Paper Sewing Patterns, Part 1

Commercially available sewing patterns have been a cornerstone of home stitching for a century. But well before they existed, there were people trying to share sewing patterns.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Holly Frey?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:08Speaker 02

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• 1:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:05Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:16Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, this one's for my stitching folks. If you're not into stitching, you might still find this interesting. I hope you do. The first week of June this year, there was a report that circulated that the company IG Design Group had sold its Design Group America division. That's usually abbreviated as DGA in any headlines or legal filings that you might see, that they were selling DGA off of the international business. And DGA is the company that is the umbrella company for the sewing pattern companies that are known among stitchers as the big four or the core four. So that's Simplicity Patterns, McCall's, Butterick, and Vogue.

• 3:02Holly Frey?

  DGA does also contain other product lines and brands, but this was grave news because DGA was sold to a liquidation firm called Hillco Capital for $1, plus, per the agreement, 75% of proceeds that Hillco collects from the sales of the assets. Hillco is the same company that purchased Jo-Ann Fabrics and then liquidated it earlier this year. As reported by the Craft Industry Alliance, quote, "IG Design Group cited the impact of tariffs imposed by the US as a factor. Over 50% of DGA's products are manufactured in China, although the sewing patterns are made in the US.

• 3:44Holly Frey?

  The company also mentioned a softening market over the last several years, as well as the bankruptcy of Jo-Ann as factors in the sale." You can get into a whole discussion about that of like, it's so sad that Jo-Ann going bankrupt and liquidating is killing our sales. Let's hand everything over to the same company. Listen, that's a whole discussion that stitchers are having, but there have been some social media posts by DGA brands that are indicating like, no, no, it's still business as usual. We're still working on the next batch of patterns. But it really definitely does seem like a little bit of duh, death knell to many people that are in the sewing and crafting hobby and professional space. And when I started this outline, there actually had not been an update on what was going to happen next and when.

• 4:29Holly Frey?

  Hey, there has been since. We'll talk about it at the end. But most of the folks who sew are expecting the pattern companies to vanish. And this, of course, got me thinking about how we got here in the first place, right? When I was growing up and into my early adulthood, Those big four sewing companies, pattern companies, were competitors for the most part, but they eventually all somehow ended up in one big company, which is just weird. But well before they existed, there were already people trying to share sewing patterns. So I thought we could talk about how this all evolved. And because it is near and dear to my heart, and I can't stop typing when it's about things like this, it turned into a two parter. So part one is going to cover ways that books and periodicals that shared sewing patterns

• 5:14Holly Frey?

  or templates to create them started out and then became very popular in Europe and the US over the course of a couple hundred years. And then part two, we'll dig into the origins of the big four and where we got here. So my mention of Europe and the US is the clue that this is going to be pretty Western eccentric. The approaches to how you do sewing in other areas of the world are actually in some ways very different, or have been historically, but the US and European sewing markets are really what we're talking about. And then at the end of part two, we will have some information about news that broke near the end of my research process. There will probably be more between when we record this and when it comes out. We'll see.

• 5:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  So people have, of course, been putting together garments since before recorded history. And then over time, those garments have generally become a lot more complex. They started requiring more knowledge of geometry and how to basically assemble something inside out. And then when it's turned right side out, it fits on the body. Not every garment works that way, obviously, but a lot of garments in the clothing traditions that Holly and I grew up in do.

• 6:29Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Listen, great kilt people, I hear you out there. Don't worry about it. It's not about that.

• 6:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, it's not what we're talking about right now. But anyway, these like this geometric focus and this inside outing and right side outing of the garments eventually led to the drafting of patterns.

• 6:49Holly Frey?

  And the first known publication of such patterns was in 1580. This was in book form, and it was written by a Spanish man named Wanda Alcega, and that book was titled Libro de Geometria, Practica y Frontera. And this is translated in different ways, but the most direct translation seems to be book on geometry, practice and pattern. Trazza, for example, is tracing. It's basically like making out patterns. Later additions of this book, because it did go through multiples, feature an illustration of Wanda Alcega on the title page. And he's using what looks like a compass and he has a ruler and scissors nearby on his work table. And you would need those tools to use this book because there were illustrations in

• 7:33Holly Frey?

  it that needed to be hand drafted into human-sized pieces.

• 7:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Today, that's not the most common way to acquire a pattern, but it's also not unusual. There are still books on sewing that work this way. Sometimes they have a grid in them and you size them up using that grid as a reference for line placement. I remember my mom having a couple of special rulers and tools for doing this kind of thing. Less common today is the method used in Alcega's book, and that's where the measures are listed on the diagrams. And the home pattern drafter just tries to enlarge the pattern based only on those numbers. But not all of Alcega's illustrations have measurements.

• 8:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  In some of them, you get a shape and then you just, you have to sort of work it out into a full-sized item based on vibes.

• 8:28Holly Frey?

  Wanda Alcega, who was born in the Basque region of Spain, became a tailor by trade. And when he completed his book, two other important tailors endorsed it as a valuable work. Those are Juan Lopez de Burget, who was the tailor of the Duke of Alba, and Hernán Gutierrez, the princess of Portugal's personal tailor. And it was through their support that Alcega received a license from the King of Spain to print "Book on Geometry, Practice, and Pattern for Public Sale."

• 8:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  The book's first section does not feature patterns. It's all about the techniques that are needed for enlarging them. And it also includes information about Alcega's effort to write the book. It sounds really arduous. He mentions just wanting to quit several times. But this book really set the standard for sewing books that include patterns. According to a summary by the Library of Congress, quote, "The quality of the designs is noteworthy and contrasts with the neglect seen in the writing of the accompanying explanatory texts." That's something that's persisted over the centuries. A lot of times, stitchers have found the explanatory text in these kinds of books a lot more confusing than helpful.

• 9:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Alsega gives information on the amounts of fabric that you'll need for various patterns, just as you would find on the back of a pattern envelope today, although the measure was different. There's nothing about yards or meters in this book. At the time, Alsega and a lot of other tailors were using a measurement called an L. The exact length of an L has varied in different places and different cultures. So you can find L's that correspond to anywhere from 27 to 45 inches. The L was its own system, and tailors of Alsega's time would have an L wand, which is a length of L, and that had marks on it to break down the various fractional lengths

• 10:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  of the L, like a half and a quarter and things like that. This all just sounds so easy and straightforward and interchangeable with everyone's different patterns.

• 10:35Holly Frey?

  I can't even imagine. It's like if you, we have a hard enough time converting yards to meters in, you know, modern day stitching, but can you imagine if everybody were calling it a yard, but it was all different? Like, wait, whose yard? What are you talking about?

• 10:54Holly Frey?

  No, it's a half yard. That's all you'll need. Yeah, but what yard? I would lose my mind. In addition to this text, which is not as explanatory as one might desire, Alsega's book also has so many patterns. It has 135 in all, and they actually cover a wide range of clothing categories. There are garment patterns for both women and men, like capes and trousers and dresses, but there are also items that fall into very specific use groupings. For example, there is a section on garments that the clergy would need. There are clothes for jousting and even things like Turkish clothing for lifting.

• 11:34Holly Frey?

  There's ropa de la trado de pano, that's lawyer's clothing, and there's even a bathrobe set. It is a very comprehensive. Set of blocks for any stitcher who may need to clothe all kinds of people. So having been calling these diagrams patterns all this time that Tracy and I have been talking is actually a little bit incorrect because they are what's called a block. A block is a set of basic pieces that are not exactly patterns. They look very much like a pattern, but they're really more like templates that patterns can be drafted from. They don't have seam allowance. They kind of represent the exact shape of the body. So if you were to tape them together edge to edge, it would theoretically look like the shell of a person.

• 12:17Holly Frey?

  Blocks, by the way, are also called slopers. Those words get used pretty interchangeably. And these are still used by pattern makers today to make patterns for all sorts of garments. So in skilled hands, a good set of blocks becomes the foundation for an entire library of potentially very different looking pattern designs.

• 12:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  We'll talk about some of those pattern layouts after we pause for a sponsor break.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 12:47Holly Frey?

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• 13:08Speaker 03

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• 13:16Holly Frey?

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• 13:22Speaker 04

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• 13:28Holly Frey?

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• 13:32Speaker 04

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• 13:36Speaker 03

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 13:39Holly Frey?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 13:46Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown-Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:52Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them

• 15:36Holly Frey?

  more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 16:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:00Holly Frey?

  Some of the blocks in Alsega's book are fairly simple. For example, there is one pattern block for some of the capasoles de pano. Those are cloth capes in the book. And those just have three pieces with instructions for cutting some of the pieces on the fold. It looks very similar to the way you'd see a pattern in a modern pattern instance, although again, you would have to add seam allowance. But others have many pieces for creating much more tailored garments. And of note too, is that these are not graded for multiple sizes, right? If you've ever bought a commercial pattern today, you'll see multiple cutting lines for different sizes. But these are really what are considered base size blocks,

• 17:44Holly Frey?

  intended to represent the average sized person, whatever that means. It would be up to the person using the book to then make any necessary alterations to those blocks and the resulting patterns to suit the size and shape of the person that a garment was being made for.

• 18:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  And in a very smart move in terms of how the book would be used, it's a book that was very short and very wide with binding along the short edge. And that made it really easy for the user to keep the book open while working without risking the pages flipping due to how tight the binding was. The real accomplishment of Alcega's book was that it opened the door to the idea that tailors' manuals could even be a thing. And Spain continued to lead the way in printing instructional sewing books for almost a century.

• 18:34Holly Frey?

  In 1588, another Spanish book, Geometry and Design for the Tailor's Trade, was published and written by a tailor named Diego de Freila. It's very similar to Alcega's book in terms of layout and organization, including the binding style that lays open more easily than a traditional-sized book. One of the ways Freila's work diverges from his predecessor is in the unit of measurement used. Instead of the L, Freila uses the vara. And the vara had actually become Spain's official standard of measurement in 1568, so even before Alcega's book came out. But by 1588, when Freila published, it had become more and more commonly used and finally

• 19:16Holly Frey?

  replaced that very haphazard assortment of measures used in Spain by various municipalities. Incidentally, a vara is actually pretty close to a yard at just under 33 inches, so that's 0.836 meters long.

• 19:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Freila also addressed something that had come up when Alcega published his book and which applied to his own work as well. In sharing all of this information and these pattern blocks, both tailors were perceived by some members of their trade as basically blabbing professional secrets. The knowledge that had for centuries been passed down through the apprentice system was suddenly available to anyone who could get one of these books. But Freila defended the publications by explaining that the information he was sharing was to the benefit of the public financially and to the tailor profession reputationally. It wasn't very likely that a novice would supplant a trained tailor just by having a

• 20:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  book full of blocks. But if people who had their clothes made by tailors understood more about the process, including how much fabric various garments require, it would prevent them from being taken advantage of by unscrupulous vendors, and that would help maintain the integrity of the trade.

• 20:36Holly Frey?

  As far as we know, it actually wasn't until 1671 that the French started publishing patterns, which began with a book titled "The Sincere Tailor," that was written by Benoit Boullet. And the full title of this book translated is "The Sincere Tailor: Containing What Must Be Observed to Correctly Trace, Cut, and Assemble All the Principal Pieces Which Are Made in the Tailor's Profession." And in the opening of the book, Boullet invokes God as the reason he is a tailor, writing, "When God calls us into some profession or some job, we must consider it as something that divine providence has established. Man is obliged to spend his life in this work."

• 21:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Like the Spanish examples we've mentioned, this has a wide range of patterns and mentions the ease of use of some of them in their accompanying text. For example, one robe pattern is described this way, "The said dress is made in the manner that I represented in the figure below. And to cut it, one has very few measurements to take. One only needs the length, which should only go to four fingers from the ground. The thickness and the seams must be loose on the body." The tailleur sincère has been so popular with costumers and clothing historians that patterns from it were being reproduced into the 20th century in the book Period Patterns,

• 21:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  published in 1942 and written by Doris Edson and Lucy Barton.

• 22:02Holly Frey?

  In English, the first book that included patterns was The Tailor's Complete Guide. That did not come out until 1769. An attribution here is hazy. Advertisements for the guide describe it as the work of, quote, "a society of adepts in the profession." And the goal of the book was to address the common problems of misfitting. Getting a garment to sit perfectly on a human body can be very tricky, particularly because in addition to just being different shapes, people are not statues and their movements will shift the garment around as they go through their day to day lives. And apparently, the tailors of England were really struggling with this issue at the end of the 18th

• 22:44Holly Frey?

  century. But this book maybe didn't achieve its goal because it was heavily criticized as late as 100 years later by another English tailor named Edward B. Giles, who noted in his own book about the history of tailoring that, quote, "Its issue could only be warranted by the nonexistence of any other published method. And in those circumstances, it was better than none at all."

• 23:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  As for the US, the first entry into the market of tailoring books that featured patterns was The Tailor's Instructor in 1809. This publication, written by Philadelphia tailors William Lapsie and James Queen, has the marvelously long alternate title of "A Comprehensive Analysis of the Elements of Cutting Garments of Every Kind, to Which Are Added Directions for Cutting Various Articles of Dress for Both Sexes Without the Usual Seams, and Regimentals of All Descriptions, with Instructions for Making Up Work with Accuracy and Precision."

• 23:46Holly Frey?

  What's really interesting here is that Queen and Lapsie actually referenced The Tailor's Complete Guide in their introduction. And like Edward Giles, they seem to find it lacking. Their criticism of it is a little more subtle, though, choosing to praise what came after as better. Quote, "The following work will no doubt produce in your minds a degree of curiosity, as it is the first of its kind that has made its appearance in the United States, and we believe the second ever known in the English language. The first was published in London in the year 1796 and received the liberal patronage of the trade in general, not only for its novelty, but for the interesting and useful instructions contained therein. The one following was

• 24:30Holly Frey?

  more judiciously executed, being an improvement on the first, and exhibited one of the briefest compens of instruction, both in cutting and making up work of different kinds, so that from the master tailor down to the youngest apprentice, it proved interesting and useful."

• 24:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  This book begins with quite a bit of writing about clothing theory, including the nature of fashion, writing, quote, "The eye will soon discriminate between the elegant contour and dress of a complete gentleman and the extravagant whimsies of a city fop." These are great considerations in the Articles of Dress, the former being the result of grace, sensibility, and refined experience, the latter, the extravagance of folly, under the sanction of the whim of fashion. And even before a single pattern appears in the first section, which is on outerwear, there's an essay titled "A Dissertation on Coats." Then it gets into a how-to, still quite wordy,

• 25:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  on measuring a thin man for a single-breasted coat, and notes which measures map to which figures in the drawings of pattern pieces that follow. So, not too bad in terms of conveying the information needed to create clothing.

• 25:45Holly Frey?

  All of these books, though, were really prepared for the tailoring market and professionals more than the at-home stitcher, even though there were absolutely likely a few non-tailors who managed to access them and perhaps learned a few tricks of the trade in the process. This started to shift a bit in the early to mid-1800s as tailors were augmenting their income by offering lessons to anyone who had the money to enroll with them. This still wasn't usually a person sewing for themselves, though. It was, in most cases, tailors or would-be tailors from rural areas who would travel, for example, to London to learn from a pro. And while this didn't democratize tailoring and pattern access for everyone, it does mark another big step

• 26:30Holly Frey?

  out from under the umbrella of trade secrets that a lot of professionals still believed in. For centuries, outside of this handful of publications we've mentioned, specific pattern blocks were passed down through families or through a shop's apprentice lines, and they were generally pretty carefully guarded. But by the mid-19th century, that had all changed significantly. More and more books on tailoring started to come out, and some even Offered early grading systems to try to help address the needs of multiple sizes to aid in customized fittings without needing to draft brand new slopers. As this loosening of trade secrecy grew more common, periodicals dedicated to tailoring

• 27:11Holly Frey?

  also started to emerge with patterns for women as well as men, and tissue patterns started to be sold in England, first as standalone items advertised in magazines and then included as inserts in those magazines.

• 27:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  We are about to get to sewing books that were targeted to women in just a moment, but first we will hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.

• 27:39Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep, but what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but

• 28:24Holly Frey?

  to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life. Love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you.

• 29:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:41Speaker 05

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• 30:24Speaker 05

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• 30:37Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 31:53Holly Frey?

  Books specifically published for women home sewists started to appear on the market as early as the 1790s. But these were often less about fashion and more about utility, or in some cases even charity. For example, the first known of these was titled Instructions for Cutting Out Apparel for the Poor. So this didn't have patterns so much as directions for how to use basic rectangle cuts to create very simple clothing for people who just needed something to cover them. There was no fashion in the mix at all. Similarly, the 1808 publication of The Lady's Economical Assistant did feature actual patterns, but they were no frills,

• 32:35Holly Frey?

  extra basic patterns, right? You weren't going to find any pockets anywhere and you weren't going to find any like lines for placement of trims. And a lot of these patterns were actually for children so that mothers could just keep their babies clothed. Again, not so much about fashion.

• 32:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the book, The History of the Paper Pattern Industry, which came out in 2014, Joyce Spannabell Emery notes that it's entirely possible that full-size patterns for women's garments were available as early as the 1830s. There were ads and magazines for patterns that were available to purchase at retailers, but there aren't any known surviving examples of such patterns.

• 33:15Holly Frey?

  As most patterns were still issued in small scale and needed to be hand enlarged, a lot of companies developed their own enlargement systems to go along with proprietary pattern diagrams. So by using any given system, home stitchers and professional dressmakers were assured by the manufacturer that they would have the greatest ease of success.

• 33:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Magazines that were focused on women's garment sewing started to circulate in the second and third decades of the 1800s. The World of Fashion began publishing in London in 1829. This was a magazine that wasn't so much about sewing a dress as it was about informing readers about fashion trends. It featured color plates at the front and then text in the main pages describing and commenting on the clothes represented in those opening pages. For example, in one entry in the January 1829 issue, there is this write-up about headwear. Quote, "Caps à la peau and à la psyche constitute the most favorite headdresses.

• 34:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  The former has the peau ornament in front of splendid blond and very narrow pink satin rouleau, under which is the stiffening which keeps the areola so formed in shape. This cap is tastefully but slightly ornamented with white gauze, striped ribbon, and in front next the hair with full-blown roses. The caul is of tulle, finished by pink and white satin ribbon, tulle-grec. A psyche cap of tulle and very broad blond of a most superb pattern is entitled to a high degree of admiration. It is ornamented across the front with half a wreath of damask roses and those of chirico

• 35:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  in full bloom, and the same flowers cross the crown behind. The strings are of white gauze ribbon finished at the edges by a border in a Greek pattern." The magazine also included information on what fashions were popular in London, Paris, and other places, including Russia. It also had features on more standard news like births and deaths and prominent families.

• 35:27Holly Frey?

  While the world of fashion taught more about style than stitching, a book came out a decade later titled "The Work Woman's Guide", containing instructions to the inexperienced in cutting out and completing those articles of wearing apparel, et cetera, which are usually made at home. Also, explanations on upholstery, straw plating, bonnet making, knitting, et cetera. This volume, attributed simply to "a lady", was very clearly intended to share practical and comprehensive information on how to make clothing and home goods for almost anything you would need for a fully stocked wardrobe and linen closet. The preface notes as much, stating, "The author of the following pages has been encouraged to hope that,

• 36:11Holly Frey?

  in placing them after much deliberation in the hands of a printer, she is tendering an important and acceptable, however humble, service to persons of her own sex, who in any condition of life are engaged by duty or inclination in cutting out wearing apparel in a family or for their poorer neighbors. She trusts in particular that clergymen's wives, young married women, school mistresses, and ladies maids may find in The Work Woman's Guide a fast and serviceable friend."

• 36:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  The first chapter teaches basic sewing, covering stitches and how to finish garments. Subsequent chapters focus on materials, setting up a sewing basket, and how to properly cut fabric for clothing before it gets into actual patterns, including, perhaps Holly's favorite piece of advice, "Cutting out whole sets of things together often prevents much waste. Hence, it is better to cut out six or 12 shirts at once than only one at a time."

• 37:10Holly Frey?

  Oh, that's good advice, y'all. If you sew... Listen to a lady,

• 37:17Holly Frey?

  even if all of her advice is super gendered. Once the book gets to the pattern sections, it is robust. There are chapters that cover kids' clothes, women's clothes and men's clothes, all from your base layer, your undergarments, up to accessories, along with pattern diagrams for enlargement. There is also a chapter titled Receipts, meaning recipes in this context, that has directions to make everything, from inks to marked clothing and fabric, to cleaning solutions. I was unable to find any information on exactly how many copies of this book were published, though. So while it actually would have been incredibly useful, it isn't clear how many people would have owned a copy. It was a British publication

• 38:01Holly Frey?

  that was printed in London in 1838 by Simkin, Marshall & Company, not long after that publishing house moved their company into a larger office. That actually became a huge publishing company for a while, but this was one of their earlier publications. So it seems a little unlikely that there would have been a huge number of copies printed. A lot of the contents of the book, though, were reprinted in the US in women's magazines.

• 38:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the developments that impacted the success of patterns for home use in the US, also noted by Emery in her book, is 1845 expansion of the US Postal Service. This made postage cheaper, and it also opened up the mail, not just to letters, but also, per the bill that was approved by Congress, quote, "circulars and handbills are advertisements", as well as other materials. So the stage was set for mail-order businesses, which was perfect for pattern distribution.

• 38:58Holly Frey?

  According to an article in the Journal of American History that was written by Margaret Walsh in 1979, in the 1850s in the US, we see a three-tiered hierarchy of clothing options. The top tier was bespoke garments, crafted by boutique artisans for people who had a lot of money. The middle range was clothing that was created by dressmakers, but who were operating as sort of trades-level small businesses rather than fashion houses. So their customers were generally the middle class. And then the third tier was clothing that was made by the home stitcher. And while many home stitchers are and have been historically very skilled, I'm not knocking the home stitcher, obviously.

• 39:39Holly Frey?

  In general, the garments, though, in this third tier were of inferior quality to the other two. But that had less to do with stitching skill than it did with the rather different skill of draping and pattern making.

• 39:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  If you've ever done any garment sewing, this makes a lot of sense. The people in the top two tiers had years of experience and their own libraries of garment blocks. While there were some books and patterns hitting the market, a lot of home sewists had to kind of guess at how fabric had to be cut to create clothing. If they did have access to books or periodicals about sewing, there was still a good bit of guesswork. It was, and still is, possible for a person to take apart an existing garment and use the pieces of that as a pattern. But even then, it's imprecise because the years of wear that a garment has had will have warped or stretched some of the pieces.

• 40:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  And just taking it apart would probably compromise some of the components or change their shapes.

• 40:40Holly Frey?

  But the late 1850s was when the first sewing machines intended for home use were introduced. So we, of course, talked about this in our 2013 episode, "The Contentious Invention of the Sewing Machine," that ran as a Saturday classic on August 19 of 2017. And sewing machines enabled dressmakers and home stitchers to create clothing that had cleaner finishes and looked sharper and more professional. The highest-level fashion tier, though, we should note, continued to tout its fine hand sewing. And that is actually still the case in many instances today. Couture fashion houses, for example, employ a lot of artisans who are extremely skilled at handwork. But despite the production of the sewing machine,

• 41:26Holly Frey?

  there were still hurdles in the way of easy access DIY fashion. A lot of patterns were distributed in diagram form in periodicals, as we mentioned earlier, so readers would have to scale them up by hand to use them. This is a tricky process, and it meant that the resulting pattern was likely to have some faults that needed correcting once the garment was actually stitched up. There were some full-size paper patterns available, but not that many. And often, they either came in a basic generic size that had to be altered, or they might come directly from a dressmaker drafter to the stitcher's measurements. That meant a greater expense, though, and it seems to have been a more unusual path.

• 42:09Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I did find a couple of advertisements for that. But I would imagine most people that were stitching their own clothes were not willing to take on the extra expense of having someone else draft the pattern. Another factor that made pattern use at large a bit of a challenge in the mid 1800s was a rapidly shifting silhouette in fashion for women. In the years before that, a lot of the pieces of a dress started out still mostly rectangular. Like, if you look at the ampere waists that were popular before then. And then they were altered through darts and gathers to shape to the body. But in the mid 19th century, that all really started to change, and it happened very quickly.

• 42:50Holly Frey?

  So more tailored cuts became fashionable, and that necessitated much more specialized pattern pieces. And this means that people needed not only patterns, they also needed more education on how to assemble those patterns into clothing. And to meet that demand, instructional books began to appear on the market in Europe and the US.

• 43:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  One such book was the 1849 The Art of Dressmaking, containing plain directions in simple language, "From the Fitting of the Pattern to the Finish of the Dress", by Eliza Ann Corey. She signs her dedication, which is to her cousin as Eliza Ann, but her name on the title page is only given as Mrs. Corey. This book doesn't actually give much in the way of patterns. It features diagrams of only two pieces, a half back and a half front. And then the rest of the book is text explaining how to measure a person and then adjust those two pieces to customize them. But really, it's mostly suggesting how to use a method people had been using for a long time already.

• 43:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  It starts the instructions with, quote, "Supposing the reader to have no idea of cutting the first patterns, she is requested to take the body of an old dress and pick it to pieces, when if made with a single plait, the half-front will be found something in the form shown in the frontispiece of this little manual. The half-front is then to be laid upon a piece of undressed Holland and a pattern cut from it. It must be remembered that this is not the pattern to work from, but only a necessary preliminary groundwork on which to take the paper or working pattern."

• 44:34Holly Frey?

  Viewed through today's lens, when there are video tutorials for almost anything you might want to make, books like The Art of Dressmaking don't actually seem very helpful or informative. There was a lot of assuming that the reader would be able to kind of figure out some things for themselves.

• 44:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  There was pretty clearly a gap in the available patterns that would enable people to make their own fashionable clothes. Two people were highly instrumental in developing an industry of affordable, size-graded patterns for home sewists in the second half of the 19th century in the United States. Those were Ellen Curtis Demarest and Ebenezer Butterick.

• 45:16Holly Frey?

  And we're going to talk about them and other people in the industry on our next installment of this episode.

• 45:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Meanwhile, do you have listener mail?

• 45:26Holly Frey?

  May we be yes.

• 45:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hooray.

• 45:30Holly Frey?

  My first piece of listener mail is from our listener Ellen, who is talking about her encounter with Bierstot's Last of the Buffalo. And Ellen writes, hi Holly and Tracy, longtime listener and first time writer. Your wonderful podcast has gotten me through many hours of cleaning stalls, painting walls and long road trips. I just finished listening to your episode on Albert Bierstot, and I was so excited to realize while listening to the episode, I had seen some of his art in person recently. We took a family trip to Washington DC and as part of the trip toured the National Gallery, where I was struck by the painting, The Last of the Buffalo. It is a massive work of art and has a very nice plaque next to it, describing how the hunting of American bison by European settlers decimated the species.

• 46:15Holly Frey?

  My initial reaction to the painting was the opposite of what y'all point out in the episode. I saw the lone figure of the indigenous hunter as included in the lament and not the cause of the death of the bison. Just an example of how art can speak different messages to different people, I suppose. Frankly, I love your read way better, Ellen. I really enjoy learning about the different artists as part of the history podcast y'all put out, and I hope you continue to include them in your rotation. Listen, safe bet, I'll talk about an artist any day. Ellen then gives a suggestion of a cool topic and then puts pet tax, and it is some photos, she says, of my horses. I raised show prospects for Western performance riding and let me tell you, horses are not so majestic all of the time.

• 46:59Holly Frey?

  I've tried to include a few photos to show you. One of these photos is of this gorgeous horse wearing a baseball cap, which is the cutest thing I've maybe ever seen.

• 47:10Holly Frey?

  There is another of just a beautiful horse kind of standing before a gorgeous sunset. That's a beautiful, beautiful combination of of images. There is a very cute baby horse in this, but he already has a little goatee, which I love, he or she, and some horses eating. These are all such beauties. Horses are so pretty. A bi-color horse that's absolutely gorgeous and one that is like a buff colored horse, like an ivory colored horse, making the horsiest horse face. Like it's a face that if you drew it and said it was a horse, people would be like, have you seen a horse? But horses make that face. I love it so much. And Ellen, I love that you pointed out that, you know,

• 47:53Holly Frey?

  art is interpreted differently by different people. And like I said, I like your read of that painting better than what it actually seemed to be about, at least according to Beer Stot and many people at the time. So if you would like to write to us and share your takes on art that we've talked about or not, and animals being very silly, which is one of my favorite flavors of animal pictures, you can do so at [email protected]. You can also subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 48:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 48:43Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:14Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 49:52Speaker 06

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• 50:19Tracy V. Wilson?

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