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Reprinted from the Sunday
Omaha, NE World Herald 2/1/76
From Taiwan to the massive, white frame
home on the edge of this central Nebraska town of 1,000, she has brought an
enthusiasm for the oriental art of pattern making.
She wants t o
spread the word. Painstakingly she
has fashioned her methods and 1300 drawings into a 194- page guidebook for other
would be at home designers.
She paid to have the
first 500 copies of “Sarah’s
Key to Pattern Drafting” printed by a firm in Lincoln, began doing her own
demonstrations and promotions, and now is hoping that a nationally known
publisher will do the rest.
“I got so excited
myself,” said the petite, young homemaker.
“It was such a terrific thing, that I wanted to share it.
I’ve made things I never dreamed of making my own.”
These days give her
some old newspaper and about 20 minutes and Mrs. Doyle is confident she can come
up with a pattern for just about any wearing apparel her family of eight might
have in mind.
“They’re always way
ahead of me,” she said. “When
they come to something they like, they’ll say, ‘Hey, do you suppose you can
make me something like this?’ and I can.
They just turn down the page to remind me.”
There
are a lot of turned down pages in the magazines and catalogues around the Doyle
house – and a lot of clothing in the closets.
She has lots of
reasons, practical ones, for her pattern making:
Saving money, creating exactly what she wants, having an exact fit, never
having two outfits alike.
Her statement that “I
guess I’d rather sew than eat” is just as much a part of it.
Mrs. Doyle got her
exposure to pattern- making, Oriental style, during a three-year service-related
stay in Tainan, Taiwan. While her
husband, Reuben, an Air Force tech sergeant, looked after their six children,
she would catch a bus and join young Taiwanese women in sewing and
pattern-making classes for three hours, four nights a week.
For the Taiwanese, such
lessons are a traditional prerequisite to marriage.
A Taiwanese friend she met in church helped Mrs. Doyle bridge the
language and cultural barriers.
The
motivation came from several sources.
She had been sewing since her grade school years on a farm near Pawnee
City, Neb., and remembers being frustrated when she couldn’t find the right
pattern.
Then four years ago, it became a family sort of project when she and
Reuben combined households – his four children, her two.
Taking in sewing supplemented the budget.
“He’d lay out the
material and maybe help cut it,” she said.
“I’d do the sewing. We
could do a lot more that way and it was pretty neat doing things together.”
They were both excited
when orders came for Taiwan. They
had heard of Oriental sewing. They
decided Sarah should learn - - and he would learn from her.
Doyle wasn’t the only
one who learned from her. She was
barely through the beginner’s course – one of three classes she would take
before perfecting tailoring – when other air force wives were caught up by her
enthusiasm.
She suspects part of
the reason was the difficulty getting patterns in Tainan.
“We had a PBX ,”
she said, “and you could order patterns.
They weren’t the latest ones and the selection was really limited.
Supposedly you could get them in three days.
Once I ordered some, but when I went to pick them up they’d already
been sold to someone else.”
Mrs.
Doyle, in classes of up to 10 students each, provided them with an alternative
-- designing their own. She began
working on a book to make the teaching easier.
Women were asking her
to set up still more classes when Doyle got the orders they had hoped for.
They would be returning to the Midwest – to the Silver Creek, Neb., Air
Force Station, near Genoa. Mrs.
Doyle’s father, Warren Bloss, still lives on the family farm in Pawnee City.
If Florida-raised Reuben can tolerate the cold winters, they plan to
retire in the area when his 20 years in the service ends in 1977.
The best she could
promise her would be pupils was “I’ll send you a copy of my book.”
She kept her word. Even
before the furniture had arrived from Taiwan last July and before the curtains
were sewn together, Mrs. Doyle’s book was at the printers.
Her
method, she believes, is as simple and basic as is possible. She needs 22
measurements from the person she plans to sew for.
With those figures she constructs a standard set of three patterns –
bodice, sleeve, pants – that can be used as the standard for any creation.
She
considers it a practical kind of designing – useful clothes, rather than fancy
New York high fashions. Hers is
sketch-it-yourself style, using old newspapers for the patterns “because
they’re around.” She compares
the learning difficulty to that of typing.
Mrs. Doyle sews like
she believes like most homemakers do – between other household duties.
Her own sewing machine is set up in a nook off her kitchen, where she can
interrupt a project to stir something on the stove or help one of the children
with a lost item.
The afternoon we
visited, winter coats were the project next in line – for Tim, 14, Robin, 13,
Cynthia, 12, Anthony, 11, Denise, 7, and Michael, 5.
They would be wool ones, pile lined, the kind that might cost $25 each in
a store. She estimated her cost for
all of them at $42.
“I guess you could
figure my time, too,” she added, “but I don’t count that.
I spend my time doing something. It
might as well be constructive.”
So far copies of
Mrs. Doyle’s book have sold mostly by word of mouth.
She also has been demonstrating her concepts at get-togethers similar to
the popular jewelry and house wares parties.
"It’s pretty
discouraging trying to find a publisher," she said, "but the
demonstration parties have been quite a bit of fun."
It’s
just that she would like to spend more time at her sewing machine.
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