A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Short-ish post! This dress had so many false starts and stops, I never bothered to take in-progress pictures of it, nor is it constructed in an especially exciting way. It's just a basic closed-front 1770s gown. But it's pink and it's fun and I like it! I think I started this dress in 2023? Bestie Robin and I had gone to Fort Fred market fair recently and I was inspired to make a new basic gown for the "next time we went to Fort Fred". (We haven't gone since.)  Some patient slash lucky ebay-ing later, I found a chunk of pink lightweight worsted wool suiting, and snapped it up. It was four yards and some change, so plenty for a closed-front gown, or an open-front gown without a matching petticoat. I have gowns in both styles, so I tossed a coin and closed won. (Finding affordable 100% wool fabric in fun colors has never been easy, and it's only gotten more difficult in the intervening three years. But what if I don't WANT pinstriped navy...) Practicing ...

 Welcome back to blog posting! (Maybe! I'm going to try to be better about blogging again. Got to fight the ever-increasing AI malarkey. My stuff may not be polished and pretty all the time but you can be damn sure I really took the photos and am writing all this out myself!)  .  This summer I made an 1810s working class outfit, and finally got around to taking pictures of it in my backyard, since I don't know when I'll get a chance to take pictures in a nicer setting! The overgrown garden beds work, I guess. Accidentally color-coordinated with the squash blossoms, very festive for fall.  . Originally I started putting together this outfit with the idea of wearing it to interpret at a local historic site in South Jersey; that didn't work out, but I figured I might as well finish the outfit up and document it! The site interprets the house and small surrounding area as it existed during the 1810s, when it was a rural farm owned by a Quaker family. The interpreter role...

ME: I'm going to just finish binding these stays and then get nice pictures of them before I write my post about them! ALSO ME: NAPPING IS NICE LOL. I should know by now that I should just work with what I have NOW and then add more LATER, or it will never HAPPEN at ALL. So, without further ado, here's a little write-up/review of the Virgil's Fine Goods/ Scroop Augusta stays pattern !  With apparently no pictures of the back or close-ups, oops. At the very end of our last day in costume at CW. And very silly faces, but alas, that's just my face.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a costumer who insists on blogging rather than posting short-format videos will never get any traction. Not that I ever had any pretensions of being an influencer (they didn't call them that back in my day, you know). Me, I still prefer reading to videos. So here we are!   I haven't sewn much over the past year-plus, and nothing worth putting up here. However! Recently I went on a costume trip to Colonial Williamsburg. I didn't have the get-up-and-go to make any new outfits, but I did have one necessary make: new stays.

Also Known As: well I ran out of time for that dinner dress, huh? I really didn't think this "dress" warranted a blog post, but far be it from me to deny plaintive and pointed requests from all two of my fans, so here we are.  Disclaimer: 90% of the pictures taken of me at the event are ridiculous; part of that because I make weird faces, but the more significant part is because it was really windy that day! Oh well, we work with what we have... (that's a theme here, for those of you taking notes.) It's... aesthetic . I got my dinner dress for the event (an 1870s-1880s dinner hosted by my BFF Robin of SewLoud ) more than three-quarters done, but at the last minute had a few Real Life things come up, and with less than 48 hours til the dinner, had to be honest with myself that there was no way the dress was going to be wearable. And I don't currently have anything else 1870s-80s that's wearable, day, evening, opera, afternoon...nada. So this was going to r...

 A relatively short post: 1880s foundations! I don't especially like making the undies, but I do like having the correct foundations for an outfit; it makes all the difference.  

 Or, Traditional Welsh Dress, if you prefer. I actually made most of this outfit for a "Bonfire Night" themed party in 2022, but I didn't make the hat and I didn't bother making the sleeves because it ended up being 80F that weekend and didn't feel at all autumnal...and as such I didn't bother getting any nice pictures of it! I wore it on Halloween to sit out front and give out candy to trick or treaters (and creep some of them out ), which felt much more appropriate weather for this outfit...in the 50s and then lower once the sun went down. Which in turn inspired me to finish it up properly - at least enough to take pictures and document its existence! There's a lot of documenting ahead; if you're just here for the pictures you may want to step over to Instagram instead! I've posted and will keep posting some shots of the outfit there, too, with much less verbosity. Relatively speaking.