As many of you know we used to carry historical sewing patterns. I remain in contact with a few of the remarkable people who research and create these patterns, designers who often work for little financial return in the face of overwhelming odds. One of these designers is Deb Salisbury of The Mantua-Maker. Deb has been a costumer for as long as I can remember, and now not only sells her patterns wholesale to other pattern providers, but direct to the public through her secure shopping cart.

I learned last week that Deb has geared up again and is finalizing several patterns that have been on her drafting board for about five years. One of them, the Mystic Mine Bodice, is nearly ready for release, and I thought I’d let all of you who read my blog in on the news.

What follows is direct from Deb Salisbury herself:

Style and elegance were critical to the Victorian fashionable mentality. Even middle class women aimed to achieve some sort of panache in their mode of dress, if only in a few ribbons. But the most obtainable part of dress was the style itself.

By the early 1870’s, patterns were available through mail order, and everyday sorts of women’s magazines were publishing pattern supplements in most issues, sometimes in the form of a tiny line drawing of pattern pieces, sometimes as whole – but single sized – patterns. These full sized magazine patterns had the disadvantage of having five or ten patterns on the same sheet of paper, with all of the dashed and dotted lines crossing and crisscrossing like an ancient city’s road map. As insane as these sheets appeared, they made a ghost of high fashion available to all home seamstresses. One of the sources for this pattern is the supplemental pattern sheet in the July 25, 1874 issue of Harper’s Bazar.