RELATED PAGES: Children's Costume

The Illustrated Hassle-Free Make Your Own Clothes Book was published in paperback in the early 1970's and has the clearest explanations for making clothes without patterns I've ever seen, and as it is long out of print, I'm going to provide some of the pages below (and others to be credited variously). I have a letter from the publisher giving me permission to photocopy, though I would much rather it be republished! It was written and illustrated by Sharon Rosenberg and Joan Wiener. If anyone knows a good source for the whole book online that would be fantastic. The paperback I have was done on cheap paper, and the glue died years ago.

UPDATE! It was republished in the UK in 2008, and it is here with quite a few preview pages: The Illustrated Hassle-Free Make Your Own Clothes Book By Joan Wiener Bordow, Sharon Rosenberg

Click to enlarge, print to print, but it seems you can borrow the whole book for two weeks electronically here: "This book can be borrowed for 14 days." (Archive.org)

Here's someone else's blogpost about the book, with some pages presented.

International Beauties—a Cinch to Sew, from the June 1971 issue of Woman's Day magazine. The diagrams make things that are much nicer than the illustrations show.

I will add the diagram from which I first made one of these. It was in a history of costume book I've never seen except at the library at UNM. But here are directions I wrote up once when I loaned one of Keith's out. You can see the flat appearance of it. Other than the surprising skirt shape, it's like any t-tunic, or the diagrams above, from the hips up.

And for anyone curious about what that artwork showing through the paper is, it's one of the original Fight-a-Knight scrolls from al-Barran. That batch was all hand-colored by Sir Stefan of the Wanderers, who had a broken leg and had to sit anyway, and myself, and we learned from that demo NEVER to put the date on a fight-a-knight scroll again! The calligraphy and art are mine. Probably Stefan colored it.