How ironic I’m posting this on a Thursday. It just worked out that way; I only found out about this late yesterday afternoon.
Some days, I just feel so lucky to do what I do; I get to meet an incredible wealth of talent I’d never have the opportunity to know otherwise. Which brings me to this new blog I found called Not Enough Thursdays. The site is less a blog than it is an internal conversation between three pattern makers who are close friends (I hope they’re prepared for the deluge the web is about to send their way). Again, as an internal conversation between bi-coastal friends and like emails you send to close friends, spell checking wasn’t a priority so don’t judge it in that vein. The writers are Hannah, Carly and Jessie from Portland OR. I found it because Carly left a comment here yesterday. Hannah recently started working at Nicolas Caito’s pattern service in NY; they do patterns for Proenza, Wang and a lot of big names. Carly makes patterns for an industrial engineering firm called Terrazign Inc and has access to scads of cool toys not normally found in our shops and I’m envious. Jessie is a student at the Portland Art Institute and has an exploratory line on the side called Heating and Cooling.

Scroll down past non-work related posts on hiking trips with breathtaking photography to find entries on problems and solutions, guidance they ask and give to each other. And you can say I’m biased because Fashion-Incubator is frequently mentioned and I can’t deny I’m thrilled that my camel toe solutions (Hannah says they work!) are being used at a leading NY atelier but there’s more to it than that. So few pattern makers blog and I wish more did. Hannah wrote an article about balancing patterns which was good for me because a lot of people have mentioned that or asked me about it and I never knew what they were talking about. So now I know what they’re talking about. And of course I was pleased that Hannah was spot-on in specifying that your back bodice pattern is smaller than your front (at right). It is you know and I get tired of arguing about it so yeah, I guess even the implied corroboration is also self-serving. In the end, it is really cool to read about the inner workings of other people’s jobs in the industry, people you don’t even know and find your work is still so similar with the same worries, problems and concerns. Hannah says she’s surprised at how many garmentos smoke around the piles of fabric they sell, which I’ve always said but nobody mentions it. She’s also surprised at how nice everyone is in the business. They eat their lunch on china with silver utensils everyday at work. Maybe I just want the word to get out? I get so tired of hearing how mean everybody is or how cut throat the business is but from what I’ve experienced, it’s students who can be horribly catty or people fighting to get in who are mean or who are mean maybe because they think everyone else is and that’s the way they should be too but honestly, I can’t think of any mean people I know who’ve stuck around. It’s no different from any other business.

I find Carly’s fashion entries interesting too. Like I said, with so few pattern makers blogging, you have no idea of the styles we find interesting. She picks the sort of thing I would, each represents a drafting challenge. Here’s a very cute dress she made that I think would be very marketable. Again, we see things from a patterning sense. Her construction shown in other projects appears to be immaculate.

Do drop in and say I said hello.