Scaling Up Waugh

Envelopes help keep things organized

Today I went to the copy center to scale up a few Norah Waugh patterns.  What I thought was going to be a 10-minute project turned into about 3 hours of me fussing with the machine and scissors, tape and paper, book and…know how you know you’ve got something right?  The task starts to sail and hum, there is actual progress along with action.

Here’s what I learned: to scale the patterns marked 1-6 inches up, 1 inch = 1/4’ in the book.  This may hold true for the other patterns, marked 1 – 3 as well, although these look smaller, but I haven’t tried them yet.  By selecting “400%”  (the max allowed by the copy machine I was using, just by coincidence) I expanded the inch unit on the pattern up to an actual inch.  That was the easy part, actually getting an entire pattern piece to print out on one sheet of paper was another story.

Anyway, after making a mess and wasting at least $4.00, I learned to make a base copy at 100% first (to avoid damaging the book) and then I cut out the tiny corset pieces.  (This was my favorite part of this process, btw.) 

Then, I lay my pieces, one by one, in turn, long-ways in the corner of the copy machine bed, (the corner of the copy machine with the arrow pointing this-a-way) selected 400% in size and legal-sized paper and voila!  A full-sized, paper pattern, one corset piece to each sheet!

Full-Sized Pattern

I did three corsets this way and purchased some manila envelopes to keep them all organized.  Each tiny corset and each full-scale piece, cut out, is now in it’s own individual corset pattern envelope with a picture and description of the corset on the outside of the envelope.  Inside the larger envelope, I tucked the tiny corset pieces into their own regular, business-sized envelope so they wouldn’t get lost.

Now that I know what I’m doing, it is, in fact, a 10-minute job!  However, here’s the tricky part: even scaled up, the patterns look very tiny, like about a size “0” or “2” in current US sizes.  Without measuring, the waist looks to be about a 22", so there’s still much work to be done.