Real Period Clothes for Real Contemporary People
I love costume history and I am either fun to sit next to in a period film or the worst if you can't stand the commentary....My interest in creating period costumes actually comes from needing a garment to wear while performing 15th Century Burgundian dances. Consuming costuming books for pattern shapes, I realized in the early 1980s there were not a lot of good commercial patterns on the market, so I drafted from the scale drawings I saw. That was slow work, so when I moved to San Francisco I enrolled in FIDM to become a better drafter and learn about grading.
While working in contemporary garment industry by day and historic dancing by night, I was still drafting dancing costumes from scale drawings. This lead to the idea of making full scale patterns for sale. That idea would sit in the back of my brain until the late 1990s when I had moved to South Carolina and was helping our local museum with costuming docents. I discovered they had a gown from 1770s and they let me copy it to make patterns for their interpreters. From that sprang the idea for Fig Leaf Patterns®.
Fig Leaf Pattern® is my product line whose mission is to produce commercial sewing patterns, complete with period stitching techniques and period fit, true to the style and construction of surviving garments in museums and private collections. The Fig Leaf Patterns® product line is created, produced and printed in-house by me . Pattern package includes both patterns and sewing instructions in a re-sealable plastic bag and a cover illustration of the garment. The full scale, color-coded, nested pattern of six sizes is printed on 24” wide 20lb paper in lengths of 75” or less (which allows for long pattern pieces). The Sewing Instructions booklet includes the history of the garment, differences between the measurements of the original garment and the model size, illustrations and sewing instructions which include both period and contemporary sewing techniques. This booklet is a spiral bound with plastic covers, inside instructions are printed on 20lb paper. The person who buys a Fig Leaf Pattern® can be confident that the pattern shapes are period correct which allows the individual the option to be as period correct in sewing techniques and construction as he or she wishes to be.
I feel there is a need in the market place for patterns based on real garments with period pattern shapes, not a 20th century block altered to look like a period garment. Strong emphasis on creating the correct look by using period foundation garments is heartily recommended. Other museums and costume historians also see this need and have partnered with me to create Peachtree Mercantile (Atlanta History Center) and KayFig Patterns (Originals by Kay).
