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.

 

 

1790s Painted Shoe Tutorial: Part I

 

Up in Reno last September, I was lucky enough to score a pair of American Duchess Kensington shoes on Poshmark.  I've always liked the idea of using bright yellow as a neutral shoe color, and this pair seemed a very good opportunity to color myself a pair of bright yellow mid-century shoes.

 

I've never worked with leather before- in any manner- so I did a lot of reading.  Most costumers seem to favor paint, but a few use leather dye.  Both approaches seemed reasonably reasonable, so I took myself off to the Reno Tandy leather store, where dithering over the racks of paints and dyes, I was approached by a fellow most GLORIOUSLY decked out in a leather apron painted in all sorts of swirls and swatches. We had a talk about the merits of dye vs paint and which would wear best - by which I mean I mentioned both options, and he asked if I'd worked with leather before, and on hearing me say "No, but -" stopped me at the "no" and told me in no uncertain terms that as a first timer, I would definitely be going home with the leather paints.

I came home to Chile with bottles of Angelus leather preparer, Angelus leather finisher and Angelus leather paint.  I also came home with a second pair of shoes.  I didn't want to jump straight to my precious Kensingtons, so I went on ebay and bought an inexpensive pair of Sam Edelman leather flats to use as a test bunny for all my new bottles.  With  a little luck, my 1790s Green Blob gown would also end up with a lovely pop of yellow peeping out from below the hem.

Back home, I worked on the two pairs at once -  testing each step on the flats, and then moving onto the Kensingtons.  This post will be warts and all description of what I did and how it did it.  My hope is that my process - mistakes, corrections and the lot - may prove useful for anyone else thinking about a pair of custom colored historical shoes!

Step One: Prepping the Leather.

The first order of business was to remove existing glaze and polish. It was a straightforward operation: I put some Angelus leather Preparer/Deglazer solution on a clean rag, and wiped carefully over the shoes.  I wiped down all 4 shoes, and then I did it again, just to make certain I had caught all the folds and wrinkles in the leather.

 

The stuff works pretty much instantaneously - you can see and you can feel the difference between the polished and the deglazed shoe.
In fact, so powerful is this stuff, that I left the rag sitting on the toe of one of the flat shoes for all of 10 seconds while I put the lid back on the bottle, and it stripped right through the glaze and the leather dye, leaving a large irregular mark that took several extra layers of paint to cover up.

I found this accident quite reassuring. Clearly, if I really screwed up with my paint job, I would have absolutely no problem stripping my work and starting again.

Caveat: Later, when I began painting the Kensingtons, I discovered that I had not removed all of the original glaze.  The paint was skating over patches of leather like watercolor paint over a  wax resist. 

With multiple coats of paint, I was eventually able to cover these areas, but it was an interesting lesson in how shoe polishes and glazes differ from brand to brand. The Sam Edelman flats had stripped very easily, but the AD formula is more tenacious.  When you do your pre-paint stripping with the Angelus Preparer/Deglazer, do your AD shoes again. And possibly a third or fourth time as well, just to be certain.

Step 2: Taping the Heels and Soles

I was thorough about this.  I was VERY thorough about this - cutting and pressing many infinitesimal bits of painters tape onto the curves of the heels on the Kensington shoes, and I  will say up front that this was probably the biggest mistake that I made in the whole exercise:

 

Angelus leather paint is an acrylic paint.  This means that it doesn't sink into the surface of the leather.  It sits on it and makes a film on top of the shoe  - and on top of the tape where I splashed over the edge of the heel, and when I  removed the tape at the end of the paint job, I ripped entire strips of paint away with it.  The way some costumers ended up painting the edges of their shoe soles black at the end of the whole process started making a whole lot more sense.

 

 Step 3: Painting the Shoes

I didn't want to use the yellow color straight out of the Angelus bottle. I wanted a softer, more lemon-y shade.

 

In a lidded plastic tub, I mixed yellow with white, and thinned it out with water.  The tutorials had recommended quite a thin mix - and here, again, I overdid it, and mixed up a lovely thin glaze of color that painted on without streaking or lumping, but when I had reached 10 coats on the flat shoes, I realized I may have gone just a little off the rails, and I left the lid off of the paint tub to evaporate some of the water out.

Tips for Painting: 

DO use thin coats.  It doesn't have to be translucently thin, but it needs to be thin enough to flow cleanly over the shoe without stippling or streaking.  I did find that a smaller brush tended to result in less streaking than a large one.

 

I found that the best results came from letting the paint dry completely between coats. It is quite humid where I live, and I found the best thing was to lay down a coat of paint, seal the lid on the plastic paint tub, and walk away and do something else for 15-30 minutes. Take your time, go gently, and build your color.

When you come back to the next coat, make sure to stir your paint before you apply the next one! The paint pigments have different densities, and if you don't remix your color you're liable to find you have lighter and darker patches across your shoe.

When you have built up the color to a strength that you like, stop, take a moment, and think "Holy HECK. If I scuff these shoes, I am never ever ever going to match this custom color.  I should have used the paint as it came, straight out of the bottle."  

 

 

But it will be too late for regrets by then, so bury your feelings down deep and move on to -

Step 4:  Removing the Painters Tape

As I wrote above, this was where I ran into my first real snag.  Removing the tape around the heel edges, I also removed strips of paint! 

 

At this point I stopped stripping, and went around the entire edge of the heel with a craft knife, digging deep into the join between leather heel and shoe body. And then I removed the rest of the tape. Very carefully.

 

Fortunately, the stripped patches filled in quite easily.  The texture is faintly blobby, but it is hidden in the under-curve of the shoe body, and anyone close enough to see that deserves all the satisfaction they get.

A bigger problem for me was all the paint that had gotten under the tape and onto the heel.

At this point I was thinking some pretty serious thoughts about all the time I'd spent taping the damn things. I tried chipping with a knife, but didn't make much headway. I tried dabbing with the Preparer/Deglazer, but discovered that the dark color of the sole edges was coming off and leaving bleached spots! At this point I decided that I could either paint the heels entirely or leave them as they were, but as I

a) didn't have any brown or black paint 

 

and

 

b) figured I'd just end up splashing back up onto the shoe body if I tried, I decide to move on and let it go. If someone sees it, good luck to them.  Lying down with your nose in the grass to critique a paint splash on the underside of a shoe deserves SOME sort of win.

 

Step 5:  Sealing the Shoes
 

Color applied and holes patched, it was time to seal and varnish the shoes.  The procedure was pretty simple - pour a bit of Angelus satin shoe sealer into a bowl and apply it with a brush.  Again, a smaller brush was more effective than a larger one, and again, I applied several coats, with resting time between each.  In consideration of future difficulties matching a custom color, I had some idea that more coats would provide more protection against scuffs.  I have no idea how effective this will turn out to be.  It will be an interesting experiment.

Using the sealer is where I discovered my second and third mistakes -

Mistake 1: 

 

I strongly suggest that when you seal your shoes, dry the sealer coats with the shoes sitting beneath an overturned plastic tub.  Or else knock up your local high school chemistry department and ask to borrow their fume hood.
Any dust that settles on your shoes will get stuck in that varnish. And if you're not paying particular attention, you may not notice this until the second or third coat, and then that cute little grey curl of dust across the tip of your pretty yellow shoe?
It's there FOREVER.

My third mistake was a GLARING one. In doing my pre-project research, I had seen that a small minority of people were choosing a matte varnish over the satin one, claiming that the satin was just too shiny.  The Tandy leather man had voted for the satin, so I went that way as well, and HOLY HECK - on these shoes, that satin-coat finish was about as satiny as a brand new patent vinyl raincoat. Under a stage-light. You know that very twentieth-century ultra-high-gloss high-beam plastic leather finish?
Yeah, that one.  That's what my shoes looked like.