Bonnes Vacances!

Just a quick post to take my leave of you all for a week. I’m off down to the Cornish coast for a wedding- hurrah!- and a spot of good old fashioned sandcastle building, knitting on the beach and rootling in rockpools. Oh, and romantic moments on cliff tops while enormous sailing boats glide past in the background, just like in this picture from the Gazette du Bon Ton from 1921 :)

I’ll be leaving my Etsy store open so that you can still nab patterns, but patterns will be actually shipped on the 20th July when I return.

Have a good week!

Faster, shinier, stronger, and patterns for sale!

Breaking news: I’m having a spring clean of my vintage sewing patterns. Looking through my collection the other day I realised that I have some that, because they’re the wrong size or shape for me, I’m just never going to use. It’s hard to part with my preciouses (rubs hands together and capers about in Gollum-esque manner) but I firmly believe vintage patterns should be enjoyed rather than just kept in a box. So I’ve set up a new Etsy store and they’re up waiting to be claimed and given a good home. (I’ll add more when I get the chance.) I’d like to offer all of you a 10% discount until 30th April 2009 as a thank you for being, well, lovely readers :) Etsy can’t apply the discount automatically- when you check out, mention my blog and the title of this particular post and wait for me to send you an invoice for the discounted amount.

Patterns for sale include the early 1920s frock at the top of this post by McCalls. This little dress has a gathered and shirred skirt front, belt and choice of two sleeves- both long, one gathered, one straight. The neckline can be either square or V tied with a bow and funnily enough the gathers at the high bust are a trend I’m spotting in the shops for this season. It’s sized for a 34″ bust. Also up for grabs is the late 1940s Vogue pattern below, with its unusual shoulder detail, softly pleated skirt front and button bodice front. And it’s a 38″ bust.

Also, I’m sorry about the blog silence, due partly to a lovely week’s Easter break visiting lovely family and partly due to the very unlovely demise of my computer. After years of faithful service my old Apple G4 Powerbook has been reincarnated… into a new aluminium Macbook. The new one is quicksilver sleek and fleet of foot processor, but I kinda miss the old one. But now I’m back. And I can blog again. Faster, shinier, stronger :)

Save me the waltz, and a discovery

“Lespiaut couldn’t make enough flowers for the trade. They made nasturtiums of leather and rubber and wax gardenias and ragged robins out of threads and wires. They manufactured hardy perennials to grow on the meagre soil of shoulder straps and bouquets with long stems for piercing the loamy shadows under the belt. Modistes pieced hats together from the toy boats in the Tuileries; audacious dressmakers sold the summer in bunches. The ladies went to the foundries and had themselves some hair cast and had themselves half-soled with the deep chrome fantasies of Helena Rubenstein and Dorothy Gray…”

Snapshot of Paris, 1927 from Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald’s slightly surreal slant on fast living in the 1920s (and a story strikingly parallel to her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night). Rereading this beautiful passage I just had put down the book and google Lespiaut, a name Zelda tosses in as a brand so well known that her reader would have needed no explanation of it. The only web reference I could find on Lespiaut today (nothing but their address in 1927) led to an exciting discovery: the web archives of Jalou, the French publishers of, among other magazines, L’Officiel de la Mode, which started in 1921 and is still running. What’s more, you can roam around their archives, and actually turn the pages of all the issues from every decade. Click on plein ecran to view pages full screen, and then use the magnify glass to zoom in further. I browsed 1927 issues for the picture at the top of this post, and this gorgeous one here:

Almost as good as the fashion shots are the advertisements:

Isn’t it fantastic that publishers allow you to access this kind of information and inspiration?

I’d rather Charleston

Guess what I’ve been doing over the past week or so? Sewing frenetically, and the result is that Hettie’s bridesmaid’s dress is officially finished. You can see Hettie modelling it at a grand trying on session chez nous this weekend in the pictures here and getting into that Charleston vibe. Personally I think the stripey socks set it off beautifully :)

Quick Update

This is just a quick update on Hettie’s Bridesmaid’s dress, before I run to catch a coach down to Kent for the weekend… Because this is written in haste, I haven’t really tweaked the overdress on the dummy so that it hangs right, but here it is:

At the moment, the finished skirt is only pinned to the sash facing (which you can’t see) which is thin cotton and interfacing. The bodice shoulder and side seams have been sewn as hairline seams. I realised that one layer of fabric in the bodice was probably going to be too sheer, so I’ve made two bodices out of the same fabric -one will be the lining- and at the moment they are pinned together inside each other at the neck edge. The dress doesn’t have a sash yet- the bumpy fabric round the middle is the hefty seam allowance I’ve left on the bodice for adjustments…

Another view:

The fabric for the underslip has arrived from Farmhouse Fabrics, all tied up with a ribbon!

So, discerning readers, here are the burning issues which I’ll be mulling over while I’m away. Your artistic input, is, as ever, much appreciated in the comments!

1. How to finish the neck and armhole edges? Satin bias binding? And if so, what colour?

2. The sash, what colour and what fabric? Perhaps to match the neck and armhole binding?

A shower of petals

When I sketched the original design for Hettie’s bridesmaid’s dress, I imagined the skirt as a shower of petals. Which is all very well and poetic but as I was sketching merrily away I didn’t think in too much detail about how to accomplish that petal effect!

Luckily, somewhere I remembered having seen a similar skirt (which may have been what subconsciously inspired me to draw it in the first place). A little leafing through a few books and I came across this sketch of a dress from 1921-22, by the mighty Vionnet in from Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion 2 (1860-1940):

Isn’t that lovely? Has anyone tried making it? I did play around for a while with the pattern piece for the skirt of this dress (to the right) and some muslin on much smaller than life-size scale, but it didn’t really work out for me. The finished result had a lot less movement and fullness that I was expecting. The movement was all in the very edges of the petals, whereas I want the whole skirt to move. Also, I don’t really want to get involved with setting in all those triangular points at the waistline! So, I’ve decided to cheat to try to achieve a similar effect.

The first scheme was to make the skirt out of a series of semi-circles, overlapping them in a line, and gathering them along the top so there is a lot of fullness:

But the gathering would anchor the petals together so that I might as well just use one gathered piece of fabric with a scalloped edge. Back to the drawing board. How about more circular shape pieces, stitched to each other a little at the side like Vionnet’s dress and gathered across the top?

I got as far as mocking that one up out of muslin. And it didn’t look that great. Finally:

Each semi-circle has a line of running stitches across the top, then is machined part of the way to the next petal at the side. Then, each individual piece is gathered, the side edges are turned apart and the result if positioned on the sash facing. This works better.

Now, can anyone help with any tips for hemming a semi-circle made out of a crepe de chine type fabric? Are there any shortcuts?!?

Right, now to make a proper test dress to try on Hettie!

A bridesmaid’s dress for Hettie

There’s someone I’d like you to meet. Say hello to my wonderful cousin, Hettie. Hello, Hettie!

Hettie has very kindly agreed to be my bridesmaid in June, and we’re both very excited! Today I started work on the first piece of clothing I’ll ever have made for someone who isn’t me or my other half, Robin. The clothing in question is Hettie’s bridesmaid dress. As Hettie and I live quite a long way apart, I thought I could set up a special page category called Hettie’s Bridemaid Dress to chronicle the creation of the Dress!

We’re going to design the dress, I’ll make a muslin test dress, and then when we’ve got that one to fit, we’ll make the REAL dress. As Hettie has a touch of the fun 1920s flapper in her personality, we’re looking towards the 1920s for inspiration. But less towards the very narrow line of the early 1920s, and more towards the full skirt of late 1920s evening wear.

Here are some photos that have been really useful so far as inspiration. The first two are taken from the book Vintage Fashion: Collecting and Wearing Designer Classics. I love the crossover bodice, the full skirt, and the flower of this one, and can imagine it with a contrasting slip worn underneath and showing at the neck:

 

I like the sleeves and easy drape of this one:

These next two are taken from The Kyoto Costume Institute’s Fashion: A History from teh 18th Century to the 20th Century (a huge glossy two volume work crammed with colour images and a complete bargain). I love the shape of this one:

and the layers and colours of this one:

So, after a bit of research, I came up with three sketches which I emailed for Hettie to look at (I’m not the world’s best artist…):

Any guesses which one Hettie liked the best?

Turns out to be Number 1. So, soon, Hettie is going to have her measurements taken by her friend Rose, and then they’ll be emailed to me. Then, it’s the difficult bit, making the test dress….

 

Fabulous Flounces

Eye candy courtesy of McCall’s Style News for October 1929- the Paris Fashion Number. I love the strong composition of the front cover (above) and the use of what is effectively shades of just three colours- black, white and yellow.

Although I do own a few 1920’s McCall patterns, they are nowhere near as complex or utterly gorgeous as the ones in this supplement. Take a look at the first page of the supplement below…

What glorious flounces! I particularly like the two designs at the bottom for evening coats, complete with hood, and even more flounces, naturally… They look as if they would be incredibly cosy for winter lounging wear made in velvet.

Click on the thumbnails below for a bigger image of these two designs in close up.