I’ve been only really able to anything in small chunks of the day so research winds up dominating as it’s less demanding than making on my hands. But I’ve done enough to start writing up and I’m just meeting so many mental and physical barriers that I’m feeling so lost. Yet the pattern diagram immediately to my left is just so clear, so easy to use, that I’m feeling even worse for not managing to articulate that.

So I might just get my past patterning help back up, as it is, and maybe with some links to original resources.

I really want to explain the different between “French” and “American” systems in the 19thC as the French system is so good, so good, that I’m switched to it for my 19thC gowns.

It’s not yet 1pm but I desperately need, and have done for a few hours now, actual rest with some dermal patches- heat and diclofenac, on my back and hands.

My current stresses are interfering with my ability to know if what I’m doing is beneficial and also wondering what it is that people like about what I share. As a researcher I know that my fancy frocks are not just pretty but that in the eras I study it is a very specific set of skills that not every master tailor was allowed to do.

I really like to teach in person but my experience is that there is a gulf between what I normally have at my fingertips at home and what I can bring physically. So you would think all this time at home would be great, but it hasn’t really worked out.

My desire to make another gold frock is in part because I found evidence in the visual record of what tailors were making and what limitations there were. They actually persist right into the timeframe of the Spanish tailoring manuals.

I want to make the frock to prove my thesis but I need to formalise my thesis in order to make the frock.

I’m also aware of how much I need to transfer from my Instagram to here because to be honest it’s so easy to record and share progress.

But I have genuinely started to find major commonalities across all tailoring manuals and that means my next step is really important. The El and Baras both really neatly fit into metrics. Really nicely.

But.

Metrics is a division of 10s, 5s, and 2s for whole numbers, while the el and baras were mostly into halves, quarters, and thirds, with divisions of each.

My problem is that the nicest quad/graph paper is 5mm which then means each division would sit within such a large number and it would be hard to distinguish between 3 and 4.

But it really is a fantastic size that allows me to do 1/10 and 1/5 scale patterns that are really easy to recognise the cutting lines.

Imperial is worse to be honest. Despite being able to be divided into 2, 4, and 8 it’s how the thirds and sixths wind up as well as the actual dimensions of each unit.

I do have a better idea of how readily fashions were able to adapt across time and space, but it’s not really easy to explain how freeing it is even while extremely limiting!

Not a proper nest today, the sun is making my little desktop nook snuggly so I’ve got more of a throne vibe going on with a faux fur throw and cushions galore, which I am fine with.

But I’ve been trying to really explain why I am working so much on making what is really a personal pattern book able to be used by anyone whether whole or in part.

Going through the extant tailoring and dressmaking manuals that cover a few hundred years? Gatekeeping and barriers galore! But it’s still possible to take those works and poke holes in them.

One example is that many books from the 1860s-1880s allow for personalisation at the top of bust darts, but not at the bottom. So a broader bust was adjusted through darts that were on a more oblique angle than a narrower.

So I’m trying to express how the idealised figure was adapted for real bodies, but without the baggage so many of these instructions come with.

A big yikes to so much of those ~500years of writing.

I’ve been working through every single pattern I can get my hands on, and transcribing them to metric. My pattern manual is intended to make them so easy to use that all you need to do is skim to get to what is needed. I’m very limited by how limited tailors were though. They had to work within the law in terms of their practice and in terms of what and how much fabric they were allowed to use based on both their practicing level and how much of any fabric was allowed to be used in any garment.

There is also an incredible document I need to track down because it was a demand that tailors outside of that country to made a brides garment be of the style (and social level) that would be expected once she arrived.

But the limitations had much more immediate effects on clients who physically did not fit within the narrowly defined limits of cloth. I don’t want to perpetuate that, nor give even a hint of validity to it in our lived context.

So my collection of portraits does help a lot in the structure of garments across a range of sizes and how that varies so much between not only countries but even cities. But not yet many adaptations of cutting diagrams. This is why I’m going through each pattern. There are a few, I want to know if the differences are universal or if they are to illustrate the first step of a series of grading.

And with my renewed eye for tailoring flow on effects I can even work out systems for creativity within the very rigid sumptuary and tailoring laws.

So my aim is to explain why these bottlenecks occur without telling people to follow them.

The aim of a Modular system is to do exactly that. Don’t like the skirt? Swap it out. Like the skirt but it doesn’t work as it is, I’ll offer alternative ways of using it to find a commercial pattern or book or other artisan.

I wound up spending a little more time converting the Vasquina cutting diagrams and incredibly that one diagram does appear to have engraving and printing errors as well as makes considerable compromise in cut by being so short! But really. All three in a single page? But that’s what seems to be going on.

I did also reread the opening chapters and yes, rounding is to the nearest smallest fraction. These are 1/12, 1/8, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 no 1/5 or 1/7 of 1/9.

Thus my sb (5/6) and ob (7/8) that I worked out would add together to make a non whole fraction and so is rounded to 7q. So the rounding is not due to curve but imperfect fractions.

There was a massive fine also for copyright infringers of this work so that remains a potential motive for keeping an error still. A massive fine that was divided between the plaintiff, the judge and the royal household.

But my other idea that the book would not be quite as needed by master tailors as much as their journeymen is also stated quite up front.

I had previously gone through the Saya and they are so much more formalised, perhaps not surprising.

I need a break but it was good practice.

I’ve also been filling in the gaps of my tailoring timeline so I need to prepare more preview images and get citing on maybe 30, 30(!!!), new inclusions.

What this also means is that I have to create some more cats by century and decade. It’s pretty draining and repetitive work but if I don’t have the (current) ability to change the view (details, grid etc) then at least I can help people find the nearest date range more easily.

One of the first things we are warned about tailoring manuals is to not trust the diagrams- meaning the line art. Usually this is because the hand drawn manuals are very rough sketches indeed, and the printed works rely on being able to fit the diagram within set dimensions for the press.

I have digitised copies of the 1580 and 1589 books by Alcega (in my timeline of manuals) as well as the printed and translated physical copy. It’s very interesting to compare them side by side. Clearly the engraving was reused.

This diagram is actually reasonably well proportioned given the measurements- the length of the outline is nearly double the width and the indicated length is 2 baras, the width after folding is one baras.

The waist of the skirt front (lower right) is close to the indicated width of 1/3 of a baras (t) as it’s a little shy of 1/3 the width of the diagram. The length of the skirt front is pretty close to 1 1/4 baras (bq) by eye. And the skirt back waist width is a little shy of half the width- mm is iiim, or three finger widths narrower than 1/2 of a baras (m.)

The text explains the skirt is 1 1/4 baras high and the hem is 14 palmos- or quartos (q, or 1/4.) This would be 7 hand spans for a side front and side back.

I redrew the pattern as it appears in the recent reprint and translation and I wound up with the hem measurements as ob for the half back hem and sb for the half front hem. Added together it’s very close to 14 palmos/q after all!

That might reflect the kind of rounding done on the fabric which is something I do with my manual. I ignore pi and round to 3 and 6 for circular skirts. As fabric is not paper and we need to turn for hems it doesn’t make much difference, especially as I also then use a hand width (across the base of my fingers) for turnings and use the barest turn under for the hem (I’ll do a proper article about this as it’s wonderfully freeing.)

So what might be going on?

Clearly the second edition has a few more skipped areas, compared to the first. The most obvious is the nearly missing q of the bq length of the skirt front (lower right again.) And if you have the recent reprint of the 1589 book, you’ll find there is an additional error following the bq of the back skirt panel (upper left). Quite a big error as it looks like part of the letter j.

So it’s possible there are two more errors, but at the engraving stage. It’s possible the engraver flipped ob (baras minus 1/8) into bo (baras plus 1/8) for the back skirt hem, but they would have also missed entirely the s of sb (baras minus 1/6)the skirt front hem winds up close to being.

So two engraving errors and errors from using the potentially worn engravings are all possible here in a single diagram.

The question is were they left in deliberately like a trap street so that if the book is copied it’s easy to prove? Or accidentally- that is a lot to miss- or just left because a tailor of the time was supposed to know these all off by heart and they would just know where to annotate if being used in the workshop for journeymen.

Of interest is just how much compromise had to be made in the hem of these garments based on increasingly narrower and patterned fabric, and these too were memorised.

Not only are the side pieces increasingly broken up into smaller and overlapping pieces, but the hems get a little narrower. The waists rarely get narrower, usually by a few finger widths.

Even the above pattern is a compromise, but in height. The preferred length for both vasquina and saya skirt fronts is 1 1/2 baras (bm.) At this time anyway.

I’ve got myself a project from more than 40 years before these were printed but these and the hand written masterpiece books are all helping me use one of the most complicated fabrics I’ve ever bought.

I can’t use any of the extant works as they are but because all of them round to fairly large units of measurement it’s helping me figure out what is likely to have come before. And it all works in to my modular system- this is a much bigger work that I’ll also break up and publish as an article so that my own manual becomes much easier to use, and to ignore. The point of it is to be modular so that means being able to mix in modern patterning and any of the many systems and patterns.

Wow. My cunning plan to connect has worked. I search for new digitisations/publications of tailor’s patterns pretty frequently (I mostly find long essays of the early 20thC atm) and my Frock Chick Files site pops up each time. This is great because I use a non invasive preview file and link directly to manuscripts and articles/books about it. So this means it’s easier to find some deeply buried archival links.

I have doubled my pre 1700 books thanks to wonderful friends who understand what I’m doing and I understand what they are doing and respect it all.

But I need to remember that Social Media is a really important tool, so I’m going to add SM links to authors of printed works because I know how powerful a simple like can be while wrangling a few centuries of manuscripts and published works alike.

Today I found the transcribed text of the Schuster manual and it pretty much ignored all the frocks. I’m not surprised, I think the forward is of a time where that was valued less, and it’s why I have dedicated my focus to frocks- but frocks for all. If you want or need a frock I want to help. I am more interested in how my understanding helps everyone including all genders because it is really tough as it is.

My pattern book is the same. I’m apparently of a height and size that works for the Spanish manuals and several extant garments, but that doesn’t help people who are not. So a huge part of what I’m doing now is to take the frock based garments and turn them into metric graphed patterns and to take the extant garments and look for all the piecings to both extend a hem and to add to the body seams.

It’s actually really cool. The language, not so much.

I think about my community and how that language is so negative and I am working on taking the best and leaving the rest in both how I share the originals and my work.

My spoiler here is that most body adjustments happen at the side. I know! When patterning though you start with a stable back panel, and adjust side and CF seams. What is maybe suprising is how very little that CF seam varies. I think in my system (and Alcega et al) with cutting the shoulder straps off you wind up able to adjust the side and the join where the shoulder meets the bodice. It’s a really cool little zone that acts like a hinge to change the direction of fabric and so can change the fit into that really complicated curve at the front of the join between arm and body.

Currently trying to limit a fibro flare through every means I have so I managed about half an hour on the sofa in a nest of pillows and got my patterning book files into an order that seems to make sense. Probably will change it all later, I do know I want the pattern block sections separate from everything else so that they can be used however people need them.

I am really trying to work out if I should put the tailor patterns in with mine or have them separate? The point was to use my system, it’s built on the scant evidence we had 20 years ago, scant for frocks anyway. Recently I realised what I was doing was producing good but pretty specific to me garments. I happen to not need a lot of adapting pattern pieces so yes, my own would naturally blend in.

So fast forward to my current project which is c1530-36 Portugal. And a frustration with so few depictions of the specific gown type. The closed front and closed skirt front, and the full sleeve.

I have reread Hispanic Costume and in doing so have a bit more hat research (yes! bonet means the same item across many countries, though it’s “banit” or “benet” closer to Kleve.) But also wow. A bit of confirmation of what I was thinking and also “blam!” Totally rethinking how I read paintings.

So allll of that is whizzing around my head in all kinds of directions and I’m leaving notebooks all over the place because I know ideas start to coalesce into more solid forms when I’m not directly thinking about them.

Herding cats would describe it well.

Except they are all in my head and trying to talk to me at once.

Like in the shower I had a realisation that the Lengberg “bra” fits into my system. For all the reasons everything fits in my system. For the same reason I worked out my system from my patterns.

So that’s another cat up there. But this one is saying something much easier to understand than the rest.

But I forgot to write that down so I’ll open up another tab and…. done. Yay.

I don’t know why I thought rewriting 20 years of patterning research was what I needed to do this year.

But I did.

This term is used a lot on fashion but it applies to research too. But if you don’t have too much then there is a bit of a risk for bias.

So I’m now at the point where I can edit out less useful information for what I’m doing, and there will be people who have already or will be working on them, so I can make sure I can offer added value.

Right now I have as many pages of extant German/Austrian tailoring books and as many Central European books as my single book. Early on I thought I’d omit outer garments as they are loose so don’t use the same skillsets that I have really tried to hone.

But, the importance of these garments in the existing manuals means that yes, I’m going to include them I have three robes of my own as well as at least one heuke.

The importance of these pieces is revealed by how many are included compared to the kinds of garments I most focus on. And I think it reveals why they are important. The costly aspect is in the fabric. So having multiple ways to get best bang for buck for these is going to be more important than a garment (bodice and skirt) that uses far less fabric.

I’m very excited by how this work in the tailoring manuals is really helping me with my Anne of Cleves and my own patterning book. It’s exhausting though so pacing is quite important.