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:

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.)

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!

I See Purple Elephants....

His name is Roger.
Roger Featherstone Umbrage the Fourth. 

Finger Puppets

My stuffed elephants are on hold until the other half of the baby gift arrives, so yesterday afternoon, during an impromptu sewing bee with Sarah, I whipped up a few of Soto Softie's finger puppets for the big (slightly bigger) sister of the baby.
            I made them about half the size that they're shown on the Soto Softies webpage  - I wanted to make them the right size for a set of two-year-old fingers.  So no big bobble eyes.  Just embroidery floss and a bit of attitude.
            They're rather creepy.  They look as if they're planning something.

A Pad Stitched Strawberry

Well  - I had quite a weekend.

            At Jenny's Biggest Morning Tea I was given a flier for an embroidery workshop sponsored by the local quilting guild. Country Bumpkin, an an Adelaide sewing store, was sending up a teacher for this past Saturday and Sunday.  Saturday was an introductory day for beginners,  but Sunday looked exciting - silk on silk embroidery, in an Elizabethan style of not-quite-stumpwork, that I'd always liked but never been quite willing to try, so - why not?

            Yesterday morning I knocked on the door of the Quilting Guild Hall - and walked into rather... more than I was expecting.

            There is an Australian-published embroidery magazine called Inspirations that's full of extremely elaborate and intimidating projects.  What I hadn't realized was that Country Bumpkin, far from being a cute and cozy craft store - is actually the company that produces Inspirations magazine.  And that Sunday's workshop was a seminar taught by Susan O'Connor - teacher, designer and an astonishing embroiderer.  And she was mine, all mine - well, myself and 9 other ladies from the quilting guild  - for a whole day, at a fraction of the price she customarily charges for her classes.

            Seriously - this woman is amazing.  She's stunningly talented, and is in high demand all over the world for her seminars and master classes. She had brought with her from Adelaide a table's worth of exquisite embroidery pieces for us to sigh over and fondle (here are a few of them- these particular ones were actually in the classroom with us, but the pictures don't come close to showing the exquisite detail and texture of the dense embroidery.) 

            The demand for her time is understandable.  She's a wonderful teacher.  Monique Johnston, who had run Saturday's class, sat at the back of the room doing things with needles and thread that looked as though she was painting on silk, while Susan led us through our paces with silk thread and number 10 sharp needles and handed out the project du jour  - a tiny embroidered bag silk.  We looked at the design - a stylized Elizabethan strawberry plant, no more than two 2 inches across - and all "Oh, yeah!  We'll get this little baby done today - wheee!"

            Susan smiled serenely and began to explain how to pad our strawberries and strawberry flowers with layers of satin stitch - and eight hours later, I had several stem-stitched stems, 3/4 of a split stitch and satin stitch leaf, one of two strawberries, and the padding of a strawberry flower.  You see - this is textured silk embroidery - you work with a single strand of silk, and you pad out the shapes by doing layer on layer of satin stitch - a strawberry the size of my fingernail has nine layers under the final layer - and then you have to criss-cross it in gold and couch it in green, and -well, there is a fair list of things that go into a silk strawberry.
            On a completely unrelated note,  I now have a divot the size of Crater Lake in the top of my middle finger.  I need to invest in a thimble. 

And my word, did I eat well!  I'd packed a sensible lunch of sandwiches and carrot sticks (I was feeling virtuous that morning.  So sue me.) but I'd forgotten something important - the ladies of the quilting guild are elderly country women: there was a morning tea provided with madeira cake and home made biscuits, a lunch of hearty country soups (plural) and long loaves of fresh-made bread, and an afternoon tea of more madeira cake and chocolate cake and more biscuits and home-made cheese straws - I may not have eaten healthy, but I ate solid.

            I also learned just how sharp really high quality European needles can be.  They're so narrow and fine that they just slide straight into your fingers and you don't even notice until they're a quarter of an inch deep.  The afternoon was punctuated by howls of anguish and yells of "SHIT SHI- sugar. sugar.  darn. drat." as delicately spoken country women leaped to their feet and ran for the first aid box before they bled all over the silk. 

            Today I've been all over amazon and found a set of books by Di van Niekerk, a South African woman who combines these techniques with ribbon embroidery, which clears up my last lingering dubiosities of "well,  this is fun, but I really love the freedom and spontaneity and creativity of designing as you go, as you can do with ribbons so,  should I...?"

            Well, I should.  And I'm sold on silk thread.  It's only a dollar more per skein than DMC cotton, and it doesn't fray and it's a billion times as strong and it keeps its luster - and I don't think I can go back!

Fire and Ice: Part 5 - The Dress!!

I woke up on Saturday morning, took the bustle skirt off of Sally's shoulders and sighed hugely - the tapes were way too short and the apron attachment to cover the zipper at the central back looked absurd - it was far too small to be rucked up with tapes of its own.
            So I unpicked the tapes in the apron and lengthened everything by 100 percent.  It works.

The Dress looking Splendid:

Straight on:

Lots of sideways yumminess:

The dress has a couple of technical issues - the bodice tends to ride up and wrinkle- I thought about putting some heavy duty press-studs on the waistband but it became very puckery - a better solution would be a piece of fabric to go between my legs-  leotard style, but I didn't have time or appropriate materials, so I sewed myself into the dress and sailed grandly out of the house toward my ball.
            I'd bought face paints and found a lovely design that I planned to base my own on - but had an allergic reaction to the paints.  I began painting on the yellow undercoat and without any fanfare or preliminary itching, my eyes puffed up until I was squinting through bloodshot slits, and they began to weep - it was like Niagara. I jumped back into the shower and washed everything off, then proceeded to redo my face - conventionally.  With as much gold as I could convince to stay there.  It doesn't much show in the photos, but I was most impressively gilded.
            The bustle isn't perfect - the upper apron is too long and the whole bustle tends to slide sideways. I was mystified till I took the dress off after the party and found several pins still tucked into the lowest tier and tugging the whole assemblage off balance.
            On the whole, however, for the amount of fabric I had to play with - I'm very happy with how this gown has come out!
            In fact, my only genuine issues with the over-skirt stem from too much fabric - the little apron attachment needs shortening and the over-skirt is far too wide -it doesn't hold the gold underskirt tight enough and the whole assemblage blooms too wide. I need to unpick a few seams and lap the back apron further over the front so that it sits more neatly.

Here is an example of how the skirt is too wide, in contrast to how it should be:

I found my jewelry in a little store on Bloor street in Toronto a few years ago - the necklace was sold strung on a cord instead of a chain, and the earrings had long chains reaching up from the top of the flower and ending in little hooks that could be strung into your hair. A few days ago I replaced the cord with a chain, removed the chains from the earrings, and attached the tikka to the clasp of the necklace, so that it could dangle down between my shoulder blades. Very elegant!

I love the shoulder ruffle on my bodice - I wired the edges of the upper and lower sticky-out-y bits so that they'd stand up sharply. Unfortunately, this ruffled piece is NOT detachable from the dress - although I wised up when I got to the feathers. And after that, the waist ruffle that disguises where I took in the waistband. THAT little bit of yummy scrap-flower-craziness can be removed if I need to wash the skirt!

Shoulder ruffle:

Frost and fire!