Patterns for coats and capes
This 1917 instruction manual by Mary Brooks Picken, published by the Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences in Scranton, Pennsylvania, teaches home dressmakers how to draft paper patterns for coats and capes. The pages show geometric construction diagrams in which lettered points, curved seam lines and measured guides are drawn on a grid. A designer could take from them the clean, technical language of pattern drafting, with its dashed construction lines, lettered reference points and precise curves used to describe garment shapes.
