Practical Designer for Women’s and Misses' Underwear was my first foray into more complex historical pattern drafting. If you want to follow along this entire book is available free at the link above. In my last article I went through the basic drafting for creating 1920s circular drawers. The drawers were pretty simple and straight forward. The princess slip? Not so much.

I will be the first person to tell you that my confidence in my mathematical abilities generally lives in negative territory. When I first glanced at Practical Designer (PD) things appeared very step-by-step. I assumed that it would be similar to the circular drawers, basic connect the dot, point to point drafting. But then I actually read the directions and I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it. In fact, I had to read the directions at least three times before I was even vaguely able to understand what and how the draft was taking shape.

'Losing face' would have been completely okay with me. Marion has been great to work with since I have been writing for FR and I did, in fact, warn her that I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to pull off this assignment. Not because of sewing ability, but because of mathematical deficiency. I even worked up another princess draft from a different source, just as a backup if this one completely failed.

However, there is something about the art of sewing that causes me to relentlessly push through things I don’t understand, to the point of absurdity. You know the athlete that practices, and practices, and practices in spite of failure, after failure, after failure? Then one day they nail it. Well, I spent an absurd amount of time deciphering the foreign language that occurs with mathematics and antique language... and I think I pretty well nailed it. By nailing it, I mean that I produced a garment that would be recognizable as a simple princess slip.

Now I am quite certain that I am not the only one is sewing land who struggles with patterning and/or mathematics. In fact, I am quite certain some people avoid sewing all together because of the math requirements of even the most basic sewing project. Math can be very scary and intimidating. For those of you who struggle with that fear, please hang in there for a little bit. I hope I can encourage you to work through your fear. You math whizzes? Bear with me, and please feel free to enlighten me if I missed any super easy explanation to some of the things I struggled with. My goal in this was not to go through this project without mistake, but to actually experience mistakes and hopefully gain a deeper understanding of the math and patterning fundamentals through that process.

All right, back to the project at hand. Women’s Princess Slip – Size 36, Lesson No. 410. One page of directions and one page of an illustration. Sounds like trouble already. As you can see from the illustration is has lots of lines, letters, and numbers all over the place. And they are not easy to read, even enlarged on my screen there are letters and numbers that just don’t show up well. And the ghost lines that look like they were erased secret codes to success made me very nervous. But I push the anxiety aside and try to dig in to the written directions.

'To begin the princess slip draw the usual foundation lines.' Ummm….what exactly are the usual foundation lines and where do I get them? I feel the crease above my right eyebrow setting in deep.

'Measure the hip line from C to D, 6 inches and cross a line from D to E.' I frantically search the illustration for the magic markers of C, D, and E hoping they will bring some sense to the commands, trying not to hyperventilate. Nope. I found them, but now I am also sure that I need to go in search of the 'usual' foundation lines or none of this is going to make sense. Time for nail-biting to ensue. It feels to me like every step I have to take backwards through the instructions must mean failure or idiocy on my part. And what if I still don’t get it?! I have to bring out my stubborn donkey self to push through my anxiety and start at the beginning.

Guess what? The beginning is a good place to start.

The Practical Designer: The Problem of Underwear

It seems that what we are up against here is the eternal quest for a magic formula that will enable us to quickly and easily bang out adjustment-free patterns for people of all shapes and sizes. At least that is what I took away from the introduction to the PD’s 'Problem of Underwear'. Basically the PD presents what they believe is their solution to fitting every woman, through patterning based on Isidor Rosenfeld’s proportional patterning system. Oh, if only!

It appears that this collection of underwear lessons is only a small part of a larger collection. They are contained in one book but judging from the page numbers and lesson numbers they are actually a continuation of earlier lessons. Maybe some of you are familiar with Rosenfeld’s work. I am new to the historical patterning realm; forgive me if this is old information to some of you.

After reading thought the introduction to the proportional system I discovered that the patterns are built one on top of another. The first two patterns are the basic foundation of everything else that is to follow. So that is where I started.

I hate wasting fabric, and I even hate wasting large pieces of paper, so the first thing I did was set about rough sketching the measurement drafts on plain old note book paper. I wasn’t concerned about the actual scale of the measurement; I just wanted to make sure I actually understood how they were coming up with numbers and that I understood the placement of lines from those numbers.

I had originally wanted to draft this to my measurements. I did attempt that, but there is something about the way the instructions are written that I couldn’t quite make sense of how they were determining their proportional numbers. This may just be my own math mind block, I am not entirely sure. I would love to hear back from any of you who try this draft yourselves. Anyway, I decided to work up the size 36 draft that they supplied the numbers/measurements for.

Foundation Lines and Second Foundation Lines drafted up very easy and straight forward. By the time I finished those two drafts I was actually feeling pretty confident that I could actually draft a garment from these instructions.

I went back to the Princess Slip instructions and they actually made sense... for the first half paragraph - because all of the number and letters that had been used up to this point were DIFFERENT! I looked back at the other pieces that were created before the slip thinking I just missed something from a previous overlap (there were two corset covers before the slip pattern). Nope. I even wrote Marion to ask her to look at the pattern just to make sure I wasn’t missing some obvious. There is no explanation whatsoever in the instructions to make sense of the letter and numbering changes. This is the point at which I considered throwing in the towel. I am not good at math! I have no formal patterning training. I’m not qualified for this!

Despite this, I rallied and decided to take the 'fake it till you make it' approach. The answers had to be there in front of me. The directions may not be clear or well-written and the illustrations may be vague, but that is all there is. It is up to me to tease out the fine details.

I was using an easy to see through, bakers wax paper for my drafting. I layered the first and second foundation lines to get the accumulated draft and then started trying to decipher the new letters and numbers for the princess draft. In order to try to make sense of what I was seeing I opted to use different colored pencils so I could visually understand the layering process better when I compared my draft to the instruction illustration.

Low and behold, I came up with something that looked like a basic princess bodice. I made one major mistake. I even questioned myself mid-draft, but I was on a roll and I didn’t want to stop to double check myself (always, always, always listen to the questioning voice). Can you see it?

All I can say about the letter/number thing is that it is really a matter of just getting a close approximation. You are able to see the brushed out lines of the first and second foundation lines on the princess illustration and that gives you enough of a guide post to use to make some sort of sense of the new numbers/letters. It required some re-labelling (you can see an orange F next to a blue N). This definitely made the draft a little more challenging, but it can be overcome if you are willing to put some effort into it.

Now I got to put my hard-earned draft to the test. I traced off a cleaned-up version of the pattern just to hip level (I hate wasting paper and fabric, remember?) and cut out a mock-up, adding seam allowances. I couldn’t decide what the instructions were implying about seam allowances so I figured better safe than sorry.

This is when my mistake clearly showed itself. Somehow I misread the measurement instructions from A to B to C on the first foundation lines. I ended up with an extra 7” in length through the waist because I was going too fast and didn’t listen to my instinct to double check my measurements. Even with that large of a mistake I could see that, otherwise, the mock up looked good! I marked the neck and armhole to make nicer lines and took everything apart to create new pattern pieces with the extra fabric taken out at the waist.

Then it was time to go hunting for fabric to make my real deal, but I didn’t want to use the super nice fabric in my stash because this won’t even fit me; so I am scouring through all of my totes and bins when I come across a bag full of sheer curtains that someone gave me years ago and that I held on to, because, you know, they are fabric - and who knows when you might need to make a dress out of curtains. Ahem… Come on now! Scarlett O’Hara did it and no-one gave her a hard time!

Everything went together as smooth as can be! I was actually quite impressed. Look how nice my curtain hem looks on the slip!

I did notice that the line of the bust seam is slightly wider set from bust point to bust point than our modern bust points would be. I don’t think that was a measurement mistake on my part. I wonder if it may have more to do with how the modern bust shape has changed with the advent of the bra. This pattern does not have the lifted, accentuated bust curve like we see today. The bust allowance is much more spread out though all of the pieces.

For my final construction I used French seams to keep the sheer curtain fabric from simply unravelling into nothing. That would have been a suitable seam finish for the time period. To keep with the frugal theme I hunted for some scrap lace to finish out the slip but didn’t find anything suitable in my stash. Next stop was the thrift store, but nothing! I had to go to the fabric store. Let me be more clear. I had to go to fabric store with my 4 ½ year old who cannot walk or talk and was not in the mood for retail therapy. They have no cream/ivory lace of any kind, but all of their lace was on sale, 50% off. Score for the frugal princess. Time to make a split-second decision before the kid clears the shelves.

My chocolate brown lace probably would not have been appropriate in 1911, but I am happy with it. It photographs well and I had a roll of pre-cut, pale yellow bias (25 cents at the thrift store) that I used to finish off the edges. I will admit that I haven’t finished off the back closure. I couldn’t decide how I wanted to do it. Buttons, probably, but I will have to head back to the thrift store for some tiny flat ones.

I am so glad I stuck with this crazy pattern and figured it out enough to produce a pretty decent finished product. I will definitely go back and try to work out how to scale for different measurements. I think I will enlist the help of some of my engineer friends to help me understand the PD’s math. For those of you, who, like me, have anxiety and fear when it comes to math, give it a chance. Take it slow and don’t beat yourself up. You just might surprise yourself...