A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

O M G an event that didn't get rained out NOR did my car break down! (I tricked it by taking the train up to Adrienne instead.) It wasn't a bad day, weather-wise, considering the whole "summer" thing - hot, but not terribly humid, and there was a good breeze all day. And we made sure to be well-watered.

Our misspeachum was getting fake-married as Maria Allaire (they have a little wedding reenactment every year of the daughter of the owner of Allaire in, I think, 1836) so naturally we had to attend and take up an inordinate amount of space. Everybody even made New Things for the occasion! And we've all decided we are very fond of the silly, silly Romantic styles, so despite Tessa departing for William & Mary in the fall (*snif* they grow up so fast!), we plan on making excuses for more 1830s in future.

Tessa's mom is an excellent picture-taker so I snagged the pics she got of us! We totally look like a group of easter eggs, LOL.
( We had a lot of fun, there are a lot of silly pictures. Fair warning! )

Pics in my album, and Alice's

And now I guess the next event I need to sew for is the Allaire barn dance in August. The idea of the not-spangled spangled dress is sort of terrifying me, which is at least part of the reason I threw this dress together for the wedding - both to stall on starting it, and to give me an option in case I don't finish it in time. (I did some rough maths a couple weeks ago... I'm going to need twice the amount of spangles I bought, and the skirt alone will take 23 days to spangle, if I sew at my usual slow rate. I know I've already put over a hundred bucks into spangles for this dress, but I might short-circuit out on it before it even gets started!)

Sneak peek! I think it fits. ;)



I still have some odds and ends to do: a sash and shoulder bows of green silk, sleeve puffs (got a feather pillow today for that purpose!), and white net mitts (cut them out today)...but even if none of that manages to get done, I still will be presentable!

As predicted, I now regret my depressing post, and we shall pretend it never happened, ok? Ok.

I managed to haul my butt out of bed early enough this morning to sew a nice bit of stuff...actually, it was a very windy thunderstorm, knocking things over that went THUNK very loudly, throughout the house. Well, that works as well as an alarm!

So I finished trimming my bonnet, which naturally means the chance of rain will instantly go up to 80%, because that's just how this year works for events. Also I sewed the bodice and skirt of the dress together. Oh, right, did I mention I decided to make a dress? I decided to make a dress. Not out of my nice printed cotton (duvet cover, 'hem), because I decided this on Sunday night and a LOT of this dress is machined. I had a little over 4 yards of mint green lawn (which you may remember from my 1920s summer dress a few years ago) that sounded like it would make a nice summer dress. The shade of green is maaaaaybe a little dubious (from my limited survey of 1830s, green doesn't seem to be terribly popular, and I haven't seen this shade at all), but it looks nice with a peachy pink bonnet, plus it's thin cotton (hello, June), so I don't care. :D

Day dresses with short sleeves aren't very common by the 1830s, but Adrienne was collecting a few examples for Alice, when she was considering short sleeves, and a very few of them pop up. I really liked the idea of this one, with sheer gloves (or mitts? I think they're gloves but I very much like mitts). It's probably not your standard "day dress" (no hat), but I see steps and bushes, so she's definitely outside! Eh, enough justification for me. And then I get to make long mitts!

...Plus, with 4 yards, there's no way I could have had long sleeves anyway! Well, maybe if I took out the half-width of fabric from the skirt (it's 2.5 panels of 58" wide), but I would consider that too narrow for a sheer.