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.

 

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.)

A Winterhalter Princess Dress for an American Girl Doll

 

I'm a sucker for big bows on little dresses. Just as an example, for instance, the shoulder-bows on the fluffy white dresses on the Princesses in the 1846 Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria and her family have always been EXACTLY what floats my small dress boat.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter, The Royal Family in 1846 via wikimedia commons

When a scrap of white striped cotton floated up in my stash, I decided that it was time to do something about it. I found some yellow French wired ribbons for the shoulders, and I ordered some orange-to-yellow mokuba ribbon on ebay, and while I waited for the ribbon to arrive, I drafted up a party dress for an early-Victorian Princess.

I wanted the bodice to be gathered, not pleated, and I wanted the gathers to run STRAIGHT DOWN, not sun-raying away from the neckline, so I ran multiple parallel lines of gathering stitches, basted (excessively) the gathered fabric to a flat cotton base, and cut a wide almost off the shoulder neckline.

The sleeves were done similarly - a gathered puff sewn top and bottom to a smaller cotton base, and then a ruffle added onto the bottom of the sleeve.

 

When the mokuba ribbon arrived, I sewed it onto the skirt in an oversized Greek key pattern, tacking it down with knots of cotton embroidery floss.

 

I ran a double row of ribbon around the waist, again punctuating with orange floss. To balance all the yellow I ran a row of large orange knots around the neckline, and as a final splash of color I made a very large bow indeed from the striped cotton, edged it with the mokuba ribbon, and sewed it onto the back waist!

Addy was quite pleased.

Aniline Halloween

Aside from making a pair of Zombie Monkeys, I thought it would be nice to do something American-Girl-dollish for Halloween.

Addy doesn't do zombie, so we compromised with a fashion plate or two.

Like the skirt trim in this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

And the bodice in this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

I used the American Girl Addy School Outfit for the base pattern.

 I sewed the blouse from Swiss cotton, and  mixed it up a little with embroidery down the front.  A Halloween skull earring made a seasonally appropriate brooch.

The skirt and bretelles were sewn from a chequered orange silk - a pair of fabulous trousers my sister wore in the mid-90s - and trimmed in a soft satin ribbon. 

I wanted a longer jacket, like this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

Unfortunately, my velvet had been stored folded. Between the creases I had just enough bits to eke out the regular zouave jacket from the AG pattern.

The electric orange soutache is what I could find in the Wyalla Spotlight store before we left Australia.
Sure, it's only just on the demure side of neon, but it simply screams Halloween.

As for the hat - behold the rehabilitated cracktastic hat of 80's doom!

 All it took were a crystal spider and a gold skull and we've gone from horror to October chic.

The Cracktastic Hat Bounces BACK

 

My little halloween-y hat, last seen looking like something Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger's bridesmaids would have worn, languished for a year, stripped and undressed.
Over this past weekend, I picked it out of my 'To DO, you great Procrastinator, you!' pile, and redecorated.
            Black feathers, ribbons, a spider-brooch with the brooch-ery stripped off, and voila!
It's still reasonably cracktastic: I'd thick-headedly attached the original decorations with hot-glue, and this time around had to use enough froof-ery to cover the hot-glue scars, but if you can't go bonkers with the frou-frou on Halloween, when can you?
            This little hat does not exist within a vaccum - it belongs to a halloween-colored outfit that I completed just before the move.
            Consider these photos to be in the nature of a teaser - complete outfit coming soon!

The Butterick Bonnet - that ALMOST was.

Last year I used Butterick Pattern #4210 to make an American Girl scale 1860s bonnet.
Mr Tabubil scanned the pattern pieces at work, and I imported them into autocad and traced and scaled them down to AG doll size.

I wish to go on record as saying that I loathe this pattern; several of the pieces didn't fit and had to be totally re-drafted.  That's ridiculous.
I sewed it from buckram, mulled it with flannel and covered it with pink silk duponi and white silk satin.  I don't like using glue (as per the pattern instructions) so I sewed it completely by hand - and something about the way this pattern held together - or didn't hold together - has made it take FOREVER to assemble.
And worse, all those hours down the track, I found that I'd forgotten to account for the mulling or the lining  - and the darned hat, at the end of all, doesn't actually fit the doll.

It was intended to be worn with Bella, but I can't seem to summon the enthusiasm to finish it.

Bah.

The Upon Discussion, Utimately Late Victorian Accessory Set: Capelet, Hat and Purse

This rather idiosyncratic ensemble was intended as a prototype for some eighteenth century accessories - a proof of concept exercise, if you like. What came out of it wasn't  particularly successful with regard to period or, arguably, aesthetics, but as proof of concept for pattern and construction, it worked exactly as ordered.
I suppose that's damning with faint praise, but it's all I've got!

Material Details:

The fabric was a remnant of stiff salmon-colored upholstery silk.   The trim is a rococo trim from Spotlight (a bit coarse, but the colors were right) with a green variegated 7mm silk ribbon twisted around it.  Beads and feathers were from my stash.

Hat:
The hat was based on the delicious and altogether edible millinery confections from the film Marie Antoinette - like this one:

My Version:

For the hat base I used a buckram wreath form left over from a wired ribbon workshop I took 15 years ago.  (Never throw ANYTHING out.  It all comes around in the end!) The wreath form is not a perfect circle and the center hole is off center and the buckram is not very strong - even reinforced with millinery wire around the brim.  I didn't mull the hat after I wired it, so you can see the outline of the bias binding I used to wrap the edge if you look at the underside ….

            I do like the trimming.   The cockade is made of more of the silk ribbon, a few feathers and a bunch of gold-tipped stamens from my stash. (Click on the image to see larger.)

            I tea-dyed the marabou feathers  - that was fun!  I'd never tea-dyed before and had read that vinegar and salt both work to fix the dye - I decided to add both to the water - for redundancy - and my pretty ecru-colored feathers turned a spectacular neon yellow orange.

I rinsed the color out and re-dyed them, using only salt this time, and it worked beautifully.

            Unfortunately, it's a leetle too small on the doll head for the eighteenth century, but it works CHARMINGLY as a non-period-specific  accent worn on the front of the head at a fetching angle. (blurry photo warning):

Mantelet:
The mantelet was drafted from the instructions at La Couturiere Parisienne.  It was supposed to look sort of like this (a la the small girl in blue):

It came out sort of like this:

Um.  The PATTERN worked lovely.  The muslin draped very nicely, as well.  If I'd been in my right mind I might have used a fabric for the final version that draped instead of using stiff upholstery silk, and I might not have used two layers of it (what on EARTH was I thinking?), as well as adding a nice stiff taffeta lining.

            And I might have used a lace that was scale appropriate and less Edwardian.  And if I had done THAT, I might not have gotten desperate and started doing COMPLETELY misguided rococo-ish figures of eight on the back of the mantelet to distract from the trim -

            As it was, I spent a whole evening twisting and couching that ruddy trim and at the end of it all I sat back and looked at it and said - "Um…"

            Mr Tabubil had HIS face pre-set into an expression of proud approval, but he took one look and cracked.  

        "Tabubilgirl" he said gravely "what you have here is a American Girl scale Christmas Tree Skirt."

Yeah.  That figure of eight is coming right off.  I plan to redo this mantelet in blue wool - lined with white silk satin, and it will drape BEAUTIFULLY.  And I won't trim it at all.

 

Purse:

I AM unambiguously proud of the purse - I used a scrap of the leftover silk and trimmed it with green embroidery floss - couching it with small seed beads, and twisting it into cord (6 strand cord for the profile and 4 strand cord for the handle.)

            It's not rococo - it's not true anything except what felt right at the time but - embroidery floss couched with beads!  Who needs an excuse for that?!

            This set languished in the closet until mum visited a few months ago.  Despairing lightly, I brought it out to show her.  She had a good look at it and pointed out that it wasn't that bad an ensemble - I had just confused myself by thinking it was mid-eighteenth century.  If I pushed the date forward one hundred years or so - I would work just fine!

            So here are my 1870s-ish accessories.  If my AG doll was a vaguely tarty sort who worked in a saloon in Denver where Doc Holiday came in nights to play the piano and she flirted her bustle at him and sat on his lap and kissed him around a shot glass full of raw moonshine whiskey.

The Straw Basket Bonnet: Version Two

A couple of years ago I split a small straw craft-store hat in half, lined it in cotton, and covered it with some wired gift-ribbon left over from Christmas celebrations, and tacked a row of pleated orange ribbon to the edge of the brim.  And did nothing else with it whatsoever except stick it in the back of my parents closet.

After the fiasco of the Halloween hat, this bonnet came to mind as a suitable vehicle for my orange roses - they're made of the same orange ribbon as the trim on this bonnet.
At Christmas I collected the bonnet from my parents place and last week, I buckled down and finished trimming it.

I had no more of the ribbon I'd used to cover the base, so to make the curtain - or whatever the technical term is for the fiddly bit at the back of the bonnet that kept Victorian ladies' necks modest - I went to Sckafs Fabrics in Indroopilly and found something that more or less matched.

I spent a little time playing and thinking up a design for the flowered trim:

To coordinate with my new bonnet, I dug into the stash and pulled out a much-loved and never-used remnant of sunset-colored rayon chiffon, and while I was still in my happy hemming place, hand rolled a hem around the edges for a matching shawl.

This is a historical piece and we're just going to pretend that synthetic dye technology was a few decades in advance of reality, okay?

I added a pair of orange ribbon ties:

And - voila! One entirely passable 1860's bonnet!  In technicolor.

Winterhalter Eugenie Gardums!

 Mum and I went to Gardums- a very good Brisbane-based fabric store, on a lace-and-trim trawl. Gardums is a lovely upscale fabric store with three locations across the city - it deals mostly with high-end fabrics and believes in getting good money for the value of it's stuff - the fabrics are lovely but the prices are heartbreaking. No bargains here - not even in the remnant bin - you'll be charged as close to market value for that 20 cm scrap of lace or 40cm of sun-faded silk taffeta as the market will bear!

But the fabrics are exquisite and the laces and trims are the real thing, and once in a while, there's a lovely fabric on sale.

 

 

I bought four meters of this to make myself a dress - Vogue 1102 - one of my favorites. I'm hemming a version of it in black and white linen right now.

I bought yards of gorgeous lace at AG doll scale!!!!  I can stop hoarding my slender supply - at home I have very little and consequently never use it - I'm always save for the next thing!
And in the remnant bin I found a lovely stretch of silk chiffon and some gorgeous apricot-y silk charemeuse and on the trim shelf I found a fabulous ribbon-flower trim -

And naturally one thinks of this painting - Empress Eugenie and her Ladies by Winterhalter:

So…..
Introducing: The Gardums Remnant Ballgown!

The flowered trim will be a wrap - of course - something like this, lined with matching silk satin so that it drapes…

As for the dress - there's enough apricot satin for a skirt and a bodice. An over skirt of chiffon, looped up with ribbons and roses, and a chiffon bertha - pleated or draped -

I'm thinking very classical - something you could have worn from the 1840s until the very end of the 60s - suitable for passing down through a row of children.

(this image from the V&A is from the 1840s, but the look stays remarkably consistent through the period)

Vintage Victorian has a fabulous page with lots of 1860s fashion plates of evening dress.

Inspirations for the skirt:

Love the sleeves and bertha on this one as well!

And the apricot one on the left with the bows and streamers -

Inspirations for the bertha:

I rather like this one, on the blue ballgown - I'm trying to imagine how layered lace sleeves would look underneath it:

But I think that I rather prefer something along these lines:

The sleeves will have to evolve a bit, I think. My original idea called for puff sleeves in the satin layered with tubes of chiffon, but this will be completely lost under the bertha, I think. Longer and larger puffs? Layered with lace, possibly.

Reckon I'll start by hand-hemming the skirt layers and see what bubbles up.