Happy Halloween

No Halloween shall be complete without my favorite antique October accessory:

 

Sofia is visiting us again.

Sofia has only ever travelled as far as our home in Norfolk,  but she Will. Not. Stop. speaking about how any day now she’ll ride away to London, crash a ball at Devonshire House and make Lord Byron fall madly in love with her, and they will run away together to Italy, where they will cohabit in a ruined Catholic abbey and spend their nights writing epigrams and solving riddles with the ghosts of deceived nuns.

 

On Wednesday last, she tearfully pressed upon me this portrait of herself to remember her by.

I wish she’d just GO already. I swear I’ll wear the damn brooch every day if it will get Sofia and her laudanum bottle out of my second best bedroom.

 

It's October.

 

 Tis the season...

From the Archives: Regency Flower Ballgown for Felicity

This small regency gown was put together as a rather drastic holiday from reality during my final fortnight of grad school presentations. Unsurprisingly, is an unholy mess of bad construction decisions (and no lining under that crepe silk bodice? Really?!)

It gives me enormous happiness anyway. It was FUN.

(And hey, Felicity is the least prima-donna of my AG dolls. It’s Addy who has  standards for couture. Felicity will model anything.)

An American Duchess Brain Hat

Or as I like to call it - a jellyfish explosion in a boudoir factory.

 

One needs lots of hats. You can't fight it - it's just a fact of life. This one's supposed to be a  bergere with loops and puffs of silk gauze all over the crown, a la the "Brain Hat" from the American Duchess Guide to 18th Century Dressmaking. (page 153)

I began by covering a straw hat blank with silk taffeta:

I traced the shape of the hat brim onto purple silk taffeta, leaving about an inch of seam allowance at the edges.  I cut roughly out a hole for the crown, then stitched the silk down at the outer edge of the brim, smoothing and folding the seam allowance over to the underside of the hat. After that, I sewed the silk to the inner edge of the brim, tight against the crown of the hat. 

 
Next, I covered the crown with a square of purple silk taffeta, smoothed and pinned my way around and over the edge of the crown.

 

I stitched the silk down tightly against the base of the crown and cut away the excess.  Because the hat will be covered in billows of silk gauze, you don't need to make a clean finish here. You won't see it.

Next, I covered the underside of the hat. I've described how I line the underside of a hat brim in a previous post here. The procedure is the same - except that in this case when you bind the brim you can either use the silk you used for the top side of the hat, or you can choose a ribbon to match or contrast with your color scheme.

 

The thing about lining hats is - it hurts.

Once the hat was lined, I had to trim it. I use the words "had to," because I ran into technical difficulties almost immediately. 

I'd  planned to make my 'brain' out of a rather elegant gold-striped silk gauze, but the gauze fabric was lousy.  

 I'd purchased the fabric from a highly-regarded retailer who had previously sold me wonderful fabrics, but this particular gauze arrived as a loose, irregular weave, woven from a stiff, coarse thread and the raw edges of this fabric didn't fray - they splintered, shattering open when I cut the stuff, or lifted the stuff, or touched it, or, cross my heart,even looked at it sideways from underneath my eyelashes.  Commercial fray-check products didn't help at all -the threads of the weave were so far apart that it was like dabbing glue onto the end of a broom, and it was just about as useful. 

For the ruffle along the edge of the brim, a conventional hem was clearly right out of the question - when you put a needle through the horrible stuff, the thread dragged out channels and drove puckers into the cloth. 
Eventually I worked out I could press - carefully - a half-inch fold without losing more than 1/4 or 3/8 of an inch to the shattering problem, and I could hold it - carefully - in place with a running stitch.  If you didn't look too close.

For the brain I reckoned I'd have less trouble - puddling on a pile of the stuff would hide the fraying edges beneath the puddle, and despite the looseness of the weave, the gauze was so crisp that it would - surely - stand up in lovely folds and puffs!
And it did.  Unfortunately, there was one more little problem: the weave of that damn gauze was so loose that my pinhead were sliding right through - even my biggest clover quilting pins were passing through like hot steel through a blob of butter, and pretty soon I  had a high balloon of gauze with pins stuck to a straw shell underneath it, and  naturally,  working a pin back out wasn't half as effortless as watching it slight right in!

At this point I felt committed beyond point of return (please don’t argue here about the economy of sunk costs.  By now I wasn't a rational actor in any way, form or shape - so I pinned and I stitched (and don't ask how the stuff handled the stitching either, thank you) and I pinned, and I pinned and I stitched, and I stitched, and wherever the stitching really wouldn't hold I stuck a pink bow, 

 

- and then because I didn't even want to look at that horrible gauze anymore I abandoned the ruffle and bound the hat in a gold satin ribbon, and when I sat up to take a breath, it looked GOOD.

And you'd think that would be the end of it, wouldn't you?

I went away and did something else for a day or two, and felt pretty good about the whole thing, really I did, but then I came back to the hat to stitch a pair of ribbon ties to the underside, and I found that that bloody BLOODY gauze had slipped its stitching in several places and was popping up where it shouldn't be popping, so I had to sit down again and stitch it down again, and when I sat up again, the stupid bloody brain was held down all right, but there was absolutely almost no froof left in it whatsoever.  All my big billows and puffs had been deflated into something that looked a something like a collapsed pudding and something like a big gauze cowpat.

 

At this point there was absolutely no enthusiasm left in ME whatsoever either.
 

Even worse, my puffy pink bows stood out like a bouquet of sore pink thumbs.  I bound the brim edge with pink ribbon layered over the gold, to tie it all together, but now that hat looked like a freaking melted Neapolitan ice-cream.

It was NOT a good moment.

I walked away again for another day or two.  And then I was done.  I stuck that stupid wonky ruffle onto the edge of the hat so that it looked more like a deliberate sort of mess and less like a flat pudding on a purple plate -

 

And then I got dressed up and took photographs to tell it that I hadn't been beaten. I had WON. And whenever it slips another stitch or shreds at me I can pull out those photographs, wave them at it, and it will KNOW that I did.

Amen.

Alpaca, Angels, and Baby Tears

I would be the first to admit that I am not a natural knitter.  I jam, I drop, I snag, I lose count, and worst of all, I don't have any fun while I'm doing it.  But thirteen and a half years ago, I walked into a yarn store in Vancouver, and I fell in love. The yarns in that shop yarns were so soft - so colorful and so soft -
With wool like this, I felt, I could definitely become a knitter. Arms full of skeins and hanks of fluffy, gently-rainbow-colored heaven, I told my husband I was ready - I was really, truly, definitely ready-

My husband petted the softness and loudly admired the colors and promised me that if I could finish ONE scarf, he'd bring me back to Vancouver and let me buy ALL the yarn in the whole shop.

 

Twelve years later,  I took my scarf to the house of a friend who knits and begged her to help me finish it. My husband is a pretty good judge of my knitting aptitude, I reckon.  

 

My twelve-year scarf is very beautiful.  It is striped in bright magenta-and-turquoise-emerald rainbow colors, and it is worked in wide ribs of knit-two, purl-two, and it has a sweet lettuce-like ruffle on both ends.  It is so beautiful that you would hardly notice where the knit-two purl-two becomes knit-two purl-one or purl-one knit-three, and I think that these little variations give it depth and character and stop it looking mechanical, as if it were something off a knitting machine or bought in a shop.  A scarf should speak of life, and if this one is talking about twelve years spent mostly rolled up in the back of a cupboard and me trying to pretend it wasn't there?  Let those stitches breathe a little, I say. Let that knit-two-whoops-where'd-the-purl-go lift up its head and yell. 

 

 

Valentina, my Santiago knitting friend, is at the other end of the knitting spectrum to myself.  Valentina can knit a hat in three hours and a cable-ribbed herringbone lace stitch sweater in a week. She can intuit a pattern from a twenty-second look at a photograph in a magazine, and knit it for herself without needing the intermediary steps of making a pattern - or even a diagram - first. She knits without looking. She knits in the dark. She truly believes that she operates at a normal, accessible level, and my fumblings with knit and purl were, to her, unfathomable.  

 

Just a little something Valentina whipped up over a weekend - because it felt good.

The way that I knit involves flapping both arms like wings and letting go of the needles every time I loop the thread. For Valentina, it must have been like a Rolls Royce mechanic watching a beat up little Yugo struggle up the road with its muffler hanging out on the asphalt and big holes knocked into its oil pan.  When I knit, there is a lot of heavy breathing, and I have to stop regularly to massage out the finger cramps.  When Valentina knits, her arms and fingers look like they're dancing, and watching her fingers glide through movements utterly unlike any sort of knitting I had ever known, I began to feel a faint inkling that there might be something in it after all.  Doing it her way might not actually be horrible.

 

I accidentally voiced that thought aloud, and after I'd cast off my last stitch on my rainbow- colored scarf, she told me I would have to make another one.  And after one more afternoon of watching her fingers dancing, I said yes.

 

Beyond Valentina, support has been somewhat thin.  My husband, his voice oozing sympathy like thick, warm honey, told me that I ought to make a little visit to the super-high-end Peruvian alpaca store.  Alongside the indecently expensive alpaca sweaters, they apparently sell yarn as well. He said that if I’m going to spend another 12 years making a second scarf, it needs to be WORTH it.

It took a further 18 months, but when I was in Santiago last month, I called his bluff and went to the Peruvian alpaca shop, where sweaters are knitted from the tears of baby angels, and the shawls might be the very angels themselves.  I played with skeins of powder-blue yarn so sweetly soft that I cried tears of my own as I touched them, and to my shock, while angel tear sweaters may be priced higher than platinum, the value must all be in the knitting, because the yarn itself was no more expensive than the ordinary sheep stuff I'd bought in Toronto 12 years ago.

 

I bought 6 skeins. Valentina will look at me proudly, and when it is done, my husband will have to wear it, and every single angel tear around his neck will fall with a sound, and that sound will be "So THERE."

 

 

Paper Fans

Paper fans and polka dots. 

I spent an afternoon with a tape measure, a pencil and sharpie pens in gold, silver and bronze! The pen tips are now worn and flattened out and going fuzzy around the edges, but look at the lovely results! 

 

 

1790s Painted Shoe Tutorial: Part II

 

At the end of Part 1, I had just discovered that the Angelus Satin Leather finisher had turned my 18th century shoes into patent plastic disco balls.  At this point I shoved them into a cupboard and went out to find the matte version of the leather finisher.

This presented a certain difficulty. There are a lot of companies that don't ship to Chile, and unfortunately, Angelus is one of them. Eventually I found a seller on Mercado Libre who had a crate of it, and for an absolutely extortionary price, I paid to have one single bottle shipped from Santiago to Iquique.
I was dubious about it, but when it arrived it was either the best fake I've ever seen - down to serial numbers and original Angelus shipping paper, or it was the real thing. Either way, I hadn't much of a choice. The shoes were lighting up the inside of my closet.  I wiped them carefully for dust bunnies, applied a layer of matte glaze and put them under a tipped over tupperware crate to dry. And then I did it twice more.

The glaze was dimmed - not shut down, but dimmed. The shoes were still bright and shiny, but it was the shiny that a really diligent shoe polisher could get with wax and elbow grease- not a violently modern space age plastic shine.

Step 6:  Trimming the Shoes

 

I trimmed my yellow 1790s shoes with pink petersham ribbon. I had two widths of it - 5/8" inches to be doubled over around the shoe opening and 3/8" inches to mark the center back and side seams.  The ribbon was glued on with Fabri-tac glue.

If you haven't used it before, you need to know straight up -  Fabri-tac is the devil.  The literal devil.  It sets almost instantaneously, but it comes out in gobs so it needs to be spread out, and that particular combination of qualities is awful.
I found the best method to be running a bead of glue along my glue-line, then spreading it out with a finger or a palette knife, then running over it a second time to remove any remaining globs that could soak thru the ribbon, and then pressing the fabric onto the glue line.

Beginning with the short back and side seams, I turned the raw edge of  the 3/8" ribbon under, tacked it in place with a dab of glue, and then glued the strip in place, folding the top edge over the lip of the shoe and holding that down with a large glob.

 

Next I bound the open edge (Rim? Shoe cavity? Foot hole?) with the 5/8" ribbon.  Working in short sections, I glued the ribbon to the inside of the lip.  Once it was in place, and working again in sections, I folded the ribbon over to the outside and glued it down, again working in small sections, and pressing it down with sewing clips.

 

I had some difficulty with the ribbon around the heel.  The suede panel on the heel became very stiff when painted, and I wasn't able to flatten out the curve enough to successfully lay the petersham from the inside.  It turned out to be easiest to run a second piece over the back of the heel, working outside-in. This extra piece is not symmetrical on one shoe - when i was gluing it down, the glue spread out from under the top layer and stained the bottom piece, so i had to rip the patch off and start again with a longer one to cover the stain!

 

 

 

And voila - there they were.  My fingers were a mess of glue blobs and petersham threads, but the shoes were a POEM in pink and yellow, ready for field tests.

Or almost - I wanted pompoms on the toes. 
I largely followed Frolicking Frocks' tutorial for this. I made four pompoms out of silk embroidery floss, tied them off in the center, and layered them on a pair of shoe clip blanks: two pompoms per blank, stacked cross-ways.  
Once they were stitched tight, I cut the loops and trimmed the shaggy edges.

I'd covered a pair of American pennies in a scrap of silk for the centers, but my pom-poms were rather small.  I only had one skein of pink silk floss, and carefully portioning it out into four pom-poms left 'em definitely on the petite side. Not even wishful thinking could make it work.

In my button box I found a pair of small mother of pearl shank buttons, so I stitched them on in place of the silk buttons.

And - Voila! all over again - these shoes have gone from cotton-candy sweet to bleeding ADORABLE.