154: Three-day Master Class: High-End Jacket, Dress, Slacks Production

High-End Jacket, Dress, Slacks Production with Laurel Hoffmann

If you have always wondered how the industry drafts and sews, this is your chance to learn how they do it. You will be in for many surprises, as this is NOT about home-sewing.   Sign-up link

You will be able to use all of these industrial skills in your home with minimal equipment, as does Laurel when she sews in her home. You will learn many new skills, all of which will enable you to sew slower, finish faster, AND produce professional results.

Here is some of what you will learn: How to determine your BEST pattern size by your chest size – if you choose your pattern size by your bust size and your are NOT a B cup, then it is highly likely you are in the wrong size – probably a size that is too big. How to trace off home-sewing patterns, converting them into industrial patterns as you do so. Determining mistakes in home-sewing patterns. Correctly drafting bust corrections that really fit. Simple grading to speed personal fittings. Sample making techniques, as you will have a number of samples Laurel has made for the course, which are now part of her professional wardrobe. Plus much more. The course is supported with a textbook, which you will use throughout the course, then take home to use as a reference after the course ends.

Why Laurel knows both custom and industrial couture skills:

After moving to Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia and sewing briefly for private customers,  Ann Loyd Jacobs Pakradooni hired Laurel to work as a trainee in her shop, Joie de Vivre, in Ardmore, on the Main Line in Philadelphia where Laurel was trained by two European master tailors. Ms. Pakradooni had a fantastic sense of design. Kennedy had just been elected. Main Line women were starting to come in to have gowns made for his Inaugural Ball.

But the pay was lousy, so Laurel then applied and was hired by the wedding gown manufacturer, Alfred Angelo, where she was first trained how to do layouts by Alfred Angelo’s nephew, then was moved into the couture department where she worked as assistant designer in the manufacture of $10,000 hand-made wedding gowns that sold in Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, NYC, to daughters of the industrialists in NYC.

She moved to Corner House, where she was hired as a fit model and was fortunate to be trained in industrial

grading by Carolyn Ramsey, considered at the time to be the top grader in Philadelphia. Carolyn later drafted asymmetrical jacket patterns  for Jones of NYC.

Finally she was hired to run Anne Carol, a gin mill, where she was hired to produce a new line of clothing. The neighborhood where she was now working was dangerous. The factories were going off shore. It was time to retire and have children. But she was convinced that one day the factories would return. She decided to write down the techniques she had learned. Read on Laurel’s website what happened next.