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About>The Book
"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
- Cicero
I am currently in the middle of fleshing out a book based on this website. I've been talking about it for a couple of years and now it is finally happening. Visit this page for more information on my book as I detail the process. So far, I have the basic structure of the book down and am currently in the middle of fleshing that out.
Book Structure
My hope is to publish a number of small volumes which will all fit together into one series:
- Underwear for Men and Women: underwear, shirts, smocks, stockings, partlets, underskirts, partlets, corsets, farthingales, ruffs, etc.
- Clothing for Women: gowns, foreparts, robes, kirtles, etc.
- Clothing for Men: doublets, jerkins, pants, robes, etc.
- Outer Clothing and Accessories: cloaks, hats, gloves, etc.
Each book will break down into three parts:
- A section on the history of the clothing, photographs or illustrations of extant garments, and other pertinent/useful historical information.
- A section containing patterns (both historical and modern adaptations) of the clothing with demos on how to put each piece discussed together.
- A section that I am calling 'critical skills' (but will probably be called something else) in which I will go over pattern drafting, sewing methods, and the various hand sewing skills (such as hand seams, button holes, or cartridge pleating) that will be necessary to make the clothing in the book.
Because each book will contain the 'critical skills' section, there will be some redundant information in each one. But, having this section will make each one of these volumes stand on its own so that a person need not purchase all four of the volumes to get all the information they need to make the clothing discussed in the volume.
The best thing about this book is that I will not be limited by bandwidth on the quality of my photos in the demos section. I'm going to be re-doing almost all demos, using volunteers and getting good, quality photographs of the process to put in the book.
I also plan to publish all four (or five) volumes of the series at once so that nobody has to wait for any of them.
I'm excited about the whole thing. I hope that it meets with all of your expectations as well and that it will be an additional resource for all of you who are pursuing your interest in historical clothing construction from the late sixteenth century.
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