Monday, June 27, 2011

The White Lace Dress - Vogue 7350


Several years ago now, I bought a roll of doll-scale vintage lace in an antique shop in New Harmony, Indiana.  New Harmony Indiana is mostly antique shops. Antique shops, book shops and cornfields on the edge of the wide, slow, Wabash river. It's summertime heaven on a slow Sunday afternoon. A year or so later, I sewed Vogue 7350 with some very fine swiss cotton voile that has been in Mum's stash for years and years and years.
This pattern certainly got me over my fear of sewing with lace - the hours picking scraps of tissue paper out of thread seams on thread lace as I stitched the yoke panels left me with no mysteries and no terrors. Lace is now very firmly do-able, thank you.

Yummy dress details:





And because I love making wired ribbon flowers, she needed a sash with a big bow on it.  Just something simple:


The purse is the sort of thing that happens on Saturday afternoons when you have nothing scheduled to do and you can do exactly whatever you want to do. I had a scrap of white silk, a meter of beaded fringe and a bag of lace remnants from my mother's wedding gown - I cut out roses from the wedding lace and appliquéd them onto the silk, and across the body of the purse I scattered clusters of embroidered petals and beads stripped from the fringing.
More beads made the purse handle and I stitched it all together by hand.
I adore it. It's fabulous.



And so, Once More with Feeling:

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Hide and Seek (but mostly hide)

Felicity the AG doll is hiding in the closet.  There's red dust outside!!!


(Felicity is not entirely rapt about living in the desert.  The red soil gets everywhere.  Which is problematic when your body is made of cotton.)


Monday, June 6, 2011

A Brown hat

She doesn't smoke cigarettes or rub burned cork on her eyelids, but she's about two steps away from rolling up her stockings and rouging her knees.... or she would be if I knew how to get rouge out of vinyl.
Being a fashionable dolly only goes so far.


The pattern for this little number came from a now-apparently-and-tragically-defunct doll hat company called Cathy Stuart Designs.
            (Ignore the Silver Robe Francaise that she's wearing. She lives in a state of temporal and existential confusion. What can I say? She's a doll. She spends most of her life with sewing pins stuck into her torso. That'd unhinge anybody.)
 
 
I made two of their hats - this one and a lovely Gainsborough, and then the company's phone was disconnected and my mail-orders were returned to sender.
A pity- they designed great hats!

Friday, June 3, 2011

I See Purple Elephants....


His name is Roger.
Roger Featherstone Umbrage the Fourth.