A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Since Robin and Alice are both being very posty tonight, I thought I'd be slightly annoying and join them! I have blog posts to write on the dresses, too, but I'd rather write here about the events first. More likely to forget those! So, Saturday first. Since I was bound and determined to do something 1860s and Christmassy, dammit. *bangs table*

There were a few futile efforts to find tickets to a couple of Christmas teas (we got on this one a little late...but now we know for next year!), but I found New Castle, Delaware had a Christmas Thing on the desired date, and since it's fairly close and billed as a Very Historic Little Town, I thoughtit might be fun to check out.

And yes, Old New Castle is quite charming; the main streets for a few blocks square are all 18th/first half of 19thc buildings (or look like it), which is a perfect place for playing dress-up! We rather felt we should be in 18thc dress - except that they billed it as a Dickens thing, and that making such a thing of Christmas is more 19thc anyway.

miss_philomena drove down to me, and I drove us down to New Castle, where we met sewloud (in a parking lot! hurray for parking lot dressing!). And I made it a point to get pictures of the marquee dress as soon as we were all put together! Which was really the whole point of me wanting to do 1860s in the first place. I made the aforementioned bonnets, and Adrienne finished a new dress for the occasion: a wonderfully horrible lemon-yellow faille. It is SO obnoxious and I love it.
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Photobucket album here

And now I'm tired, so I'll do the Allaire/1830s writeup tomorrow!

Finished! Well, not technically...I remembered that I forgot I wanted to put a pocket in. But that won't take long. And I need to take the undersleeves out of the grey dress, wash them, and tack them in this dress. Which I should do sooner rather than later

But other than those little details, finished!

I took some uber-crappy pictures on Mabel for proof, too. I'm not unreservedly thrilled with it, for little nitpicky reasons I won't get into now, because I need to get dressed and do my makeup for the Halloween party I'm going to (have decided to wear the Ugly 1920s Dress, braid my hair, and go as Wednesday Addams). But I like it well enough to wear it, and it had better be cold for Gettysburg, because my 500 pounds of dress and I demand it!

(Well, it's 10, with most of that in the skirt. My hoop is not entirely thrilled with that, and needs a bit of help re-inflating after I get up from a chair while wearing this dress. Good times. But it's super warm!)


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I had many things I intended to work on today, but the wrists and fingers opined that they would like another day off from hand sewing. Since I have a lot of machine sewing to do, too, I determined we could do that. Sure! Let's work on the day dress instead!

Primary accomplishment for the day: sewing a finger. I know I seem injury-prone lately, but that's actually the first time I've machine-sewed a finger since getting this machine Christmas of '05. So there. ;)

(Not, like, right through the finger, just the side of it. I think I'll survive.)

First off, I added another half-width of fabric to the skirt, because apparently math is hard, and I failed at it while putting the skirt together. Good job, Past Me. Then I had to actually decide how to trim the skirt, which is something I've been waffling over for weeks. I kept going back and forth between vertical bands of fuchsia and some kind of hem cutouts backed with fuchsia. Vertical trimming seems to be a little later in date, though, which would coincide with slightly gored skirts, which I didn't do because gores are annoying. Circus marquee it is!

It doesn't look like much for an entire afternoon's worth of work, but it's a lot of skirt and the flannel was going creepy-creepy over the polished cotton facing (and that's where I sewed my finger). Yes, I could have hand basted it...but, no. That's waaaay too many inches of basting. Basting my silk satin ballgown is one thing, this day dress is quite another. (No.) I thought I mathed my cutouts properly, but apparently didn't, so I ended up with two slightly longer flappy bits on one side. To my credit, they aren't right in the CF.

A flounced band of the fuchsia will go under that, and hang a few inches lower than the marquee edge. (Come on, you KNOW it looks like a tent.) The original plan was to tack the fuchsia flounce onto the skirt itself, but I sewed a few inches of it on, and, nope. Probably because it weighs a ton, the stitches show through really obviously and look mucho terrible. Okaaaaay, guess I'm making a separate underskirt for the flounce! I may actually have to buy fabric for that (boo), since I'm very low on mockup and random don't-need-this-for-anything fabric right now. Hmm. Must go poke the Stash.

So as to avoid any funny business with my poor old burnt fingers, I did zero hand sewing today. I think they'll be fine tomorrow (provided I wrap them up when I go to work, because that place is FILTHY and every time I get cut there, I half-suspect I'm going to get blood poisoning), but oh well, I managed to survive a day without hand sewing. You'll be surprised, I'm sure. Last night I did some Lovecraft re-reading, and tonight watched The Civil War on PBS.

And today before work I finished tucking my white hoop petticoat (hopefully now it won't hang out under my skirts, thanks. and now I can wear it Sunday if I wear the fluffy beast to Belvidere. Also good), and miracle of miracles, actually started on something for Gettysburg. Cut and sewed the panels for the seafoam flannel day dress skirt - 2.5 widths, since it's so helpfully 63" wide. Then I brought out the candy stripe plaid dress bodice pattern. And thought about a mockup, and then decided to live dangerously by just cutting the CF to come to a small point instead of rounded off. I've decided to do the false-bolero-with-contrast-waistcoat-front sort of look, because the fuchsia is so very contrasty and I think it needs to be as obnoxious as possible. Something vaguely similar to this purple-and-white, at least in bodice type. (She looks surprisingly early-bustley-skirt-trimmed, doesn't she?) Actually I like the skirt too, but think it might make me look like some fool who's wandered in from 1870 because she didn't know any better...

Bodice! And I think I even cut all the pieces with the grain of the flannel going the right way...didn't even sew one skirt panel upside down. Always improving! ;)