Online Linky Love on a hot Friday evening

Dammit, I am just too warm to edit and rewrite notes. My sewing machine is going back to the shop, because it did not get fixed, so nothing to see there.

So it's linky love Friday, with fitting fun from Threads and SewNews

First, there is pattern news.

The big news is McCalls is looking for vintage reprint ideas. Really.  Go to LauraMae's page on that link and start reading. I'll be here all week, but do that now.

Colette Patterns has a new dress pattern coming soon. I will have much to say about it when the veil is lifted next week.

Grainline has a new dress pattern out now, the Alder. It's a shirtwaist with gathers and without.

Neither one has sleeves. Which is good for summer. 

I will have a new pattern coming out in August. It's for culottes. Without sleeves.

Yes, I know how to make other things besides culottes, but this is more interesting to me than dresses.

I have this annoying tick. I'm staring out the window, sitting in a coffee shop, doing tech drawings and pattern piece breakdown of the hep jacket the woman over there is wearing. It's a fun mental exercise, but taking it further is....uh....stealing.

I want to do something NEW...

 http://moldesedicasmoda.blogspot.com/ does something like this (more of 'what do you do with a sloper/block?'). It's kind of a guilty pleasure for me; I also really enjoy http://pokroyka.ru/ which will take you to http://issuu.com

Which is my new "oh, is it time to get up to go to work in the morning now?" clickhole.

Just don't. It's really a bad idea. Intellectual property is not a bad idea (except if you take it past the life of the creator). It's almost all japanese crochet books anyway. And I don't even crochet.

Sew News has a PDF extra with Sarah Veblen on five patternmaker skills to master. Mostly about using rulers and smoothing out lines, but she does the usual great job with photography illustrating what she's talking about. A decent explanation of walking the pattern. 

My mother always said it was tacky to wear high heels with pants. I'm not a truly judgmental person, but this photo just makes me think that hemming these pants was not done on these models.

http://www.threadsmagazine.com/item/4244/everyone-can-have-jeans-that-fit

Well, yes. It's not exhaustive, but it gives a good overview of how it works. I'd go find  Sarah Veblen's Complete Photo Guide to Fitting if you really want to dial down on the matter. Her photographs are really good; clear, concise, cogent. I think it's a keeper.

http://www.threadsmagazine.com/item/25087/how-to-enlarge-a-pattern

I have my issues with how Threads approaches grading patterns, but I always find scaling up explanations deeply deeply funny. By the time you are done drawing all those lines, you will have a total webby mess on your hands. May I suggest using a grid?

A search on the internet that begins with "how to enlarge" is always entertaining, but this site, Art is Fun, gets to the point about halfway through. Forget the exact proportions of your framing grid; the source and the target just need to have squares. And it's a lot easier to do with a pattern piece to draw, vs a cartoon character or a bowl of fruit. When it gets less hot, I promise I'll put up a decent tutorial on this.

Let's end with a suggested alternation from the pants article:

adding width for my enormous calves?