Fitting shell type 1: Müller/Hofenbitzer

I could use a new set of fitting shells. Last time (2007) I started with a Butterick fitting shell pattern which, in the size I used at the time, probably started off too big in the upper torso, and I was never convinced that I'd got the armholes, shoulders, and upper back quite right. They are now just too big overall and probably don't fit my posture anymore either. Likewise, I drafted trousers using the Minott method, but they are also now too big, and I'm not sure I placed the waist at its real height in that draft.

So I've been looking through these. (I should mention, the Armstrong was in this stack just for completeness because it does very briefly mention taking measurements from a real human, but that isn't anywhere near being the focus of that book. The duct-taped book is a used copy of Jan Minott's Fitting Commercial Patterns.)

What I spend the big bucks on.

In theory I'd like to have drafts from several or all of them to compare to each other. Really, I might be obsessed enough to try it. But for now I'm working on the one in Müller & Sohn's Kleider und Blusen.

I almost started with Guido Hofenbitzer's Maßschnitte und Passform (new late last year) instead. Both of these books create similar styles of basic patterns (with no waist seam to start, unlike the usual American style). They cover certain figure/posture variations and how you can draft a basic pattern differently from the start to address them.

M&P seems less densely written; for one thing, I think it tends to use less of the sentence-structure variation that can make German harder for a non-native speaker (such as myself) to read. It also covers trousers in the same volume, as well as a bigger selection of possible figure variations. This is where I ran into trouble: you have to compare your balance of front and back measurements to an ideal. Then, by using these comparisons and observing the person being measured, you decide what variations (or combinations thereof) are causing the differences from the ideal, and by what amounts different areas will need to be adjusted. I played around with these calculations for quite a while, but eventually felt like I was wandering off into the weeds; in any case, I didn't think I should necessarily trust my measurement set that far in the first place. So I decided to go back to K&B, just get a first draft done and see how well it worked. I hope to come back to M&P later and maybe at least reverse-engineer how my fit issues would have been classified.