Introducing the PRAGMATIC COSTUMER

The Pragmatic Costumer age 15

I've been blogging for about 2 1/2 years now. And because of this have become aware of many wonderful sewing and costuming bloggers. I've even become friends with a few.

Most blogs have have cleaver sewing or costuming related names. One name that caught my attention early on was The Pragmatic Costumer. I consider myself a pragmatic person and actually wished I had thought of that name! Click this to read her Pragmatic Manifesto.

Well, some time passed and I came across an interesting blog praising the virtues and versitility of my really basic costume dress pattern #3723.

I get sales records twice year for my patterns. And several times this pattern has been the number one seller. Of course I'm happy when a pattern sells well, but with all the other patterns I've designed I found this curious.

So, when I saw this blog all about this pilgrim/prairie pattern, I clicked on the link to read it and ... guess what? It was written by The Pragmatic Costumer! Click this to read it yourself. And for part 2 click this.

How could I not love this woman??

BTW, she gives good advise about the armhole.

So, I asked her to be a guest here on my blog and she said YES!

I asked how she got into sewing and her are her answers.

Sewing for me started off as a pitter-patter: making Halloween costumes out of household stuff with my mom (like a bathrobe angel when I was 5) and learning to hand sew (badly) so I could make clothes for my Barbies. I did a lot of costuming for theater and literature events, but most of that was thrifted/assembled rather than sewn to save time. When you take a lot of English Drama classes, you begin to realize how important clothes are to portraying a character properly. I was intrigued, but very intimidated and often discouraged because of the amount of nit-picking that goes on in the historical costuming arena. The "real" sewing didn't start until I got out of college and found myself at a new job in a new town without familiar faces, so I had a lot of freetime to fill. I still loved costumes, did research during breaks at work, and would go home wanting to copy what I had seen. So it began: as hobbled and ill-supplied as it was (the area I was living in had no fabric or craft store besides Walmart within a 100+ radius). So I guess you could say I dove in, though my method was more like a haphazard cannonball...

I wasn’t born a costumer. Indeed, sewing was a mystery until I was out of college. I did, however, come from a very creative family and we always visited craft stores when I was growing up. When I was in middle school, I remember discovering the Simplicity costume pattern catalogue. Around that time, Renaissance fairs were extremely popular and the earliest incarnations of Simplicity’s renaissance-inspired pattern lines began rolling out onto shelves and into my dreams. I couldn’t resist buying Simplicity 5517 because it was so cute and I argued with my sister over which version of 8192 was prettiest. 

For my 8th grade Halloween costume, my mother very kindly sewed me my first bodice from Simplicity 0663, the Celtic Lady pattern, which I had been obsessing over for months. I wish I still had it! All I have left are angsty teen MySpace photos. Ah, memories.

An interesting lady, indeed. Come back on Friday to read the blog she as written specially as a guest here.