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! 

 

 

Those Frenchies Seek My Ruffles Everywhere: a Swashbuckling Fichu in Dotted Swiss

They seek it here, they seek it there - they seek really good dotted Swiss cotton everywhere!

 

Last time I was in Australia, I was let loose  on my birthday in Alla Moda Fabrics in Fortitude Valley, where I picked out a beautiful dotted Swiss cotton.  White, sheer, spotted, and crisp with body for DAYS  - here was only one reasonable thing to do with a fabric like that - make a honking great ruffled fichu.  

 

I was thinking something rather like this one in the met - a fluffy, froofy, hold your chin high or drown in flounces sort of fichu.

 

French Robe à l'Anglaise and fichu via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

I started on it almost immediately, but almost immediately after I started, I went home to Chile and accidentally packed the unfinished work in my sea freight instead of my suitcase. And almost as soon as my little sea shipment arrived (on a slow boat that saw most of the major ports in the Asia-Pacific region before it slid into the Chilean Port of Valparaiso) we packed everything up again and moved north to Iquique.
It took several more months, but at very long last and a very long time later, the fichu was finally unpacked, and I was able to finish it up.

I enjoyed this little project SO MUCH that I'm finding myself needing to use all-caps when I write about it.  Some fabrics fight you, but others behave like they WANT to be sewn, and just need you to show them the way. Who else gets the happy wriggles from a really good rolled hem?

The styling of this fichu sits squarely in the later 1780s - a half-circle with a whip-gathered ruffle along the curved edge. It is one of those garments where the construction is very simple and the effect comes down to the quality of the fabric and the needlework - in this case, the extra-ordinary cotton did more than half the work for me, and the rolled hems just sort of happened all by themselves while I watched.
 

Technical Details for those who want a giant white neck caterpillar of their very own: 

The base of the fichu is a half-circle with a 26 inch radius. 

I wanted a ruffle that looked BIG on my 5'7", broad-shouldered frame.  After some playing around, I concluded that the ruffle should be between 3.5" and 4.5" total FINISHED width  - with the gathering line running at 1/3 of the way in from the edge. 

That range will take you from restrained to Ding-DONG, without looking clownish. I wanted a full on ding-dong honker, so I  cut mine for 4.5".

I finished the edges of the kerchief and the ruffle with a rolled hem, and whip gathered the ruffle (along that 1/3 line) to a 2:1 ratio, and tacked it down.

 

Does everyone else find the sewing itself as beautiful as the finished piece?

 

And here you have it - a finished fichu. 

This fichu has a real element of “Off-Broadway does 1776” about it, but it gives me the Scarlet Pimpernel vibes - and what else are we in this hobby for?

 

The Infinitely Ruffled Apron

This apron began all the way back in 2018.  It was my second project out of the American Duchess dressmaking book, and at that point I hadn't much experience with hand rolling hems, and this apron - well, this apron had a lot of rolled hems. There were 3 yards in the apron body, 6 yards up one side of the ruffle  and 6 back down the other side.  Just thinking about it, I needed a fainting couch and a handsome gentleman (yes, Mr Tabubil - that IS you) to sponge my temples. At my slow, painstaking rate of rolled hemmery, 15 yards of hem felt like miles. 

I started with optimism - mostly at night, in front of the television, where I didn't have to think of the miles and miles and MILES of hem (the estimate grew, exponentially, with every stitch) and I worked on it on and off, and on and off,  and on, and on, and ON -
I came to think of it as the Infinite Apron : when I was feeling down and like life had no meaning, I'd pull out this horrible apron and confirm that I was right.

 

Then 2020 happened.  Circumstances saw me stuck outside of Chile for 18 months, where I sewed - and hemmed - other things.  Uncertain, unmoored, waiting for vaccines and badly missing Mr Tabubil, I sewed for my sanity's sake: caps, fichus, mantelets, wrapping gowns, petticoats -  I seamed, I gathered, I whipped, and I hemmed -

Practice brought experience, and eventually expertise, and somewhere in the middle of it all - rolled hemming changed from proof of the dreary infinite to something that was fun.

When I finally made it home to Chile in 2021, I pulled out the horrible infinite apron and found that as a project, it had become benign. It had become something almost small.
So I finished it. I took that heap of half-hemmed voile, I unpicked my laboriously bungled whip-gathers, and then I sat back, cracked an anticipatory grin -
I re-whipped my ruffles. I tacked them down. I stroke-gathered the waist to a band, and then I stopped, and looked for a bit, and I took some vast and serious pleasure in the formal, measured beauty of the strokes. 

 

This apron had become metaphorical as hell.  I felt existential whiplash with every step. 

Until there it was - the American Duchess 1780s ruffled apron. 

 

 I liked it so much, I made another one.

Here's an apron. Take two. I can HEM, you see. I hemmed around the world and back.  Sometimes, looking at those lonely, drifting 18 months, I feel like I hemmed my way home.

 

The Linen Mitts of Discontent

 

 I am a genius!  And it only took 10 iterations to get there.

 

 Some time ago I was gifted a pair of large purple linen napkins. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them, but it took me several years to get around to it - until I was living in a coastal city in the driest desert in the world, where the summer sun is FIERCE. I have the sort of skin that blisters and peels and goes straight back to blistering again, so up here in Iquique, a pair of light linen mitts was, at last, exactly what I needed.

There are some excellent kits and patterns for 18th Century Mitts available with a quick google search, but i wanted to draft my own.  Happily, there are equally excellent resources on the google for drafting your own mitt pattern - notably the excellent tutorial by Sew-Loud.

I found that drafting the base shape went quite quickly, and then the pattering came down to a long process of fine-tuning - small iterative changes to the thumb and point placement.

 

 

Once I had my final mitt design, I unpicked and pressed the fabric, and traced it onto paper - making sure that I had proper seam allowances not only on the side seam where my mockups were stitched, but on the top and bottom edges as well. It is surprisingly easy to forget that. 

 

And then I traced!
 

Somewhere along the way,  I had dug up some red kona cotton and decided I needed a pair of bright Christmas mitts as well as light linen ones.  

 
(Gratuitous historical note: While there are documented examples of unlined cotton mitts out there, the extant ones of which I am personally aware are all pale, neutral colors.  I don’t know of any dark cotton mitts, but cotton was what I had - so that's what I sewed. Regardless, the "red-green-gold means Christmas" scheme only became the default later on during the 19th Century, so 'Christmas' mitts were already a big helping of happy what-the-heck.   Hurrah!)

Tracing done, it was time to embroider. I very sensibly (I thought) decided to embroider the mitts before I cut, so that I could keep the fabric taut in an embroidery hoop.

When it comes to embroidering mitts, there are no limits. From a simple tambour hem to full-body polychrome embroidery, the sky's only where it STARTS.  I was in a hurry to get these done, so I chose a very simple motfi:  - three lines of chain stitch down the back of the hand - a common design  that would embroider up very quickly so that I could get on with the work of sewing the mitts up.

HA.

 

  Oh yes, I did.  I really really did.

 

And then I did it again.

The same evening I set down to embroider my mitts, I came down with an attack of gastroenteritis. When you're busy leaping up and down off the sofa all evening, embroidering a pair of mitts is definitely EXACTLY what you should be doing.

I'll take my wobbly chain stitch for 100, Alex…

The gastro won.  I quit.

A New Year Necklace

A simple stash-busting project for a bit of New Year Bling: 

 

 

16 inches of faux pearls, pear shaped crystals and matching mountings, a handful of jump rings, and a bean clasp.

 

For real elegance against the stones the pearls should be smaller, but no Napoleonic lady worth her pearls would ever quibble the SIZE of them - she’d grab those honkers, string on some amethysts and sail out into the ballroom, angling towards the candlelight as she went!

 

 

 

 

 

Ribbon Embroidered Reticule

A few weeks ago I had a rummage in my fabric stash, and I found a piece of soft peach silk dupioni. Unfolding it, I saw that at some point I'd begun embroidering wild roses. It took a bit of remembering, but eventually I worked out I'd started this piece back in High School.  That's quite a while ago now.  Why on earth had I abandoned it?

I decided I'd finish it.  Going back to the stash, I pulled out a frame, my silk ribbons, a box of silk threads -

Oh boy.  It was pretty quickly VERY clear why I'd abandoned the project the first time round. I use dupioni often for ribbon embroidery as I find that silk ribbons pass very cleanly through the fabric - far more easily than they do through a silk taffeta.
  But this particular  soft-and-supple-seeming dupioni was so tightly woven and so tough that I could hardly get a needle through it.  To drag a ribbon through it, I had to pull the needle through the fabric with a pair of pliers.

 

The mystery now wasn't why I'd abandoned the project the first time round - it was why I hadn't burned it in a fire and salted the earth afterwards.

Presumably I was as much a stubborn idiot then as I am now.  The roses were pretty. I would not waste them.I abandoned my first plan -  to unpick the rather-badly-laid-out stems and start the composition over, and instead stuck to a few simple rose leaves. 

Leaf by leaf, I dragged the thin ribbon through the blasted silk.  The resulting tension issues mean that my little rose bush is not the healthiest-looking rose bush in embroidered history - in fact I'm pretty sure some of the leaves have sawfly.
But I pressed on, swearing ineffectually, until there was a nasty snap, and only the front half of the needle came through.  Yep.  My, soft and supple silk had actually broken a tapestry needle in half.  

 

Dropping plans for any  further leaves, I tied off and threaded up the smallest needle I could get away with and started embroidering rose thorns instead.  Lots of rose thorns. This was NOT a FRIENDLY rose bush.

Once I'd wrestled the embroidery into submission, turning it into something I could show off was practically a walk in the park. I needed a regency reticule, so I made that.  

I figured out some dimensions, cut out a template, marked it up, cut it out, and stitched it up.

 

A hand-stitched drawstring channel was next.

 

Then a pair of ribbon drawstrings to match the roses, and lastly, I used up a hank of green silk thread making a set of little silk tassels for the corners.

And voila - a reticule!

 

 
The embroidery might not be perfectly accurate to the period, but it is very pretty and photogenic, and I never need to sew this AWFUL silk again.

So there.

 

 

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:

Wired Ribbon Flower Purse

Because every doll needs a handful of frou-frou when she goes to a party!

Front Side:

Back Side:

Silk Mitts

Naturally, now that I'd made a cape and muff I needed a pair of silk mitts to match. The muffs are made from the same white tissue taffeta as the muff casing, fused to a soft woven interfacing for stability during the embroidery. (In retrospect, it would have been more sensible to embroider 'em on a hoop before I cut them out).

For fastenings I settled on corded embroidery cotton strung through eyelets. Which meant I had to learn how to sew eyelets. 

I played with awls and embroidery floss until I had it figured enough to wing it.  The first four eyelets on the left-handed mitt were reasonably scrappy, but at number 5 the technique fell into place and if the rest aren't exactly exactly oil paintings, they are perfectly serviceable and respectable enough to hold up their heads in polite company and I am extremely proud of them!

(Yes, I know she's wearing a regency era dress.  Let's not quibble, okay?)