I was a consultant for the Great British Sewing Bee on BBC2, talking about early dressmaking patterns. Although we know these were on sale from the 1860s, very few tissue paper originals survive. It’s even difficult to find copies of the magazines that advertised them – but those I have seen in the British Library and elsewhere suggest that there was a real demand for patterns, with several British companies selling them in the 1870s. What do survive are pattern sheets published as part of magazines such as The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. These are frighteningly complex, with up to twenty different patterns printed on the same sheet using different types of lines. The dressmaker had to trace off the pieces, adjust them to the right size, and add seam allowances before cutting out. The magazines also advertised tissue paper patterns, cut to the correct size and tacked together to show the shape. One wonders how many magazine readers tried these patterns once and vowed to leave dressmaking to the professionals after that…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0165nv7
'Marie Antoinette' fichu to be made from the pattern sheet
Great to see you on the Great British Sewing Bee – you came over as very knowledgeable and well presented!
best wishes
Liz Holpin (was Sewell)
The Cotton Patch
Thanks Liz – great to hear from you. I really enjoyed working with the Cotton Patch and seeing all the amazing gadgets and patterns you had to help sewers. It’s humbling to read old dressmaking books and find how much they did with so little equipment!
Just a little hello from Melbourne, and to say that I’m very glad that I came across you and your work (thanks to The Great British Sewing Bee). Your field of work is very much up my alley, so this blog is quite an exciting find! Being a mere Undergraduate Arts university student, with few options to study the history of costume, fashion, dress etc, reading about your work is just the thing to keep me interested and focussed on such wonderful topics (whilst officially studying the university coursework), and hopefully to one day propel me into a similar field!
Regards,
A new and keen reader from Aus.
Thanks for this comment, Clare – I’m interested to hear you could watch the programme down under. The history of home dressmaking has not really been studied much although there are some good articles on aspects of it in Barbara Burman’s book ‘The Culture of Sewing’ (Berg, 1999). That’s one reason why it’s so exciting to find and work from old dressmaking patterns – they can teach us so much about fashions in clothes and in bodies!
I’m not sure there are many of us watching…but thanks to Youtube, anything is possible, even from the other side of the world. Oh and it helps to A. like sewing and B. have just come back from the UK, so I knew it was about to air!
Good to know it’s on youtube – will flag this up to my foreign relatives before it disappears. The experience of being filmed was fascinating as the venue was a house stuffed with antiques, very distracting!
Another Aussie watching TGBSB with enthusiasm 🙂
I love your website Clare; my path into studying education came through sociology and your website feeds my interest in hand crafted children’s/babywear!
I’m currently very interested in the mid 20th century baby wear trade made in the Philipines – stunning baby gowns and dresses constructed and embroidered entirely by hand by Philipino women. Companies like the Feltman Bros (USA) then sold these garments with their label. Any help in sources of information would be greatly appreciated.
cheers
Su
Dear Su
Embroidery done in the Philipines for the US/European market is an interesting topic. There was an early tradition of fine needlework on the islands – the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, have a man’s shirt woven from pina fibre and decorated with embroidery and pulled thread work, dated 1859. I imagine that, as in Madeira, workshops were set up to produce hand embroidery for export – especially for lingerie and baby clothes where styles did not change too fast, and clients were unwilling to pay the price of work done in high-wage environments. I don’t have any specific information but there might be advertisements in US newspapers, digitized through the Library of Congress. Are there surviving catalogues for Feltman Bros, and what do they say? I’d love to know more about this!
Clare Rose