Fun Friday Resources—on a Monday!

I was out of town most of last week and am easing back into the real world today, so have a "light-blogging" resource day!

This is a rather specialized resource, but one very dear to my heart: costuming.  My undergraduate degree is in theatre, and I was a costumer at the University of Georgia.  (Costume design class was where I met my lovely first wife, and we were both costume assistants.)

Head over to CostumingDiary.com and check it out, especially the free patterns page.  This is the kind of thing we would have killed for back in the day.  Until the late 1990s, if you wanted to build historical costumes, your options were pretty much limited to buying one of the standard resource books (Waugh, Hill & Bucknell, Holkeboer, et al.) and then drafting those patterns yourself.

By the time I decided to costume The Winter's Tale in Elizabethan garb (1995), however, there were actual patterns in sizes! available for purchase, and the situation has vastly improved since then, mostly because of cosplay and Cons of one description or another.  Consider yourself fortunate to live in such a time.

I think the Custom Corset Pattern Generator is a thing of beauty.  It almost makes me want to do a huge costume show.  Almost.