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What's New at VintageSewing.info

April 27, 2008

If you are interested in our day-to-day activities, we've started a progress blog. There is a learning curved involved with RSS and CSS and PHP and all the other acronyms, so please be patient while we sort it all out.

April 26, 2008

We're ba-a-a-ack! It has been a very intense three years in the "real" world. Things appear to be settling into a stable pattern and I will resume adding new works. (There was a major promotion, change in marital status, an organ removal and a chronic health condition, first-time home ownership of a broken-down fixer-upper, and the adoption of a rescue dog, to name a few happenings.)

And then there are the pirates. Not the hot media darlings of 2006; the ones who subvert the purpose of this site. If you look at the bottom of each page, you will notice something new:

You see, there are thieves who have stolen our content, burned it onto disks and have been auctioning it off (without attribution, to boot) on eBay. One of the thieves desisted (after sending an abusive email in response to our cease-and-desist notice). The other thief, in Australia, seems not to care. But thank you to those of you who contacted me to let me know this was going on. I don't have the resources to spend on shutting down someone halfway around the world; however, if you know this person and can bring personal pressure on them to cease and desist, it would certainly bring a smile to my face.

There is a misperception that because the original copy of the works published on this site are in the public domain that this web site's renderings of them are fair game for anyone to use in any manner. The original works are in the public domain; the VintageSewing.info version of them is copyright by the Vintage Sewing Reference Library, Inc. We exist to freely share the information—emphasis on the FREE. As the Creative Commons license explains in clear, human, terms:

You are free:

• To Share — to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Can I make it any more clear? You do NOT have permission to repackage the information on this site to sell it, or to charge admission or in any way impede free access to it. This information is to be FREELY shared. I encourage you to share it; you need only include a link or text reference back to this site so people can find their way here and see what other information we have. If you choose to copy entire passages or works to your own site, you must include a clearly visible attribution on each page (for example, the original web version of this work can be found at VintageSewing.info). You can use the images for noncommercial purposes; if used on web sites, include an attribution and link to us (for example, image courtesy of VintageSewing.info). You may use the images or information for your presentations and include them in your local sewing guild's newsletters, again, with an attribution. If you want to use any of the images on items that will be sold, you need explicit permission (contact me).

If this seems restrictive to you, you are free to acquire an original print version of the work or image, scan it, OCR it, format and code it, clean up the images, and do whatever you would like. If you use anything published by Vintage Sewing Reference Library, Inc., it must be under the terms stated herein.

Back to the topic of new works being added, I would like to let you know that drafting manuals are very dreary to proofread. They are a delight to work with in the real world, allowing you to save a bundle on vintage patterns and to make recreations that fit your own modern body, but they are a bear to get from paper to web form. I am actively proofreading the unending M. Rohr's 1957 Pattern Drafting & Grading, Women's and Misses' Garment Design, inluding junior's, sub-teens, teens, and half sizes, but it's slow going.