A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Quick post before I trot off to bed (trains are back up after two days not running, thanks Hurricane Sandy); I managed to finish the linen shirt to wear with the pompom Regency outfit. Bad pics, sorry! Bad lighting, bad hair...you know how it goes.

I did promise to post more! It's just difficult when all the sewing I can do is picking away at a hem here and there for fifteen minutes or so before I go to bed - nobody cares about those kinds up updates, I don't think! But I'll give you an overview of what I've been working on - in two weeks I'm going to a Regency tea with friends, and I need a new dress! Really. The only Regency dress I have is made from a lightweight silk sari, which isn't exactly practical for November. I have a ton of wool from an online sale last year (or the year before?), so I knew I was set for fabric...one of the wools is a very dark midnight blue with a drapey hand, good for Regency. And after much poring over books and finding this one in the V&A's collection, I decided I needed a silly pompom dress! From Nineteenth Century Fashion in Detail - more views on the V&A's site

Or, What Happens When You're A Procrastinator. You have an unfinished jacket with no trim, no shoulder bits and crappy sleeves, no coif, and no smock. So you wear your 1530s French hood and your low-necked 18thc shift, and feel self-conscious all day (even though it's the Renaissance Faire , and no one besides the group you're with know how wrong it is!). So...I hesitate to call this done, but then, I don't know when I'll actually get around to fixing the horrible chicken-wing sleeves, putting on trim, and all that - we've got Many Wicked Plans for next year's faire visit, and none of them involve a c1590-1600 jacket! At least it was wool, so I wasn't cold for the final joust...except for my neck. Would have helped if I had a HIGH-NECKED SMOCK or something. Just a couple pictures so you can see the awfulness...

Today I drove down to Delaware to meet up with a few friends, at the Rockwood Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. It's an historic house that was built in the style of a lovely English Gothic country house in the 1850s, and is kept in the style of the family that lived there around the turn of the last century. There were just four of us, but we made the most of it! Weather wasn't superb; it rained all the drive down, and was still a bit drizzly when I got there, but we had tea and snackies in a parlor, took the tour, and by then the rain had decided to take a break so we could parade around and get pictures! (Well, my friends could get pictures, anyway. And were kind enough to post them tonight so I could take them!) It meant yet another outing for the striped bustle dress (SIGH. Really going to have to get on that), which wasn't ideal, with the whole "train" and "wet" thing, but at least it's cotton, so wasn't a problem to wash out the hem!...