This is a picture of one of my great-grandmothers with her two younger sisters. Note the dresses, then look at the picture below from Scientific Sewing and Garment Cutting, copyright 1898 (the youngest sister was born in 1892), by Antoinette Van Hoisen Wakeman and Louise M. Heller.I downloaded the book from Google books. This book describes a sewing program for grades one through eight, in which girls would learn to sew, first by hand, then by machine, including mending rips and patching. By eighth grade, each girl would be able to take a few simple measurements, and using a square and a parallelogram as bases, draft a pattern for a dress in 10 minutes! Modern women talk about being liberated, and being so much better off than their ignorant ancestresses trapped at home, but could your eighth grader design and manufacture any article of clothing from scratch given material, thread, needles, a sewing machine, brown paper, a ruler, a tape measure, a pencil, and pins?
The description of the work girls did back then makes me feel a bit dumb. I want to work through this book sometime, if only to learn the darning and patching techniques, and how to match plaids. Maybe someday I'll be as smart and capable as my great-grandma was at age 13. We shall see.
No comments:
Post a Comment