A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Done the second painted petticoat! So that'll get sent off tomorrow or Monday, and I get to sew for meeeeee again! For now. ;)

I ought to get cracking on my plans for the Big Hat Tea in April, but I'll allow myself a bit of playtime first. So, today, besides hemming the painted petticoat, I:

- Washed, dried, and ironed (ugh) a bunch of "modern" dress fabrics, mostly from my last splurge during an FFC sale. Includes what I'll probably use for my 1940 Reading airshow dress (white lightweight cotton with little black polka-dots), but we'll see about that.

- Cut a hunk of linen to make a new late 18thc shift from. Was going to cut the pieces, but realized it had a big weird brown mark on it, so had to wash that out first.

- Started a new pair of 1770s stays. Um, what?? Welllll, my current pair is still unbound - they were the "let me experiment with cane" pair, in which I decided I do not like cane at all for half-boned stays! After the first try-on snapped a couple canes I wasn't inclined to put more work into binding them... anywhoo, I wore them Saturday and broke another cane, which reminded me that I'd bought some fun rose-pink linen to make stays with last year, and I should really get around to that. This pair will be boned with plastic whalebone, so I shouldn't be able to destroy them as quickly!
And I'm going to hand sew them, for funsies. I'd like to, and there's no rush, since the cane pair is still quite functional. And I've never yet made a pair of hand-sewn 18thc stays, believe it or not! I should really use linen thread for linen stays, I think...but I like sewing with silk so that's what I'm going to use. Fight me. xD
So I traced off a new pattern from the cane stays, as I apparently still had the 2011 stays pattern but hadn't saved the updated-in-2015 pattern? Good job, Past Me. Derp. Good thing stays are easy to trace off! Got all the pieces besides lining cut - outside of aforementioned pink linen, and two layers of linen canvas for the channels. That is, the channels will go through all three layers, as I don't trust the pink linen to be used as a strength layer alone (midweight, mid-priced linen to hold in boning on its own? Nope). And basted all the pieces together with enormous purple stitches! Shame I didn't take a picture, it's very attractive.

Since there were a few of us in the Philly area that couldn't make it to the Francaise Dinner for various reasons, I thought it might be fun to get together and do a Costume Thing that weekend to at least sort of make up for it. To that end, we went to City Tavern yesterday for lunch - the Tavern's a perfect setting for costumed lunches, and the owner loves when people show up in costume. (Free booze. Just sayin'. And Robin doesn't drink, so I got two. Win-win.)

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Rapidly running out of time - it's a mercy we rescheduled the lunch to Sunday rather than Saturday. (Although if we hadn't, I probably wouldn't even have started the petticoat.) This one's got more colors in it, and so many leaves to outline. All the leaves. Hrrng. I like it very much though, so I'mma keep on truckin'!

Well, I wanted one for myself, too! And the first was to try out a less complicated pattern. This one's a little bigger. I ordered more inks a couple days ago; here's hoping they actually get here in time, heh. So I was dedicated and got the whole pattern drawn out today. So many leaves argh.

Finished painting the petticoat today - even had time to do a half-repeat sample of the design on medium-weight cotton as well, though I don't think it looks as nice and uses up considerably more ink. Tomorrow it starts being an actual petticoat!