About "Pattern Magic"

During Winter Break a group of instructors and classmates got together to do a "Japanese Pattern making" using the book "Pattern Magic, Vol. 1 and 2" by T. Nakamichi. The first step was to get the volume 1 book; this took a very long time since the book was out of print: in my case I had to buy one used copy from a bookstore in New York, and it took over a month to arrive! (I think they sent it via "burro" mail).

The second step was to create the bodice block according to the instructions of T. Nakamichi. OMG! it was really a mysterious magic to produce...the book is in metric system which is really easy for me since I was raised and educated with it; but, the instructions are incomplete and confusing. It took a good 4 hours to create the Japanese bodice block; me and Mr. M. (my classmate) end up very tired and frustrated. When we meet the rest of the patter makers to share our blocks, we all realized that the book uses a dress form that is not the same as our size 8 PGMs or American dress forms. The "Bunka" style dress form of the book, is very "flat" on the front, the side seams are about 1.5" moved towards the Center Back, and the waist line was about 2" higher than the usual PGM dress form.

Anyway, we went ahead and started producing the different styles of bodices. I particularly liked the neck and collar treatments; Mrs. L loved the "black hole" dress and the twisted knit top. Mrs. C worked on the "Bamboo" bodice and created a skirt for it (she needed to move the side seams to match our dress forms); Mr. E and Mrs. S where interested in the "pop up cubes"; and, Mrs. S made a cool pattern for it (zillions of little pieces, aggggh!). And in my case, I worked the "bow" bodice with an OK overall success.

Volume 2 of the series was not even discuss since we all found that the instructions were not clear. This is a book series that works wonders for ideas; but in my opinion, not great for learning pattern making.