 Hi, I'm Rebecca Olds of Time Sniff Just Making. Thank you for joining me. In this video I'm going to show you my attempt to draft a pattern for stays using the ARC method that's outlined in Patterns of Fashion 5. This book was published by the School of Historical Dress. It's only available for purchase directly from the school. I will share a link to their shop in the description below. This video is not going to be a tutorial or even a demonstration of how to do this method for several reasons. Firstly, I'm still very much a student. I did a workshop with Luca Costiglioli last year and even after that workshop I still have some uncertainties about how this method works. So I'm still figuring out each step and how to apply what I've read and how to apply what I've learned in the workshop. This is my very first attempt at this method outside a supervised classroom environment knowing that I was going to be making stays to this pattern down the road. So quite clearly I'm not qualified to teach this. And this brings me to a really key point that I just want to put a marker down and I'll probably say this again in future videos. One-to-one tuition is a really special relationship so I think the knowledge and the skills that a teacher can impart to a student should never be undervalued. And this brings me to a little health warning on YouTube that what you see offered to you for free on the internet you need to remember the context that you are getting what you paid for. So whether a YouTube presenter is an absolute beginner or a renowned expert you are going to get what you paid for. If you're watching a beginner you might be seeing everything that they know and that includes the implicit gaps in their knowledge, the misunderstandings, the modern approaches, the modern shortcuts, and the mistakes that they might unwittingly make and share as part of a tutorial. On the other extreme when you see an expert sharing their knowledge often they are not sharing everything they know. What they are hoping to do is tantalize you, intrigue you to dig deeper. That there is no way that they can give a presentation on YouTube for free that gives the full story to really benefit from their teaching. You will almost certainly need to pay to get into a workshop, get into an in-person class with them, or these days possibly a really well arranged and well structured online class where they can give as personalized attention to you as possible. So when you see stuff on the internet and you've not paid for it, bear that in mind, you could be seeing a beginner, warts and all, or an expert who's just giving you the tip of the iceberg. Most presenters is somewhere in between. So you need to look at think about what you need, how much information, how much depth, how much accuracy you need, learn to recognize whether that presenter is fulfilling that need that you have, and go in and do your own research, do your own homework too. So this video I hope shows you what I did, if not exactly how I figured out or decided what to do. But if you've been reading patterns of fashion 5 puzzling over the extracts in the book from period writers such as Diderot and Gersalt and Reiser and Bernhardt, and then you're looking at just one page about the art drafting method and thinking that's just not enough, then maybe watching someone do it, just getting the paper out, drawing some lines, connecting them up, even if it's not clear exactly why I'm doing it this way, if it makes it more accessible so that you can actually visualize yourself trying it, then that's great. That's what I hope will happen. And if you do go afterwards and try it yourself, I'd love to hear about it. Please, please let me know. If you watch right through to the end, I'm going to share five key takeaways from my experience. As you watch this, you don't know how it's going to turn out. And neither do I. The first thing I did was assemble all of my notes, patterns of fashion 5, notes from the course that Luca taught at the School of Historical Dress, and then the pattern that I had done in the workshop. I think I hoped that by surrounding myself with everything I had collated and collected over the years that I would somehow absorb all of this knowledge and that I would automatically know how to do this. There comes a point when I had to lay out the paper and draw that first vertical line. This is where everything comes off of, is measured from, and the first job it was to determine the length of my torso and draw horizontal lines for the top line, the waist line, bust line. And then from there you go on to find the center front and the back front. As you can see, just about every single thing took several attempts. So then it's on to establishing the arcs for the bust line and the waist line. And I started by just getting something on paper as a reference point that I could start tweaking and just seeing what looked right. The key is to compare the curves with what you see in the pattern, taking the original extant garment as your style guide to try to get the shape of the original stays. Here we go again, third or fourth time. And that means erasing parts of what I had done based on the previous curves that turned out to be wrong. Once the torso length I really struggled with. Once I had that down and some sort of basic curves in, then I mapped in the top line, which means the neckline, the front arm's eye point and the arm's eye itself. Because this is done freehand, what I was aiming for was something that looked elegant. Frankly, I don't think I did a very good job of that. And that's why I was erasing so much on things that were perhaps not quite so fit critical. I even pulled out the shapes cut in the menstrual making class that I took at Burnley and Trowbridge to see if any of the basic proportions of that would help. And unfortunately, not really. And that's because it is all done on the curve on the body. Where stays are patterned on the flat, but in such a way that they then will curve around the body. It's just two different ways of thinking about shaping to the body. And they wore very little resemblance to each other. The next job really was to figure out the high hip, which is where the top of the skirts sit, the line over the hip. And it's on that, that the sort of waistline of any gown has to rest between that line and the waistline. I found that quite tricky too. Curves are tricky. The next step is to divide up what the overall piece into the four pattern pieces. And there is a formula for that taught in the workshop. But it isn't it isn't until a mock up that you can determine on the body exactly where those seams sit and how well they fit. With the seams drawn. My next step is was to shape those seams by drawing freehand again more curves to sort of sort of darts that basically eat into a cut out the each seam to give it shape. And that is where the reduction comes from not just from your lacing gap. But because you're drafting to your measurements all set out there, it's the shaping in certain ways in the seams that join the pattern pieces that provide both the amount of reduction and the shaping and type of reduction in certain areas. As with all my previous work with curves, flexible ruler was of some help, a French curve was of some help protractor was of some help. But at the end of the day, it's getting right out there with your eye. I didn't spend much time on the shaping of the skirt. It's just basically mocked in general width and length, knowing that cutting it out in the mockup would have seam allowances and all sorts of extra and it would give me a just a general idea of fit but shaping the skirts into more elegant fashion would really happen final construction of the the real stays. I think it took the best part of a day to read through all my notes, realize I did not remember clearly enough enough from my workshop to have a great deal of confidence and decided to just dive in and take it one line at a time, one thing at a time that I was not going to be able to visualize the entire process as in the in in its entirety. What I didn't film footage on the cutting room floor all the times I just down to tool and walked away. Okay, so we have a complete pattern. I promised five tips or takeaways, things that I feel I learned from this process. Number one, be super careful when taking your measurements. If you use a string around your body at your bust in your waist, keep them on for a while. There are going to be some measurements you'll want to go back and repeat to verify that you've written them down correctly, or to retake them. So take your time, be careful. Number two, relating to measurements. Specifically, front, back and underarm, you need to be looking at top line, bust line, and waist line, and they will be different lengths at those three points of your body. This dictates the proportion. So be extra careful with these. Number three, this pattern involves drawing curves. It's called the arc method. It relies on three arcs in the pattern for your bust line, your waist line, and a dropped waist or high hip line as well. The degree of curve in these lines does vary from beginning to end. A French curve or using a string to pivot with a pencil will only get you so far. There's a certain amount of freehand drawing you will have to do here. Number four, following on from the previous three points, knowledge of your body is going to come into play. Remember to measure the fullest point of your bust line to your waist line, both front and back. How far below horizontal does your waist sit? Your front waist and your back waist are going to be very different. Front waist is usually lower. Remember the stays can, to some degree, compress the fleshy bits, and they should if they're to support your body. But how squishy will be completely individual to you. Compression will lift some of the tissue. So your bust line and your waist line in stays will be higher than they are naturally. So how your drawing plays out with your curves may not look right to you, and you're going to spend some time trying to reconcile what you think your body looks like with how you expect that you'll look in stays. Until you've drafted stays several times with this method on yourself and ideally some others as well, your expectations won't be wholly right or wholly wrong. But the doubt and indecision will be real. And that brings me to number five. At some point, you're going to have to shut off the overthinking and get on with the rest of the drafting. Even if the step you're on, you're not sure if it's right. You may not know how right things are until you actually get to fitting the mockup that you've made using this pattern. But my advice would be you may be pleasantly surprised. Keep with it. Don't give up. Just move on. Trust the process and take that leap of faith. This video is part one in this staymaking process. Part two will follow in about a week, showing the building of the mockup and that critical first fitting where we finally find out whether the pattern draft actually works. Please subscribe to the channel so that you can stay tuned and see what happens.