About Laurel
Trained by three different European master tailors, by the layout artist when working in high-end wedding couture, and by the top grader in Philadelphia, Laurel rose to the level of production pattern maker, preparing the work for and overseeing factory production in just three years.
When the industry was going offshore back in the seventies, she decided to write down the skills she had learned, eventually resulting in her being hired to teach fashion techniques in the Philadelphia universities’ fashion program.
Retired to raise her children, she realized that a studio that can design, develop, and test patterns and sewing procedures for the factories can be easily replicated in a home. What is needed is not so much equipment, as an understanding of the methods used in a designing department to design, draft, sew, develop, and test the patterns, fabrics, and procedures that are used to make the clothing in the factories.
Her books present, hands-on, the industrial techniques now provided on computers, that students need to know to understand what the computer is doing. Her step-by-step instructions and diagrams make it possible, even for novices, to draft, fit, and grade without computer assistance, and to produce quality clothing with minimal equipment. Developed in the USA during the first and second World Wars, these are the procedures now used throughout the global fashion industry.