Silk gift bag

This embroidered bag was a bachelorette gift for an artist friend (Zoe) who was married last month - I sewed the outer bag of green silk and lined it with calico - so that it would be strong enough to hold a large bottle of chocolate body paint and a paintbrush!

The Straw Basket Bonnet

How to make an 1860's doll bonnet from a craft-store straw basket:

Take one small straw basket from Lincraft. (Home furnishings section)
Slice in half, bind the raw edge with cotton bias, line the shell with silk taffeta and lace, attach a silk curtain round the bottom edge, and go wild with feather biots and fabric flowers and white taffeta!

Random ribbon embroidery

Finalist in the Historical Inspiration Festival!

Good gosh! - I went over to Story of a Seamstress tonight and discovered that my 1850s Child's Dress has been nominated as a finalist in the Most Creative Category!

The Historical Inspiration Festival - Part 3

 

Story of a Seamstress is hosting a Historical Inspiration Costume Festival.  She has kindly invited doll costumers to participate - so I'm putting up a few of my 'historically inspired' outfits!

Introducing Bella:

Bella is a mid-century summer costume, inspired by several fashion plates showing breezy summer outfits worn with straw hats:

The dress is sewn of chequered cotton poplin and trimmed with vintage velvet ribbon.  It is ornamented with self-pleats, positioned to take advantage of the striping in the fabric.  The pelerine is made from a vintage cotton collar:

The shawl is sewn from silk charmeuse, blind hemmed by hand and embroidered with silk ribbon roses:

Embroidery Detail of shawl:

The hat is made from half of a vintage straw purse - steamed to shape and trimmed with wired silk ribbon roses:

Under her dress, Bella wears a lace trimmed cotton petticoat, a set of hoops (courtesy of the AG company) and white voile pantaloons:

The Historical Inspiration Festival - Part 2

Story of a Seamstress is hosting a Historical Inspiration Costume Festival.  She has kindly invited doll costumers to participate - so I'm putting up a few of my 'historically inspired' outfits!

Introducing Regency Lilly:

This small 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 bodice? Really?!) It was based on this c.1815 color plate of an EXTREMELY decorated ballgown:

The underskirt and under-sleeves are sewn from white silk charmeuse, and the overdress of lavender silk crepe.
The dress is trimmed with vintage cotton lace and bands of 7mm lavender silk ribbon.  The three-dimensional flower bouquets are made from wired silk ribbons in varied widths and colors:

A view of the wired silk ribbon bouquets on the white silk underskirt:

The back detail is composed of a sprig of wired silk ribbons and a three-color fall of 7mm silk ribbons in purple, lavender and white:

The Historical Inspiration Festival - Part 1

Story of A Seamstress is hosting a Historical Inspiration Costume Festival.  She has kindly invited doll costumers to participate - so I'm putting up a few of my 'historically inspired' outfits!


Introducing Jane:

Jane was inspired by two specific items of clothing:

Elizabeth Bennet's scrunchy bonnet from the A&E production of Pride and Prejudice

and Anne Elliot's spencer jacket from the 1995 made-for-television adaptation of Persuasion.

The dress is sewn in cotton voile, based off of the AG regency-era patterns.  The spencer jacket and bonnet I drafted myself, and sewed in silk shantung.  A small gold-and-swarovski turtle pin is fastened to the bodice of the jacket. The sleeves of the spencer are not strictly period; this was the first historical pattern that I drafted for myself - before I'd begun to study historical fashion styles.

The spencer back detailing is delicious: hematite 'buttons' fasten down a flare in the silk -

that leads into a lovely full fall of fabric in the skirt.

The bonnets is gathered along three rows of wire, pulling it in for a delightful scrunchy look.

Nasturtium

This is my current favorite color of silk ribbon:  Nasturtium, by Color Streams.  It's not a color I usually use - I tend to go for purples and blues.  I bought a hank of it on a whim at a craft show, reckoning to use it as an accent in larger compositions  - naturally, I use it constantly and have to restock regularly.  It's bright, it's sunny and cheerful and not QUITE orange - and it has the same quality of subliminal iridescence that, like real life flowers, lets it coordinate with everything.

Pig Iron

This is Porcus Minoris Mark 0.5- the original test run to see if I could machine stitch the little squeakers.
Mr Tabubil has claimed him as an office mascot.  His name is "Furnace Pig" - and I have stuffed his belly with pot pouri, so that he can climb all over the job site and get black and dirty and still come out smelling of roses.

The Inadvertent Hat of Cracktastic 80s Wedding Fabulousness

Late last night as I finished sewing the orange ribbon roses for this hat I had one of those moments of horrible realization - my little 1860s doll hat: intended to be all Halloween-y and macabre-like, had turned into a wedding headband - from 1986.
            Out of a special wedding double-episode of a daytime soap opera, where the groom wears a dove-gray tuxedo with a pink cummerbund, and the whole bridal party is high on hairspray and coughing up opalescent glitter.
              This hat is the perfect accompaniment to the sort of tulle-and-sequin explosion that they used to design specifically for thrift store windows.
            You know what I'm talking about -  all brassy plastic pearls and and white illusion netting and monstrous puffed shoulders, with a matching beaded tiara sagging dismally from the neck of the coat hanger, and the whole ensemble getting dustier and sadder every year, as its swags of spiky plastic lace turn yellow in the sunlight and brush the dust away from the racks of clip-on earrings that just make the window display, don't you think?
            The orange hat-band and the orange gauze streamers and the beaded wire sprays and the ostrich feather- they've all got to go.  I'll keep the roses and the feather spear and go out and find some black ribbons.  And a spider.  Possibly a mouse skull, what do you think?

Oinkers, Doink & Sidney

This triple bill of Porcine Perfection is known as Oinkers, Doink and Sidney (or Sydney. He can't spell.)
Porcus Majoris is reasonably tractable, but the two porcus minorus are liable to cut up something awful if you leave them unchaperoned.

All three have been sent to keep company with the new baby of a very good friend. They used to be my very favorite purple sweater.
            Then the sweater got felted. I didn't know much about felting before it happened, but I've done some research since: one takes wool rovings, or knitted wool fabric, and through the application of detergent suds and agitation and hot water, one turns them into felt.
It's a highly specific process, prone to balling and piling, but the best results are achieved through the use of a centrifuge in conjunction with very high heat.  (You want shrinkage to squash the knitted fabric into felt.)
About a year ago, I accidentally ran this sweater through a hot wash layered between two sheets. The washer and dryer in our old house in Adelaide uses water at about six billion degrees centigrade and spins the water out of the clothes with a small medical-grade centrifuge...
The sweater came out sixteen sizes too small, fully hypo-allergenic, and perfectly felted.
            It was a freak of perfect circumstance, and I have not been able to duplicate it since.  And I have ruined a few thrift shop sweaters trying! 
           So I made pigs instead* and embroidered all over them with silk ribbons.  But for the love of heaven, if you use this pattern, chop the noses off. Poor Porcus Majoris looked like an anteater. Even after some serious lopping he looks less than porcine. With the three porcus minoris, I cut the snout back almost to their front legs- now they look like pigs.

Originally the two porcus minorus had major embroidery on both sides, but I sort of forgot to leave room for an ear and eye on the really busy side and had to unpick everything but the french knots.  Le sigh.

Clarice

This is Clarice. She is a rare blue dwarf lemur and she is six years old. She is dressed up as Miss Piggy for a New Year's Eve costume party, but because she's only six, she's only allowed to stay up till nine o'clock.
            We had a big argument over a wig of brassy blonde Miss Piggy curls - I said that they were far too big and far too MUCH for such a small lemur. She said that the curls were NECESSARY or nobody would know who she was, she'd just be any elegant pig in evening dress.
            I won because I am bigger than she is, but she is still sulking, which is why she's so excited to be going on a trip through international post to meet Miss A -another little girl - because grown-ups never EVER understand and in Korea where Miss A lives she bets people would be properly sympathetic and let her wear her costume with authenticity. I congratulated her on her mastery of big words, but I still wouldn't let her wear the wig. She sulked till seven o'clock.