The Culture of Sewing, edited by Barbara Burman

In my prowls through the library I came across this title, and I have to say I learned an enormous number of things from it, including:

• Vogue, Butterick, and McCalls produced more than 600 patterns a year each in the 1930s and early 1940s, dropping to an average of 500 patterns a year thereafter. (And when you put it that way, I hardly have any patterns at all! Let's see, the 10 years of the 1950s times three pattern companies times 500 ... and that doesn't even count Advance or the newspaper pattern companies ... or modern patterns ... )
  


• McCalls were the first printed patterns, patenting them in 1919. When the patent expired in 1938, most of the other pattern companies started using them, except for Vogue, which continued to use hand-cut patterns until 1956. McCalls was also the first company to produce patterns that were licensed copies of Paris designs.


• The price of a Singer sewing machine in the 1860s was $100 -- $50 if you were the wife of a minister (which should tickle the writer of this funny and useful blog; thanks to Sendhil for the link!).

The Culture of Sewing also led me to this book (which I'll have to try to get from interlibrary loan), and this one, which I can't believe I didn't have, and will now have to buy.

All in all a successful read ... although some of the essays (it's a collection) were much too theoretical for my enjoyment, most of them were very good reads. One even had a word I can't find anything else about: humby, in this context:

Household duties -- worried over new poplin dress, bought last winter which is a perfect humby -- looking as if it were rough dried. Pressed it.

This is from the diary of a Susan McManus, in Philadelphia, in 1869. There was an actress named Humby about that time (it's a commonish surname) but I can't make any links or find evidence of other uses like this. Yet.

Is there anything more pleasurable than reading a good book about a subject you're fascinated by? (If there is, don't tell me, I have enough trouble keeping up with all I have to do already.)

[No cover image, as it's NSFW. It's an arresting and beautiful image, but I have to say that one of the New Laws of the Internet should be that if you want people to blog about your book, it helps to not put nekkid people on the cover.]

Are you reading FI? You should be reading FI.

La Bella Donna recently pointed out to me that I haven't linked to Fashion Incubator, which astonished me, but I checked, and she was right, I haven't! But I'm doing it with a vengeance now, because I read that site all the time, and I think everyone else should, too .... well, anyone who's interested in clothing production, because FI (run by the incredibly knowledgeable Kathleen) talks about how commercial, retail clothes really get made.

There's this huge gap in the fashion press that FI fills in. Usually you hear about the Designer-with-a-capital-D, who dreams up the clothes, and maybe there's an arty, floaty sketch or two ... and then there's a picture of the actual item (on a clothes-hanger model, of course). Sometimes, MAYBE, there will be a mention of some handwork being done; embroidery, or pleating, or whatnot, but otherwise, there's just a big void: nothing about the patternmaking, the construction sewing, the fabric sourcing ... you could just as easily assume the Brownies showed up overnight and sewed everything up for a bowl of milk. And that's the amount of attention paid to high-end stuff; lower-end stuff's production gets NO attention, unless someone finds out it's done in a sweatshop somewhere overseas.

But if you read Fashion Incubator, you learn all the gritty details. What makes a good commercial pattern? How do you source fabric? How do you find the people you need to work with, and how do you judge their work? How do you get your clothes into stores, and when? Fashion is, after all, a business, and FI is the trade blog of the production side of that business.

Personally, I *love* trade magazines, and I always have. When I had a not-so-great job working in a dry cleaners in high school, the best part was reading American Drycleaner magazine. (The next best part was folding starched men's dress shirts ... you see, there was this special machine ... but I digress.) It was like Christmas when our mail carrier misdelivered a copy of a welding journal to our old apartment. Heck, I used to read Folio, which is the trade magazine of magazine publishing, just for the oh-so-meta frisson of it! So as soon as my next Google Adsense check comes in (thanks for clicking on those ads, by the way!) I'm buying Kathleen's book (I'm going to buy it from the link on FI, but I'm linking here to Amazon so you can read the great reviews it got). I'm never going to be a fashion designer -- I'm not suited for it -- so reading her book will just be pure geeky pleasure.

Oh, and the picture above? It's from a series where she shows how welt pockets are done in industrial sewing and gives instruction on how you can make a jig to do something similar (if not exactly the same) yourself. Awesome.