Could you post a list of titles of these resources so that if we happen upon them we can snap them up (like crack fiend after a fix)?

Also, it’s good to hear you say trial and error is better than bad education, it makes me feel better ’cause I spend a LOT of time doing it. The wasteful time that I am currently resenting, is the time I spend staring at the pattern paper thinking “is THIS the right thing to do?” I should get over my fear of doing things incorrectly and acknowledge that some testing (and re-testing) will be necessary until I find a tutor at the appropriate level.

On Couture clothes and hand-sewing. I have altered quite a few couture clothes, and have come up with a few observations:
1) Quality varies wildly.

2) Sometime hand-sewing DOES have a quality purpose–I like the flat, smooth exterior effect when seams are hand-stitched to the underlining. You could do a machine version by blind-hemming the seams to the underlining, but I’ve yet to see that. It also helps gathered skirts to fall from perfectly smooth seams to hand stitch the gathers together (and to the underlining) in the seam allowances. Don’t know how you would replicate that effect by machine. ANyway, the point is, sometimes hand-sewing IS the appropriate engineering tool, IMHO.

3) I think the origin of hand-sewing isn’t for the sake of quality, but for the ability to make changes at the last second. Anyway, I know my clients always want changes at the last second, and remember, couture started out as a form of custom clothing before pret-a-porter came around. Machine sewing everything generally does come out nicer, but often requires that you know the exact finished dimensions ahead of time, which isn’t true in actual “couture.” So I find, for my indecisive customers, hand sewing actually SAVES me time and frustration. This isn’t relevant for RTW. (unless you ship garments half-finished to a store that intends to customize them to the customer. Let me know if you know of a store that does it this way).

Yes. Please. Please write that book; I will buy it, and recommend it. If you don’t write it, who will? No one, that’s who. And the field will be clogged by people who perpetuate errors.

And now I’m depressed. I paid Good Money (i.e., more than I could afford) for a consigned Valentino suit, not because I can wear it, but because it was beautiful, and I want to “read” how it was done – but the sleeve linings are, in fact, sewn in by hand. I too thought it was one of the hallmarks of a “quality” suit.

For example you can imagine the belt loop as a tube of 3 layers (after folding) with the end of it tucked under which makes for a total of 6 layers that are bartacked onto _1_ layer. The one layer is of insufficient structural integrity to bear the weight of 6 layers, particularly in an area subject to the stressors of vertical and horizontal expansion, no?

If that doesn’t make sense, consider the belt loop end that is bartacked to the top of the waist band. This 6 layer portion is tacked onto _2_ layers that are only stressed by horizontal expansion. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’ve never seen an instance when the stress load was relieved by the top end of the belt loop coming loose.

Also, as far as structural integrity is concerned, more stitching is better rather than less. It’s a myth that more stitching makes something fall apart due to needle holes punched in the fabric; it depends more on stress and what it’s sewn to. For example, consider flags, the commercial ones flown outside of buildings. Those flags have hems with 4 or more rows of stitching. You wouldn’t think that something designed to hang there would need that kind of structural integrity but they do. The wind can shred a flag in no time at all if the hems aren’t reinforced.

In my entry also of 2-22-05 _nothing pithy here_, I quoted Eric (elevated from comments under cognitive dissonance entry)
….”Therefore, the ancientness of the apparel industry lends itself to secrecy and mysticism, and therefore may be exploited by anyone claiming to have unlocked these secrets. If it’s not in the open, anyone can lay claim to having the knowledge. Nobody in the industry is likely to come out from behind closed doors to dispute them, and nobody in the general public knows enough about it to dispute them.”…

This comment inspired me to get serious about transparency and putting everything out in the open -just what do you think this blog is about? Shaeffer can only claim to have unlocked our secrets because we have let her. Well, I’ve come out from behind closed doors to dispute her.

Honestly before, the hobbyist press was just a cause for laughter-a way of amusing ourselves if one happened to see them. The industry was robust and we were swamped with work so who cared what was printed in a college textbook? But the costs of our isolation increased as trends changed. With the field narrowing, any information that sifted through that funnel became increasingly influential. Note that I said influential, not accurate. It became an issue when -through the fallout- the largest publishers came to dominate the market, when previously the garment industry had always had a significant insider’s trade press consisting of pattern makers and plant managers who had taken the time to write some of this stuff up. The books weren’t pretty but they reflected the needs of the daily reality of people working in plants. In other words, due to the shift in trends, the information market narrowed to favor textbooks written by people who marketed themselves well and knew professional book proposal standards that publishers wanted to see. I resent this narrowing of information resources because we can’t afford it like we could before (as though we really could have afforded it then). We have fewer resources and less ability to weather the consequences of our poor decision making that is based on poor information. These costs are utterly wasteful because no value is generated.

This industry has become so fragile and still more fragmented, an ugly self-perpetuating cycle we’re finding difficult to reverse. Fragmentation drives our fragility when we can least afford it. For example, as the larger plants closed, people stopped attending the annual trip to mecca (the Bobbin Show in Atlanta GA). Once things got really bad, the show’s sponsor ceased hosting it annually. While no one disputes the wisdom of that decision in the economics of terms favorable to the largest companies, it reduced the rate of opportunity for peer to peer information transmission which hurt the smaller companies most. Now we have almost no opportunities to share information peer to peer, making it less likely we’ll meet someone who could resolve some basic problems. Failing to have a venue for meeting has dramatically increased the value and costs of good information.

Now, as the opportunity to acquire person to person information has been reduced, iinformation has become more rare and costly. The costs are generated when the entrepreneur must learn through the process of trial and error. A side effect of expensive education is that people are less willing to share their information with each other due to the cost of their own investment.

It’s my personal opinion that the costs of bad information are more wasteful and costly than learning by trial and error over the long term. I realize that in the beginning, Shaeffer’s book is useful if you don’t have anything else, so you use those methods to get off the ground. The problem is, those habits become behaviors and once it’s become a behavior, it’s a problem that is harder to break. Once behaviors are institutionalized, people will make all kinds of rationalizations to justify what they’re doing and how they do it. This is the path of least resistance and these kinds of companies don’t last very long. Led by their information resource, they tend to produce products with unnecessarily high costs but lower quality standards. For example, sewing a sleeve lining in by hand is lower quality, not higher. This method is rationalized as “quality” when the reality is, the hand sew method is just a way of compensating for the fact that you don’t know how to bag a jacket professionally. The former is a shoddy work-around and not a quality standard. This is an example of waste -muda- and we can’t afford it.

On the other hand, I think the costs of education from trial and error are much more cost effective over the long haul. And it’s funny how the trial and error process works because it’s very common that you’ll be in the middle of learning to dominate a problem and the answer ends up finding you (when the student is ready, the teacher appears). This kind of education is so effective and becomes self perpetuating if this becomes a behavior. The habit and behavior of proactive improvement creates an enviable standard of excellence. This is the core tenet of lean manufacturing and entrepreneurs who are willing to get their hands dirty can only thrive.

This is the 3rd part of the 4-part series regarding the process review of the lapped zipper. The first entry analyed the correct application of a lapped zipper. The 2nd part was the pattern templates needed to execute the proper…

Once I post the template patterns for this lapped application and include the photo instructions (step by step), I’m hoping that people will actually do the exercises. I’d really like to write a sewing/patterns book and I’m hoping participation and feedback will be enthusiastic enough to show me that there’s sufficient demand for a book like that. But, if I don’t get participation and feedback, it’d be silly to move forward on a huge project like that.