Do it Yourself: Re: [DIY] Wood Cut Sheet

02 January 2013

Re: [DIY] Wood Cut Sheet

There certainly is a place and a need for hand tailoring, it is just that no one is doing it around these parts anymore. I fondly recall when J C Penny's sold trousers without cuffs and the in house seamstress hemmed and turned them to fit both the customer and the style of the day. You could even get a pair of jeans or overalls shortened for a half dollar or so. I had an aunt who owned several men's custom clothing stores in California and made a very handsome living hand tailoring men and women's business suits. The sewing machine was a very important addition to every household and most of the farm women made shirts and underwear for the men folks as well as their daughters school dresses. Most on this list may not recall the days when chicken feed and baking flour came in printed sacks which were carefully selected, traded and used to make new clothes for the coming school year. I was an only child and after my father was killed lived with my grandparents for several years. Grandma taught me to hand stitch and run her treadle sewing machine. I made a complete set of hand embroidered dish towels the winter of my eighth birthday. There wasn't much for a kid to do during the long winter evenings, so grandma taught me to sew and grandpa taught me to whittle. Mothers prided themselves in how neatly they could patch a worn or torn pair of jeans and overalls. Shucks I had patches on my patches, and they weren't called designer clothes in those days, we were country kids and those were "clod hopper" togs.

When I went to high school the girls had to take six weeks of shop and the boys were required to take the same period of home economics. This practice is still going on in the small community where we live. You can be sure that the foot stools the girls made far out lasted the shirts and aprons the boys brought home. Well, perhaps I should alter that last remark because you couldn't have gotten the boys to wear one of their hand made shirts with a horse whip and a club, so they probably lasted forever.

Dale in the Flatlands.

Bob Davis wrote:

Dale, I think there is still a place for hand tailored clothing, just as there is a place for quality hand crafted high end furniture. My wife continued to make much of her clothing for a long time after she could afford buying nice clothes. She could modify a pattern to fit her perfectly. She also did custom dresses for some wealthy friends' daughters (senior prom stuff).

Bob

From: DoIt_Yourself@yahoogroups.com [mailto:DoIt_Yourself@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Dale S
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2013 8:46 AM
To: DoIt_Yourself@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [DIY] Wood Cut Sheet

Now that I recall those visions from the distant past, there are a lot of similarities. Women can't afford the yard goods anymore, and those who can don't need to make their own, so I guess that is just another in the long list of individual skills that are going by the wayside. Now it is machine embroidery and quilt making.

Dale in the Flatlands.

Jan Flood wrote:

All this talk about laying out your pattern so as not to waste any material - making sure you get everything aligned with the grain - cutting precisely on the cutting line so you get a good fit......sounds suspecially like man code for making a new dress, LOL. Sawing sounds better than Sewing right?

On 12/31/2012 5:36 PM, John S Moss wrote:

I’m looking for a better way to layout a cut sheet for a woodworking project. I have my materials list, but need to figure out what sizes wood I need to minimize waste. Drawing the layout by hand can get tedious and prone to arithmetic mistakes.

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