A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

If correlation and causation are the same, then I can state for a fact that a severe cold can be improved mightily by a long bitching session with one's friends on FB chat about how sick one is feeling! ;) Felt rather better yesterday (but still managed to snag a snow day, since the store called me with an "if you're still feeling sick we don't really need you on tonight" ten minutes before I was going to call in to say they hadn't yet plowed my street!), and vastly better today, though I'm still a little snuffly and have a charming post-nasal drip. And, snow! I think my area ended up getting between 5-6" yesterday...the perfect amount to really enjoy, but not quite enough to make shoveling horrible, or really foul up the roads. Helped that it wasn't during the workweek...

A few of us went out to sewloud 's local tea house for a little 12th Night(...ish)/Holiday Regency tea this afternoon; same place we went for our (pompously named) Farewell to Summer tea, which is really nice for a low-key event with a few people. I must be feeling better, as yesterday afternoon I realized my green silk pelisse from last year was very nearly wearable... So I got that into a wearable if not finished state, and once I can snag pics from Robin I'll post them.

I've also officially revised my plans for ice skating. I still want to make the Very Smart plum wool suit, but I can't kid myself anymore that I'll have time for it! Losing almost a week of sewing time just won't allow it - I know how fast I can sew, and it's not that fast! So! Plan...what are we up to? C? D? Heh.

So I brainstormed a bit, and went down the "well, what would actual me in 1898 or so have worn?" (Not that Actual Me would be exactly the same in 1898 as 2017 Me, but you get the gist.) Not a fashion plate, like the plum suit! I like pretty things, but don't have an unlimited budget to spend on clothes or places to wear high-fashion things, and I strongly prefer separates over dresses. Well...that can work for 1898 Me, too! And that should work for 2017 Me's time constraints, too. :P

Almost definitely still going to make a jacket out of the plum wool - partly because it's really very nice wool, partly because if I want to trim it up later and make the plum wool suit I can, and partly because my new winter coat this year in Real Life is a very similar shade of plummy burgundy, so it amuses me. I haven't actually dragged out the fabrics for the waist and skirt yet, but mentally a skirt of navy wool-cotton flannel and waist of tiny burgundy and cream check silk look nice and neat together! Reserve the right to change that if they don't look nice when I put them next to each other in real time and space though. ;)

And a new hat if I possibly have the time! Heh.

Imagine that. I made myself sit down and get boring grownup stuff out of the way (ordering checks, filing taxes, other extremely exciting things of that nature), and then even got some sewing on the pelisse done! Hemmed the sleeves, the skirt, and bound one side of the CF.

And now it's supposed to be close to 60 degrees next weekend when I wanted to wear it. Ffffffuuuuuu...

...I may not be wearing it next weekend. We'll see.

I suppose that means I should also finish the new bonnet I wanted to wear with it, so I'll have something new, sheesh.

Got the second sleeve all sewn in, and the back bodice edge taken up, so now I get to actually finish all the edges, thrilling. Except for the neck edge since that'll be enclosed by Fur Collar. Actually remembered to buy a little piece of wide twill tape from work tonight to cover the waist seam, too.

Oh, and I made a skirt from a late 1950s pattern. Cut it out earlier this week, which probably took almost as long as it did to sew the thing together, since, plaid. I cut it all out very precisely, managed to sew it together somewhat less precisely. The lines got a little wonky at the side seams...a few mms off. I tried to get myself to care enough to rip them out and resew them; couldn't manage it. So it's done except for the zipper, which I will put in by hand, because it's quicker than putting it in by machine and having to pick it out and redo it three times. I am so entertainingly stupid at putting in zippers. Damn newfangled contraptions. xD

Not that these have done anything particularly horrible, but sleeves are always at least vaguely annoying. I ended up using the sleeves from the red spencer, as they fit over the cream striped wool dress with only a wee bit of discomfort, so I added a little bit of width to the pattern and called it Good Enough.

So I got all the sleeve pieces cut - the interlining of one is navy tropical wool, the other is leftover cream stripe wool from the aforementioned dress. They're almost the same weight so it shouldn't matter, but it does amuse me. The left sleeve is sewn together and put on, and the right has the green silk and wool interlining basted together, and that's all I'm doing tonight.

Also discovered I need to take the back of the bodice up a very little bit, maybe 1/4", so it doesn't droop in a very sad manner. At least the back of the skirt's long enough that I won't bother unpicking, can just sew that part of the seam again, a little tighter this time.

Did a whole bunch of costume-related research today, that was basically totally irrelevant to anything else I have on my plate at the moment...but it was still very interesting! Thank you, internet...what would I do without you?

So all I got done on the pelisse was to baste the green silk and lining together at the top edge of the skirt. Um, yay?

(Slightly related: I haven't watched any of War & Peace, but I've been reading recaps, and the costumes are just so exhaustingly bad...it makes me tired. I did see the top of a furry pelisse on Lily James that didn't make me want to stick a fork in my eye? On the bright side, this series can provide abundant education as to why The Correct Bust Support in Early 19thc Costume is So Very Important! All the boobs look so sad and dumpy...and, like, a fair amount of these actresses have perky 20-something-boobs, so you really gotta try to make them look bad! Congrats, you've succeeded.)

Oh so productive today! Sort of.

Remembered to actually take pictures and list the new bonnet first off, so hooray for that. And it's cute! I may be converted to soft-crown bonnets yet. ;) (Nevah!)

And then I decided to indulge myself and work on the pelisse pretty much all day. I finished basting the bodice pieces and got them all sewn together, cut the skirt pieces, and started sewing them together. I got to the point of "why aren't I machine sewing these long seams, again?" within the last half-hour or so, which meant it was time to put it away for the night!

I haven't actually fitted anything, just went "hmm, liked the fit of my black spencer, will base the bodice on that" and "hmm, probably want it an inch or so longer than my cream striped wool dress" and cut and sewed accordingly. So if I'm pulling my hair out when I actually try the thing on, we have documentation as to why!

Cut out and pinned together the rest of the bodice pieces for the pelisse - now to baste them together!

Almost finished the obnoxiously red hat - just have to tack down the seam allowance on the inside, and then stick some ribbons on it. The color's obnoxious enough that I'm going to keep the trim pretty simple.

Also cut out the interlining for the pelisse bodice - I could have started cutting it out of the silk ages ago, but it did occur to me that the silk I have and the silk I've bought might be wildly differing dye lots...in which case I'll have wasted a nice piece of silk! (I'll be disappoint if I can't use the green silk, but at least if I don't hack into it now I'll have two intact pieces!) Said silk is on the way to me now, so now we wait. I got the bodice interlining pieces out of scraps of navy tropical weight wool from my 1920s Dress of Ugly; the sleeves may have to be something else, we shall see.

My fur coat-thing came in the mail today - a day earlier than expected, most excellent. It's in very decent shape; only a few scruffy spots, and one hole in a cuff. And for the price I am perfectly fine with that. It's some kind of squirrel, which I admit to being tickled by, as I am an unrepentant squirrel-hater (they're suburban yard terrorrists and you can't convince me otherwise, with apologies to those of you out there who love all tiny rodents). Well, not that this one is made of North-American-grey-suburban-yard-terrorrist-squirrel, it's more likely some sort of Russian squirrel.

Squirrel squirrel squirrel. Doesn't look like a real word any more, I've typed it out too much. Anyway.

The coat is a kind of weird cape-coat-hybrid thing, which is actually great because there's no little niggling voice in my head that says "but what if you ever wanted to wear this coat as a coat? it would be so nice and warm!" I'm not really into weird coat-capes.

And I think I'll be able to use the cuffs and collar pretty much as-is, which is very convenient indeed. And, yeah, I'm fairly certain I'm going to use my green silk. Sorry sewloud. ;) I'll wait and see what I can squeak out of this before buying more though. It won't photograph nicely - I think it's one of those fabrics that only will play nicely in outdoor natural light! It's green shot with bronze, and I think it looks super spiffy with this fur!