12 Lessons in Making Your Own Clothes

Wow, that was intense. I just finished republishing a 12-book out-of-print series from 1921, A Complete Course in Dressmaking in Twelve Lessons. All 12 lessons are now available as free downloadable epubs — links below. So far, paperback versions are available (for purchase) for the first three lessons; we’ll do the rest if there’s enough interest.

A thousand 100-year-old line drawings passed through my hands as I extracted them from scans of the original books, removed the sepia background, the dust, the fly spots. As far as the text, I worked from OCR scans, so the manuscript started out full of out-of-place running headers and page numbers, “tne” instead of “the” errors in infinite variety, and, just to keep me on my toes, the occasional missing paragraph. Also, apparently it’s entertaining for OCR scanners to occasionally substitute “Line AD” for “Line AB” when telling people where to cut their pattern pieces.

So it’s a lovely little rescue mission I’ve run from the year 1921. The book series was written by Isabel DeNyse Conover, a contemporary writer for ladies’ magazines, and it mixes fashion advice and ideas for nicening things up with detailed DIY how-to’s for the person who wants to take the world of clothing into their own hands.

Modern clothing manufacturers are happy to put a strip of plastic into the shoulders of the “comfortable, natural” pajama shirts they sell you, rather than do a bit of stay-stitching. They prefer to assault your skin with open seams stitched and serged with polyester thread than take the extra time and fabric to make French seams or other comfortable finishes. It’s all about profit; it’s not about you.

One wonderful and empowering thing about doing your own sewing is that you can make healthy, exquisite clothing you love and tell those other guys to go to hell. You can use all-natural fabric and make exactly what you want in a high-quality, self-tailored way. You can be you, not them.

The books are somewhat haphazardly organized and named, but I get it — it’s a hard subject to organize. The volume on making men’s clothes (12) is also home to a section on types of fabric and how to clean them, plus a section about easy make-overs (“upcycling” nowadays) for women’s clothing. The upshot is that you can find delightful content in each volume that you were not expecting….

And overall they did a great job. Going through these 12 volumes word by word and image by image, I became intimately aware of the tremendous amount of good work the original writers, illustrators, and page layout artists poured into this classic guide to great sewing. I’m pleased to have been able to bring it back to life.

Ideally, you would start with Lesson 1 and work your way through in order. That way, when they say in Lesson 6, “Make a kimono sleeve as in Lesson 2,” you won’t lose your mind. But it’s perfectly possible to start anywhere in the series and have a good, productive time, and whatever level of sewing expertise you have will have been enriched by deep knowledge and fortified with a liberal dose of “Of course you can make smoking jackets, boys’ hats, Russian blouses, party frocks, lined coats, whatever you like. Just follow along with us.”

I’ve reproduced the book’s original index at the end of this post, to give you an idea of the scope of the lessons.

The volumes are: