I always wondered if any of my children would take up needlework when they became adults. They all learned basic sewing skills (as well as basic carpentry skills, cooking skills, etc.) as children but you never know which they will enjoy as adults. My oldest daughter, Carrie Merrell, has taken up quilting and her grandmother, Laura Nehring, would have been pleased. I think one of the things that appealed to both of them (and to me) in quilting is the math.

Carrie has just released her first ebook, the Quilty Math Workbook. It’s one of those books you look at and wonder Why Didn’t I Think of That? When I design a quilt, I spend hours figuring out how much of each fabric I need. And the next time I design a quilt, I start all over from scratch figuring out how much of each fabric I need. Carrie has organized the designing and math of a quilt into graphs and tables that you fill in as you go. The graphs help you visualize your developing quilt first as blocks and then as an entire quilt top. Then, as you work down each table, she has you apply simple math to the measurements of your quilt block to figure out how much fabric you need. And I use to figure out the math from scratch every time I designed a new quilt – Never Again! I’m using her workbook to keep my designs organized and the fabric calculations as simple and fast as possible.

Recently I was looking at an old Interface Age magazine (Sept 1978, p. 76-81) and I ran across this gem. It’s a program on a vinyl record, called a Floppy Rom, that prints out McCalls sewing pattern 6066 for the dress pictured above in sizes 9-13. The program is designed to print out the pattern on a 132 character wide printer in multiple long strips that you tape together. The pattern is mapped as it was sized on the pattern sheets. There is no provision to dynamically adjust the pattern.

For you geeks out there, a bit about the Floppy Rom. The Floppy Rom is a 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record that is thin enough to be bound in a magazine. Usually these records held one song or some audio advertising but a technique was developed so that the vinyl record could store digital data in the Kansas City standard, a format originally developed for audio cassette tapes.

Click on the link to see the full article The Automated Dress Pattern for the Apple II by Wm. V. R. Smith III, (c) Artsci Publishing. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. You can follow Bill’s current company and learn a little more about how the pattern program was developed under the history section at Artsci Publishing and learn a little more about Bill on his web page William V. R. Smith.

Historically many companies in the textile field produced educational/promotional material about how their products were made. The practice was popular in the first half of the 20th century but began to loose favor after WWII as manufacturing processes became more sophistocated and patented processes and trade secrets in manufacturing became more common. Targeted audiences for this educational/promotional material were Home Economics teachers and their classes and salesmen and their clients. Boye® made this educational card showing how needles are made sometime after 1921 when they started producing needles.

You can read most of the information directly off of the card but I have a few close up photos of the steps that form the eye of the needle. Excuse the rust in some of the photos – the card is old!

Step 5   impression of eyes for two needles

Step 6   eyes punched through

Step 7   broken in two

Step 8   ground