut of Men’s clothes has a price of $18.95 in it, so you know I bought it a long time ago!

My favourite local bookseller Fanfare Books, is getting ten copies of Patterns of Fashion in for us!
Shop Local!
Reference Books could be an interesting topic! A future post on reference books is in order. What are your favourites for cutting or research?