My daughter and I had a girls’ weekend and enjoyed watching Mamma Mia 2. We were both mesmerized by the colors, costuming, and scenery in the movie which takes place on a Greek island. This orange full skirt that young Donna wears while singing in and dancing in a grove of trees was one of our favorite images.

So, I did want any good (insane) mother does, I told my daughter I would make her a long orange skirt. Maybe it would transport us to that luscious place in the Aegean with those dreamy suitors.

We looked at various patterns and decided that the folkloric tiered-style skirt wasn’t really our style, especially since we had already found the fabric. It was a drapey burnt-orange silk charmeuse, which seemed wrong for the tiered-style skirt. I looked at various flare skirt patterns, but they just weren’t full enough, however, I worried that a typical full skirt with gathers at the waist would not be flattering. Then I picked up my copy of Vionnet, a Japanese pattern book. We found the skirt.

The skirt was going to be a bit of a challenge. For one, I couldn’t read the directions. It is all in Japanese. Secondly, it required a lot of fabric – over 7 yards. Yikes!

How do I know that if I can’t read Japanese? Luckily, all the patterns are on a grid with a scale of one block equaling 10 square centimeters, or about 4 square inches in full size. The patterns also have alphabet letters to denote match points on all of the pattern pieces.

Since I am such a big fan of the designer, Madeleine Vionnet (obviously, I bought this book that is written in Japanese), I couldn’t wait to make one of her skirts. The skirt had an interesting design to it, and was reminiscent of the barrel sleeve shirt I had sewn. (read more here).

Vionnet masterfully used geometric shapes in her patterns and this skirt was no exception. It is simply a circle sectioned into quadrants and squares. The pattern is also typical of the way Madeleine Vionnet would incorporate bias in her designs. She used bias to give movement to a garment and flatter the body but the seams were ideally placed on-grain. Very clever!

The Japanese pattern book is a great companion book to Betty Kirke’s famous book titled Madeleine Vionnet (“Kirke’s book”). Kirke’s book is a richly detailed book about Madeleine Vionnet and her designs. Kirke’s book was originally published in 1991 in Japan, when no one else would take on her manuscript. It was only later translated into English and published in the United States in 1998. The Japanese definitely appreciated the merits of Kirke’s extensive research about Vionnet and her detailed depictions of Vionnet’s designs.

The Japanese pattern book, Vionnet (“Bunka book”) was published in 2002 by the Bunka Fashion College, who got Kirke’s permission to illustrate the same patterns she had used in her book and that she had drafted from Vionnet’s original garments. The main difference between the patterns shown in Kirke’s book and the Bunka book is that the patterns are shown to scale along with pictorial construction renderings in the Bunka book, while Kirke’s book gives detailed descriptions of the garments such as how it was constructed and the fabric used. The Bunka book is also strictly a pattern book of only some of the garments in Kirke’s book. The pattern numbers in the Bunka book correspond with the same pattern number in Kirke’s book. For example, the skirt is Pattern 18 in both the Bunka book and Kirke’s book.

On a side note, Bunka Fashion College also published the innovative series of pattern books, Pattern Magic by Tomoko Nakamichi and Drape Drape by Hisako Sato. I really enjoy these books as well, and you can definitely see the Vionnet influence.

As I mentioned before, the Bunka book states that one square, which measures 1.2 cm squared in the book equals 10 cm squared full size. For a few of the patterns in the book, I actually took the book to a professional graphics company (Pro-graphics in Nashville) to have the pages scanned into a computer, then blown up to scale and printed on large sheets of paper. As a side note, my understanding from the professional at Pro-graphics is that it is not as simple as just enlarging the book to a certain percentage and printing it. He had to actually plot the scanned image in a software application to get the correct size, so he could not tell me a percentage or scale he used to get it to full size. The total cost per page in the book to scan, plot, and print was approximately $10. Below is an example of one of the patterns I had printed (Pattern 11, One Seam Dress).

The One Seam Dress was the first garment I attempted to make from an enlarged pattern from the Bunka book. The dress was eventually a success after a couple of muslins.

My takeaway is that this Bunka pattern was probably based on standard sizing for a Japanese woman, which is different than American sizing. This pattern in particular was based on a woman with about a 32-34 inch bust, and 34 inch hip. I ended up adding at least 4 inches to the hip area to get a good fit. Regardless of what pattern you have, making a toile of the garment first is a must. I did find Kirke’s descriptions most helpful when putting the garment together.

Obviously, printing all the patterns in the book could get rather expensive and grading the right size even more challenging. So for the skirt pattern (Pattern 18), I decided to just draft it myself and not have it printed. It’s just a little math right???

Check out the follow-up to this post – Mamma Mia: Here I go Again!