Another 17th C. Dress Patterns Book!

EEP!  If you loved the first Seventeenth-Century Women’s Dress Patterns — okay, and even if you didn’t! — the next installment, Seventeenth-Century Women’s Dress Patterns: Book 2, comes out on May 1, and can be preordered now.

It sounds really cool, particularly all the info on stays:

Book Two in the V&A’s groundbreaking new series presents 17 patterns for garments and accessories from a 17th-century woman’s wardrobe. It includes patterns for a loose gown, a jacket, a pair of stays and a boned bodice, ivory and wooden busks, shoes, a hat, a stomacher, linen bands and supporters, a bag, and a knife case. It also features a description of the stay-making process. Full step-by-step drawings of the construction sequence are given for each garment to enable the reader to accurately reconstruct them. There are scale patterns and diagrams for making linen and metal thread laces and embroidery designs. Multiple photographs of the objects, close-up construction details and X-ray photography reveal the hidden elements of the clothes, the precise number of layers and the stitches used inside.

If it’s anything like the first book, it will be of interest to those into 16th c. costume as well!