A really useful tip

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You will recall last Friday’s fun resource, TemplateMaker, and the fact that a regular sheet of paper was too small for most of the templates to be usable. I suggested that you could print a template out and enlarge it if you were “handy with a straightedge.”

At some random point after that, it flashed into my head that I was taught how to do exactly that in costume construction class (i.e., sewing lessons) in college.

from The Cut of Women’s Clothes, Waugh

First, some context: Back in the Olden Times, my children, we didn’t have historical costume patterns from Vogue or plotter/printers. All we had were costume reference books like Stage Costume Techniques and The Evolution of Fashion and The Cut of Women’s Clothes, and we had to learn to draft our own patterns like our Cro-Magnon ancestors did: by hand.

Oh sure, we could put the book in the opaque projector and trace the projection — once we got it the right size — but mostly we would photocopy the pattern and then enlarge it… WITH MATH!

Here’s how it works: If you wanted a gift box that was 10” on each dimension, the resulting template would be far too big to print on one piece of paper. (Hold that thought.) So reduce the dimensions to an easy-to-multiply fraction of that: Instead of creating a template with 10” sides, create one with 2” sides, i.e., 1/5 of 10.

Print it out.

Pattern from www.templatemaker.nl/en/

Affix it to your big piece of paper in the lower left corner. If you’re going to use the big one as a pattern, just tape the little one down and cut through it when you cut out the big one. If the big one is your actual gift box, use temporary double-sided tape.

We’re going to ignore the flaps and concentrate on the box walls for the purposes of this demo.

We’ll start with that bottom line. It’s 2”, we want it to be 10”, i.e., multiplied by five. Draw a line out from the bottom left corner, along the bottom edge, mark 10”.

Next do the left hand side. It’s 6”, so extend a line to 30”.

Here’s where it gets weird, and in the case of more complicated models, messy.

Pick another point. I’m going to pick the corner A.

  1. Draw a line from our origin point to A.

  2. Measure it. Multiply that x 5.

  3. Extend the line to that measurement.

So, using my superior trigonometry skills — and also the Triangle Calculator — I find that the diagonal line is 6.325”. (It is perhaps worth mentioning now that if you can do this in metric, you probably should.) Multiplied by five: 31.675”. Make it so.

Repeat with as many points as you can stand, then connect the dots. With costume pieces back in the day we would lay out all corners, then grab a few points on any troublesome curves to help us sketch it in. Also, if your measurements lie within your yardstick, you don’t really have to draw the line: just mark the point. (If you think you’re going to be doing this a lot, I highly recommend a metal ruler; you can get them as long as 48”, marked in inches and millimeters.)

As you can probably tell, this is not an exact science. You’re going to be doing a lot of eyeballing and adjusting (aka GESTALT/SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION), and it is time consuming until you get good at it. (It’s a miracle any of our costumes fit.)

There is another option, and that is to

  1. Back at templatemaker.nl, put in your actual dimensions.

  2. Select the size of paper you’re going to print on.

  3. Request Tile (PDF) as a product.

For our 10”x10”x10” box, printing on US letter/landscape, that produces a PDF of 24 pages, which you then have to cut and overlap and tape back together. It’s all about which hassle you want to deal with. If I think about it, on Monday I’ll give you a life-changing tip on how to get things like this taped together with a minimum of fuss or swearing.