Quite Specific Information

It doesn't take much to get me interested enough in a book to buy it, and this goes doubly so for books that are both in my realm of interest, and that change over time. Triply, I guess I should say. Years ago, I bought a pair of slim paper-covered pamphlets from a friend; they are two parts of a series of correspondence courses in sewing, dressmaking, millinery, and fashion design, by Mary Brooks Picken of the Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences , dated 1916/1921. (Interestingly, I have a string-bound downmarket version of this sort of thing from the early 50's that was my maternal grandmother's. It's much the same, but about twenty years later.) A few weeks ago, I saw an intriguing picture on the internet from something that appeared to be a much later version of this work; so I went to Bookfinder and got a copy. Turns out I hadn't paid enough attention to that original picture though, and so the edition I initially got was different enough from

The McDowell Garment Machine is a pretty interesting contraption, used to convert a set of measurements into a bodice pattern that you can trace and cut out of fabric and make without having to do a lot of drawing. I have a few different ones, but this one arrived missing some knurled thumb knobs, which makes it impossible to use. The machine itself is made out of engraved strips of brass, held together with rivets and screw-threaded rivets or rivet-headed screws, depending on how you look at it. There are also a few actual screws with a "plow" built into the head to keep them aligned in a slot. Without the knurled knobs, you can't "set" the axes of the strips to the desired sizes, which means the whole thing is useless.    These screws, at least in the example in my collection, are standard 5-40 threads. So now you can order replacements with impunity and know they won't cross-thread!

I've thought about this blog for ages. There are some things that you really want to know (when you have weird and far-ranging hobbies like mine) and which you simply cannot find, for some reason, on the internet. So as an idle sort of public service, I'm going to start posting some of the stuff I find interesting and potentially useful.