“The nightmare for most of us who collect antique patterns is that when generations inherit their mom’s or grandmother’s stuff, the paper, the ephemera, the magazines, the catalogs, the paper patterns - that’s just stuff people throw away,” Greene says. CoPA is home to around 56,000 physical patterns going back to the 1800s, along with books, pamphlets, journals, and other related material. A labor of love and insistence on the part of a small team of historians, costume designers, archivists, and hobbyists, the archive began in the 1990s and includes a physical stash and digital database of English-language patterns unparalleled in its scope and depth. The Commercial Pattern Archive is one of the few projects in the world that safeguards these documents that are fragile, easily forgotten, and born to die. Home sewing patterns aren’t meant to be saved for decades - they’re made to be disposableįor the community of vintage sewing enthusiasts, an unassuming website maintained by the University of Rhode Island is a priceless and irreplaceable treasure. The common pattern’s ubiquitousness only adds to its disposability - patterns were cheap to purchase and finicky to preserve and were never meant to last. And through most of the 20th century, before manufacturers moved production to capitalize on cheap labor abroad, sewing at home was a way to have high-quality clothing for less money.īut scholarship around patterns and home sewing is still relatively underappreciated, often dismissed as women’s work or insignificant to fashion and art. These patterns - flimsy packets of paper covered in shapes, numbers, and symbols - guide sewists through the process of making everything from sweatpants to wedding dresses. Sewing patterns provide a uniquely detailed look at the lives of working-class people throughout history that clothing collections held at museums or universities seldom offer. Kingston, Rhode Island on April 21st 2022. The largest of it’s kind in the world, it contains over 60,000 patterns dating from 1847. The Consumer Pattern Archive housed in Carothers Library at the University of Rhode Island. “Once I knew for a fact that patterns that old existed, I just got lustful for them.” I didn’t even think about how people in the past made their garments, other than going to a tailor,” Greene says. “It didn’t occur to me that patterns themselves were that old. It began a decades-long hunt as she searched for the oldest possible examples to add to her personal archive. Old patterns are used as references by costume designers, especially when working on period pieces, and seeing Williams’ collection was formative for Greene. In 1994, Greene was a 24-year-old stitcher at the New York City Opera when she was brought along to visit Betty Williams, a costume designer and researcher with a large antique pattern collection. And like other collectors, she is paranoid about losing them: to fire, flood, and mice or simply the indifference of people whose first instinct would be to toss them in the trash. Greene has collected at least 10,000 patterns - possibly 20,000 - since the 1990s. Greene keeps her antique sewing patterns in plastic tubs, stashed in the first-floor workshop of her old Victorian home so she can throw them out the window if her house goes up in flames.
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