I recently spent a lovely afternoon chatting with Janyce Hill of the Vintage Pattern Lending Library. She explained to me everything the Library has to offer and her exciting new initative, the 1912 Project. 

Wilhelmina Frame:  What’s your role with the Vintage Pattern Lending Library?

Janyce Hill:  I’m the owner. I started it in 1998 so it’s been going for quite a while.  My goal was to get these patterns back out into public hands again so people could use them. They are becoming rarer and rarer and much harder to find than they used to be four or five years ago. I was really lucky back in 1998 to be able buy and get a lot of donations early on before the pricing (on vintage patterns) had gone out of the reach of most anyone. Not too long ago a 1930s evening gown went on eBay for over $400.

WF:  Just the pattern?

JH:  Yes, the original pattern.

WF:  So the patterns in the library come from various sources?

JH:  Yes, the biggest source is from people who had mother and grandmothers and aunts who have passed away. No one sews in the family. No one’s interested in sewing but they don’t just want to give the patterns to a charity or throw them away. They don’t know what to do with them.  So they’ll call me up and say, “Would you like to have these? We’d love to see them back out where people can enjoy them.” I get some real treasures from people who have been generous to share and let us archive and keep all these things for future generations.

WF:  How does the lending library work?

JH:  There are two aspects to it. There is the lending part where you pay a flat fee of $25 per year. For that you get 4 free loans that means you can check a pattern out for a month. You can sew from it. You can cut it apart or copy it for your own use, just like a regular pattern. At the end of that month you just pop it in the mail and send it back. After you use your free loans the patterns are checked out for $5 per pattern, per month. You also get a 10% discount on any direct purchases you make through the website. You can also purchase patterns from the website without being a member.

WF:  What kind of patterns does the lending library have?

JH:  A better question, what kind doesn’t it have? There are about 300 patterns right now on the website. These are just the patterns that have been electronically formatted, digitized, have new instructions and graphics and are ready to go out the door. The archives have over 10,000 commercial patterns. That would be a Vogue, a Butterick or a McCall’s. On top of that, there are probably another six to seven thousand pieces of fashion history including things like tailoring books, sewing manuals, style books, needlework, embroidery, knitting. Pretty much anything related to domestic fashion, there is something in the archives on it.

WF:  That’s a lot of archiving work to do 

JH:  Yeah! I have years of La Mode Illustreé starting at 1863 and going up to the 1930s. Then there is Harper’s Bazaar, the American version of La Mode. We have those from about 1867 through the late 1890s, not much beyond 1897 or 1898. Then there are the German versions of them, and the Spanish versions, the Swedish versions. We have pattern catalogs. For instance I can date pretty accurately, almost to the month sometimes when a particular pattern was published. So there is a huge archive of material like that date patterns from.

WF:  Or to get ideas from!

JH:  Yes, or to look at and say “I wish I had that pattern!”

WF:  Or you could put it on your wish list for the Vintage Pattern Lending Library!

A lot of people are familiar with the French and American magazines, but I don’t see too much information about the German or the Spanish ones. Do you see a lot of difference in the fashion from a regional standpoint?

JH:  Not so much as a difference between the European and American fashions. The European ones tend to be more complicated, more stylish and more elegant. These magazines were really meant for women of leisure, not necessarily for women who would be sewing their own clothing. You could trace these patterns and take them to you seamstress and your seamstress would make them up for you. They tend to expect a certain level of sewing skill that a lot of women may not have had necessarily.

WF:  That’s interesting. I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding in that an average homemaker used these magazines and patterns.

JH:  These magazines definitely were catering to the more upper middle class. They have an awful lot of needlework, fancy work and handwork that one would do. Most women who sewed for themselves or sewed for their household would be more likely to buy a McCall’s or a Butterick pattern from their local dry goods store than they would be making something out of these magazines.

WF:  So the magazines really were like today’s Vogue or what Harper’s Bazaar has become, high end fashion magazines. It’s just that they had this sewing component because more people could sew themselves or were working directly with dressmakers.

JH:  And generally speaking women’s clothing, until we really got into mass production, which wasn’t until the end of the First World War, was made at home while men’s clothing was made by tailors. So if you couldn’t really afford to go to a dressmaker then you would make do for yourself as best you could. If you look at the illustrations and some of the descriptions it’s very clear they weren’t made for the farm wife. A lot of the garments are garments to wear for travel, a sporting event, in the afternoon. It’s more akin to the upper class Victorians where they were changing three and four times a day. You had a tea gown and a visiting gown and dinner gown and morning gown.

WF:  And a gown for the races, for the chrysanthemum exhibition is one I’ve seen in one of my books.

When you’re working with original patterns, how are they different from commercial patterns today?

JH:  The first thing is that until early 1920s when McCall’s actually started printing patterns, almost all of the patterns have no information on them. They are a series of tissue pieces that have holes punched in them and you get to interpret what the holes mean. If you work with them for a long time you intuitively know by the shape of the punch and where it’s located probably what it means. The patterns tend to give you a guide that says three medium circles means place on the straight of grain. It does give you some guidelines but sometimes, unless you are familiar with how vintage clothing goes together or the way people would have sewn back then, it can be very confusing to try to figure out.

WF:  Then when you republish patterns what do you do to help the modern sewer?

JH:  I have a 40 x 60 inch CAD table. We press them flat and lay them out and digitize the patterns using a program called Patternmaker. Patternmaker is also a sponsor of the 1912 project and has been incredible helpful getting it off the ground. The software has the capabilities to let me add seam allowances, text, grain lines, and markings for pleats. I go in and make it look, as much like a commercial pattern that you would buy at a fabric store. None of the shapes are changed. You get a historically accurate, one to one reproduction of exactly the kind of pattern you would have gotten back then. Then it has all this added information to help the modern sewer put it together and not be confused. I scan all the graphics and clean those up and rewrite the instructions so that they are more understanding to our terminology and technology. I don’t, for instance, call a pleat a plait or blouses “waists”.  It’s not terminology that’s familiar to the majority of people who actually get patterns from me. They’re not necessary people who are very involved in vintage sewing or costuming. A lot of times they are people who want an evening gown for an event or a skirt to go to a dance in, something that looks unusual or unique, so they won’t necessarily be familiar with this terminology like costumers are. 

WF:  I know most of the patterns before a certain era had no variable sizing. What can you tell me about that concept and any resources a modern sewer can use to make those adjustments?

JH:  My favorite book for adjustments is “Pattern Fitting with Confidence” by Nancy Zieman. It uses a slash, pivot and slide system.

WF:  Does that system demand a dress form?

JH:  No.  It does require that you have your seam allowances written down on your patterns. A lot of the modern patterns that have multiple sizes no longer print a seam allowance. And generally most of the vintage patterns will be tight through the shoulders and the armholes due difference in our modern bodies.

WF:  Are there any restrictions to patterns as far as producing your own garments from them?

JH:  No. I have people who make garments and sell them from the patterns. I’m delighted when people do that. I’d be really happy if they’d say they got the pattern from me but it’s not a requirement. The only restriction is that you don’t replicate the pattern itself to sell under your own name.

WF:  Since you’ve mentioned it briefly, let’s talk about the 1912 Project. What is it exactly?

JH:  The 1912 Project is a project to transcribe and test sew every single pattern from La Mode Illustreé, France’s premiere fashion journal, for the full year of 1912, January to December. Conservative estimates are between 250 and 300 patterns that I’m going to try to transcribe and make available from now until December.  I’ve wanted to do a project like this for a long time.  I’ve always been a huge fan of the Titanic event and the historical significance of it. So I thought that maybe this is a good year to get myself motivated to actually do this project. Originally it was just to encourage me to meet some deadlines. I posted a note on my blog and I thought if I have five to ten people who are interested in testing this will be enough to get me to do a certain number of patterns every month.  It got picked up by a couple of blogs, then more blogs, then by Threads Magazine's website and then it just exploded.

WF:  I’ve found there’s incredible interest and excitement about the Titanic event. There are many events planned around the sailing throughout this year. This event is really fascinating to many people. Why do you think that is?

JH:  I think part of it is the huge scope of the tragedy and the social aspects of it. The majority of the people who perished were lower class, not upper class. There were not enough lifeboats and obviously fault with the captain not taking safety precautions. I think it’s something that made such a huge impact at the time that it just continues to echo further and further down through our history. It’s a very romanticized period to us now with the fashions, the gentility, the position in society. I think a lot of people look back that way because we don’t tend to have a lot of that strong sense of structure in our society now. It’s this romantic sense of the past connected with this horrible thing. None of us really would have wanted to be on the ship but at the same time, all of us really would have wanted to be in the ship. It’s a contradiction and the scope of it makes for an obsessive fascination.

WF:  It seems to me too there’s an interesting juxtaposition. There’s the tragedy of it, but yet many of the events I’m getting notice about are really about the glamour of it. Really what people seem to want to do is relive the promise of the Titanic versus the reality. I think it’s an interesting thing socially and why people are attracted to historical events in the first place.

WF:  What kind of garments are people going to find as part of the 1912 project?

JH:  There’s everything from babies’ clothing to women’s clothing, swimsuits, evening gowns, blouses, skirts, underwear. I have not, unfortunately, found a 1912 corset pattern. I believe my 1911 issues may have one. I have not found a lot of men’s clothes in the 1912 issues yet. I haven’t gone through all of them yet.

WF:  Did they normally have much men’s clothing in La Mode Illustreé?

JH:  Some but not a lot. There are a number of men’s shirts but I have not found men’s suits yet.

WF:  Are you looking into making the 1911 corset available so people have that garment to use under their 1912 projects?

JH:  Yes, absolutely.

WF:  How many people are involved in the project?

JH:  At last count we have 354 and I am still getting requests coming in.

WF:  So people can still get involved with the 1912 project?

JH:  Absolutely, even if they come in at the middle of the year. For anybody who joins and sticks it out all the way to the end to December, I’m going to scan all the 1912 issues, even the ones without patterns, put them on a cd and also make a package of all the patterns that have been printed. For the people who stick it out the entire way, that’s their holy grail. They will get everything. I may need to make a requirement that you need to be involved in the program for six months, just to make it fair for the people who have been there since the beginning.

WF:  To stick it out until the end, what are your requirements?

JH:  They are very minimal. I wanted to make this accessible to anybody regardless of sewing ability. The only thing that you are required to do is to get your pattern, to sew a muslin. It doesn’t have to be finished garment. It can be in the same size as the original pattern or you can make it larger or smaller. Some people are even interested in doing doll clothing. Then post a minimum of once a month on your blog (if you have one) and the project blog about your experience working with the pattern. You don’t have to complete the garment in a month, but you do have to post about where you are and what you are doing. Ideally we’d like to see more than one post from you. But as long as you put something up for other people to read and get information and learn from then you will qualify to get a new pattern the following month.

WF:  If people would like to join the project how do they do that?

JH:  All you have to do is send me an e-mail at vpll.1912@gmail.com saying you’re interested. I have an information file to send out that asks for your contact information and what you’re interested in doing. Once I get that back I put you in a group with likeminded people.  

All of the patterns, as they come out of production, will be available on the website. The patterns will also be available in paper form and direct digital download.

WF:  Do you need to be a member of the VPLL to join the 1912 Project?

JH:  No, it’s open to anyone at all.

To get all the updates on the 1912 Project visit the blog: http://vpll1912project.org

Browse the holdings of the Vintage Pattern Lending Library: http://vpll.org

While there is no cost or required membership to participate in the 1912 Project there is significant cost to preparing and mailing all of the patterns that are part of the project. If you are interested in helping to defray the costs of the project, you can make a donation to the project via Paypal. 

All photos courtesy of Janyce Hill and the Vintage Pattern Lending Library.

Editrix de Mode and Part Time Lion Tamer, Wilhelmina Frame travels the globe in pursuit of adventure and style. When not in the circus ring with Rajah, her tiger and the rest of her kitten kabal (seven lions, three cheetahs and a rather droll panther), Ms. Frame can be seen at the most fabulous parties, in the latest fashions, sparkling with wit in conversation. Ms. Frame's alter-ego, Gretchen Jacobsen, is a freelance producer, self taught costumer and prolific crafter. You can follow her @ptliontamer on Twitter. She sings quite well also.