RH837 - Regency Morning Dress

[Val]

What they said. Don't waste your money.

[Mme de Beaufort]

I wish there were a way to tell Kass that wouldn't sound evil.

[Val]

Oct 31, 2008 15:45:27 GMT -5 Mme de Beaufort said:

I wish there were a way to tell Kass that wouldn't sound evil.

I tried once on her LiveJournal where she would welcome questions but she basically answered like I was an idiot and couldn't read English. Later I read where she and her buddies were laughing about all those "idiots" that were questioning her about the pattern problems. Not the kind of business owner I wish to deal with.
On the other hand, Jennie Chaucie, of Sense & Sensibility, will lean over backwards to try and help you. And she has extensive descriptions on her website if you need more help.
Too bad we can't do the same for LMB. Not sure how to go about doing that since the company was sold.

[lauren]

Mmm, I've heard some negative things on other patterns from this era from RH. Mmmm, I don't think I will invest in this one.

[Mme de Beaufort]

I sent Kass a note about this, and this was her response:

Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for your candor. Your email had been very helpful. I'm sorry that you have had problems with RH837. I appreciate the detail you've included in your email. It will help me address these issues and produce a better pattern.

I blame the problems with the pattern on my personal skill in grading. The pieces of the base size (D) fit together perfectly. But the pieces diverge from that "perfection" as the sizes go up and down. In pattern grading classes, we learn to grade on the modern body block and then apply those grading rules to the typical women's fitted blouse, slacks, and skirt and the typical men's jacket and trousers. As I'm sure you realise, the pattern pieces of Regency women's clothing are not at all similar to the pattern pieces in modern women's clothing. This made grading into larger and smaller sizes a guessing game for me. I did my very best, but your email has helped me realise that I have not done well enough.

This is also why I don't give a static size for the shoulder straps. I am very aware of my inability to size things perfectly and I would rather give you something you know you'll have to adjust than something you expect to fit the specified size only to find that the dress doesn't fit your customer.

Regency women's clothing is a new foray for me. The new line started with men's clothing (of which I have much more confidence because it does not diverge wildly from the clothing of the previous century in terms of pattern shapes) and that is where I wanted to stop, but the demand from customers for matching women's patterns was very high, and I tried to satisfy my customers. Clearly I have fallen far of the mark.

However, I have news that I hope you will be happy to hear. We have purchased new software that will make it unnecessary for me to grade the patterns entirely by hand. This software is designed by garment industry professionals and works with many pattern shapes, not just the typical blouse, skirt and slacks that I've learned to grade.

If you would be willing to accept, I would like to send you a new printing of RH837 after I revise it with the new software. I would be very happy if you would try it again and let me know if I have corrected the problems. If I have, I hope that you will also share this with the other seamstresses you mention in your email and hopefully they will give my patterns another chance as well. If you agree to this, please email me your mailing address and I will send the pattern free of charge when it is finished.

Again, thank you for your email. It has helped me greatly.

Kass

She shows a willingness to discuss this, it seems, and definitely a desire to address the concerns of her customers, so I cannot fault her for that. I'm happy to see she didn't take the critique as a personal attack. I think this is a mature response.

I look forward to seeing what she comes up with.

[lauren]

That's good that she seems to be responsive. I hope her new software fixes those problems.

[Anna]

That's very slick business, if she follows through on the free reprint offer - you get the free version, and talk it up to all of us (she hopes), but everyone else who bought one already is stuck footing the bill for the new one herself. Harumph, harumph.

On the other hand, it would be great to know whether the new version works.

[dawnluckham]

It’s a good response if she follows through...
Ideally, the absolutely best response would be to offer a downloadable file with the corrections to all who bought the first draft patterns.

I’m familiar with the “new” software she speaks of. If it’s the Gerber Garment Technology programs (or something similar) these don’t work all by themselves. The operator needs to set parameters and desired grading criteria, so she may still find grading a challenge. It will make it easier for her, but she still needs to understand how grading works.

There is a method of checking patterns and notch placement by “walking” the pieces along seam lines. If she doesn’t have the time to make up a rough or mock up copy of every pattern she produces (which might be understandable, though we know her competition does do this), she could at least take the time to “walk” all the seam allowances to check that they match and work together. It’s extra time, but it might be worth it to keep happy customers.

Sounds like you wrote an excellent letter of complaint, Steph. I’d love to know what you said and how you presented it.

[Val]

That's the first bite of humble pie I've seen her bite. I wonder if she'll make this offer of a corrected pattern to everyone who purchased it?
My biggest problem with her still is she sold these patterns w/o testing them first, and they were expensive.

[Mme de Beaufort]

Nov 4, 2008 8:00:06 GMT -5 dawnluckham said:

Sounds like you wrote an excellent letter of complaint, Steph. I’d love to know what you said and how you presented it.

Thanks Dawn,

It was no work of great literature. It was a honest narrative with what I hope is an objective 'critique'. I told her I was bummed because I was excited to have a pattern that is taken from the Janet Arnold book... and that I discussed the problem with other costumers and they too had similar problems and some had sworn off the pattern altogether.

I told her I didn't want to write it off completely or give it a negative review until she's had a chance to look at it.

I think that's fair.

[aylwen]

If I read Kass's letter right, does this mean that the size D should fit together properly, and that the other sizes around it are questionable?

[Val]

Would anyone like to buy my copy of the Reconstructing History pattern? tinyurl.com/94b4rh You might have better luck than some of us did. I'm not that good of a seamstress, and it does have fitting challenges, so you need to know what you're doing.
It would be half price $15 (original $30) plus the mailing in an envelope. Mine has been cut.
Val

[Mme de Beaufort]

Aylwen, the answer is yes, that's what she implied, her "D" size is the base-pattern from which she graded the larger and smaller sizes.

However, I decided to experiment and make the bodice in the smallest size. It was a disaster... even *with* prior modifications.

I cut the teeny tiny back, the sides and the bib. The bib stomacher is huge. The armseye is too far back in proportion to the side-back panels. I lengthened the back a bit to accommodate the huge side-back panels, and set length of the the shoulder strap based on the proportions of another pattern.

There is no shaping if you do it the way it is cut. I have to widen the back piece by at least a 1/2 inch ot an inch, pull the armseye forward, lengthen the shoulder strap, narrow the front flaps and make the bib much smaller. With all my modifications, it won't be very much like the original pattern at all when i'm done.

I'll wait for her revision to see if it's improved, but the whole pattern right now (except maybe the "D" size) is not a viable option if you're looking for a Janet Arnold gown. No way.

Little movie of experiment is available here:

Here is the bodice before it's been tried on the subject:
www.flickr.com/photos/herodyssey/3254063460/

And the problems discovered after it's been tried on the subject:
www.flickr.com/photos/herodyssey/3255386879/

[dawnluckham]

Steph, I loved your video clips. Very informative!

Is the smallest size the "size D" ? I know some of the Janet Arnold patterns are very small. I was just curious if your video was with the "Base pattern" or if you were working with a graded pattern.

[Mme de Beaufort]

Feb 6, 2009 12:01:52 GMT -5 dawnluckham said:

Steph, I loved your video clips. Very informative!

Is the smallest size the "size D" ? I know some of the Janet Arnold patterns are very small. I was just curious if your video was with the "Base pattern" or if you were working with a graded pattern.

I was workin gwith a graded pattern... I think it was size A.

[dawnluckham]

Just curious again:

If you ever have time or are curious yourself, I’d be very interested to know how the pattern she says is her base pattern (the size D) fits together. I wonder if you’d get those odd long curves with the extra tab pieces hanging down at the centre back to side back piece seams. (Just as a tiny aside – when I was in school, this kind of mismatch in pattern making was a MAJOR no-no. There should be no ‘extra tabs’ of fabric on seams that “you just cut off” – a quote from the pattern maker herself…)

I have the half robe pattern, released about the same time, and I haven’t had time to play with it yet. I wonder if it has similar fitting issues and which size is the base size in it.

About the tiny back piece: It may actually be somewhat on target – although your addition of a half inch on either side isn’t really that huge a change and if it works, you’ve done brilliantly. Period documents have (on one garment somewhere in my research) indicated a centre back piece at its widest point as 7 inches across. (That’s pretty tiny.)

The original garment graph in Janet Arnold’s “Patterns of Fashion” indicates that centre back piece where the skirt should attach to the bodice as 3 inches. Of course, we don’t know what the original wearer’s measurements were or what ‘size’ that original garment would actually be. I’ve not graphed up that particular pattern myself. I wonder if Katherine did this one…Memory sort of says she did….Yes!
www.koshka-the-cat.com/drop_front.html

She says “only minor adjustments to fit”. I don’t know what she is in modern sizing, but I’m sure we could ask her if it helps…

[Mme de Beaufort]

Hey Dawn,

I might jus tdo that. For the purpose of Sherry's gown, I will modify and finish the small one first because I promised.

Katherine's gown is the first gown I ever saw in bib-front fashion. I love that girl, I want to adopt her as my own. Anyway... I can already tell by the width of her shoulder straps that the pattern she scaled up is different than what the RH837 pattern is. RH837's shoulder straps are thinner. The two panels up front are wider, and the bib too wide. The pattern's curve on the neckline is more severe than that one Catherine made.

I may just try to scale up the pattern myself like Cosmo did with a photocopier. I'm not sure how that will work, but I may try that. But for the purpose of trying the graded patterns on the RH837 pattern, I am quite convinced that they are not workable. I can already tell you this, if the SMALLEST size of the side-back piece doesn't notch into the back piece because it's too big, the size D, which is a full three sizes bigger has little chance of fitting either. And if you look at my back piece, I elongated the bottom of it by at least an inch to accomodate the huge tabs.

The bottom's width at this point is 2 1/4 inches, which is by my standards, way too small. If I go up to where hers ended, it is 2.5 inches wide (on the pattern which means that that measurement includes the seam allowance). That one back piece is supposed to fit all 11 sizes, and with each progressive size, the tab on the bottom just gets bigger and bigger. If I just eyeball the pattern in Janet Arnold's book... the back looks visibly wider at the top. BUT, the bottom part is still narrow, but the arcs where the tabs of the side back attach are much wider. This little comparison may interest you. I scanned the pattern piece from RH837 and then Janet Arnold's.

[dawnluckham]

WOW!

Thanks so much, Steph, for taking the time to scan that comparison! That explains a lot on a couple of different levels!

It makes me wonder if I’ve been mistaken in my thoughts on how she’s drafted/created these patterns. I had been under the firm belief that she was digitizing the patterns directly from the book, sizing up and grading. In fact, I even went to my Nora Waugh “The Cut of Women’s Clothing” to check if the same Salisbury Museum dress was diagramed in it with the slightly different shapes that you’ve shown. (No, it’s not in there.) I opened up Jean Hunnisett and there’s nothing quite like that in “Period Costume for Stage and Screen” either.

Now I’m puzzling.

I know she’s said she’s a “draper”. She prefers to make patterns by draping.
The thing is, that I have a hard time believing that the curve shown on her pattern piece was created with a drape. It’s an extreme curve for the back! NO WONDER you all are having difficulty with this section!!! And you’re absolutely right: The shoulder piece is missing a whole angled section where it should work outward at right about the location where she’s put her size letters when compared to the Janet Arnold pattern.

This signifies that even though she’s used images on the front cover of the pattern that directly “indicate” Janet Arnold’s research, these are not Janet Arnold’s patterns scaled up. Anyone who was purchasing these patterns with that belief is going to be disappointed.

The neckline does seem to “match” width wise and the rest of it all fall’s into roughly the ‘same size’ if you overlap the Janet Arnold pattern with the RH pattern at “base size D”. The shoulders are off and the curve of the back isn’t the same but the bottom of the piece is only off by a small bit on either side (probably your half-inch that you found you needed to add). BUT then, one must remember that the RH patterns are supposed to have seam allowance added and the Arnold pattern does not.

I’m really, really curious about how the size D will come together. Your reasoning is sound when you say if the small size doesn’t work together one will think that the next sizes should have problems, but it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes even if the base pattern fits together perfectly, if the grading formula or technique is off (which is what she said happened) things can go wonky.

As far as scaling up patterns like the “Patterns of Fashion” grid patterns: There are a lot of people who swear by Cosmo’s technique using a photocopier. I have never been able to wrap my own head around how to deal with all those pages and pages of paper.

Other people borrow an overhead projector and size up the patterns on a wall. This seems “doable” in my own mind and I’ve had moderate success with this technique one time when I had access to a projector.

My own preferred method (and you are confident artistically so I know you’d be able to do this with very little effort) is to buy the 1-inch square or 1-centemeter square (depending on the grid in the book) Pellon grid and simply trace out the pattern counting squares.

www.hancockfabrics.com/Pellon-Tru-Grid-810-1-inch-Graph-Material-Sew-In_stcVVproductId49134818VVcatId539010VVviewprod.htm

It works!
I sometimes use regular tracing paper over one of those fold-up cutting boards with one-inch grid. That works too.

What you get with this method is the exact size of the original garment as your ‘base’. You are then able to plan and take measurements and make decisions about how best to “explode” your pattern to achieve the size you’re aiming for.

Thanks again for taking the time to scan the comparison pieces. It explains so much. Now I should run off and check out comparisons of the half robe pattern I have. I checked it out once and at a glance it looked the same, but maybe I didn’t look carefully.

………..

…It occurs, that another thing that might have happened was that the computer “self-corrected” when she placed a point while digitizing. If you “picked up” the point at the top of the curve and stretched it out to where “it should be” in comparison to the Arnold pattern, the inner curve would correct itself and the pattern piece would probably work.

[Val]

Once again, I feel like I was not a total boob when trying to make this dress, as it appears the problem I had is the same others are having.
And Dawn said "I wonder if Katherine did this one…Memory sort of says she did….Yes!
www.koshka-the-cat.com/drop_front.html
She says “only minor adjustments to fit”. I don’t know what she is in modern sizing, but I’m sure we could ask her if it helps…"
Katherine is a tiny little thing, with no curves. She can't use any modern patterns w/o major reductions, which throws them off. However scaling up patterns from the tiny folks in our past are perfect for her. Lucky girl. Well, maybe not. I'd hate not being able to use all these modern historical patterns for the ease of use.

[lauren]

Again, all does not bode well for this pattern. Argh... Sorry you're having such a hard time with it, Allseeing.