Vintage fusion wardrobe #1

A felted atomic hat in the making...

 A couple of weeks ago I scored a cute atomic print dress on etsy. It arrived just before this weekend and as soon as I tried it on, I felt a desperate need to acquire some matching accessories (Yup, I one of those matchy matchy types. I love to go all in with kitschy details in my outfits). A picture of me in the dress will be posted as soon as I have the proper undergarments. A black bra and girdle showing through a pink dress is not pretty.

Close up of fabric curtesey of etsy seller sheandhervintage

Today in school we worked with different wool felting techniques and while the teacher demonstrated them in the beginning of the class, inspiration hit me like a bomb. Of course I should make a hat! A wool atomic hat.

I started out with wet felting a base in roughly the same shape as the white "rockets" in the print. Then I needle felted on the black spots and the pink circle. Tomorrow I will add some millinery wire to the edge to help the hat maintain it's shape and also to help me mould it after the curve of my head. I will also wet felt some black wool on the wires that are lying on top of the hat in the image below and try figure out a good way to add the green "leaves"... or maybe I should leave them out? We will see tomorrow night...

Atomic hat WIP, the colours are a bit skewed, but you can see the general idea.

I'm so excited about this!

/L

Rescued and Resurrected #1

 Black roses and stripes!

So this is the first post that goes in to the Rescued and Resurrected (henceforth called RR in texts) category.So what is RR then, you might ask?

Well, that's my name for refashion, up cycling etc. I sometimes find clothes, accessories and such in thrift shops (or ordinary shops, but that's rare) and  see how awesome they could be with some modifications. Or sometimes I find something made out of a fabulous material but I don't know right away what it will become. If the price is right, I buy them. Then they end up into my RR-bin until I get the time/inspiration to resurrect them.  Clothes from my own wardrobe that falls victim for my style changes might also end up in the RR-bin if I still like the material they are made of. For me this is a way to save money and also make sure that I have truly unique wardrobe. So now with further ado, here are two RR items that I wore to a wedding in august:

Sadly, I was in a hurry when I altered these clothes so I have no "before photos" or images from the making the magic happen.

The blouse is a silk knit I got from a acquaintance wardrobe cleaning. It had a rather modest and boring V neck before I hit it with my scissors and sewing machine. I used the neckline from this vintage pattern, Simplicity 2511. I had some problems with the knit stretching all over the place so I stabilized it with a selvedge strip from a thin cotton twill. It still lost it's shape a bit so I also had to do small tucks in the corners.

The thin border is actually a crochet beading lace, laced with black satin ribbon, the lace I had in the stash but I had to buy some ribbon. The rose buttons that I sewed on the corners and also made earrings and a brooch of came out of the stash ( It's great to be a button hoarder, I tell you ;) )

The skirt was found in a bin marked "all clothes here, 30 SEK (4$)". It's made of a rather flimsy polyester but the stripe and the shape caught me. As frequent readers of this blog know, I have a total crush on stripes.

It originally had a absolutely horrid lining made of even more nasty polysester that the outer skirt kind of clinged to. It looked awful, the sad thing. I ripped pout the lining and hocus pocus, I had a fabulous 50's skirt, the only thing it needed was for me to wear a petticoat underneath :)

I got tons of compliments at the venue and I felt fabulous in it!

/L

Ch-Ch-Changes...

A lot has happened in my life that has kept me from blogging.
To keep it short and not bore you all with gruesome details I had a break down over my life situation that cast me into a depression. I managed to pull through and have now made a big change in my life, I've gone back to school. I'm studying to be and fine arts and slöjd*  teacher for junior high school. I'm starting my second year the first of September.

It was a tough decision to make and it's getting tougher because when spring arrives my college fund that the state is offering (student loan + fincial aid) is running out which means that I have to juggle work,study and somehow have some spare time. But I will pull though somehow because now I'm determined to get a "proper" job, damnit.

One thing that I have missed during all this time is blogging. It's not that I don't sew it's just that I don't only sew 18th century. I've branched out into new era,1890 to 1908 and I'm also working on my mundane wardrobe (late 1940's to eraly 1960's)  and some custom work for clients. So instead of splitting all of these different subjects up in different blogs, I'm making this blog more of a sewing blog. I hope this might inspire me to write more often. I'm also planning to start carrying a notebook with me so I can scribble down all blog post ideas I get when I commute (wich I do more or less four hours a day) which might help me to actually get the blog posts in here instead of just scrambling around in my head.

Since the blog will have more topics now, I will rework the way I use tags. They will be sorted after eras and then tagged with a specific item (like this-18th century:petticoat, vintage wardrobe:hats, edwardian:jewellry etc, custom made: corsets and so on). The tags follow the titles of the lists that help me organize my sewing and hopefully this will make it easier for me to blog and easier for you to keep track of the diffrent subjects in the sidebar.

This means that I will have to go back though all my old posts and retag them, I'm not sure how blogger will react to this but If something behaves strangely in your feed you now know why.

I hope you all still want to follow my endeavours, even if this blog is no longer the18th century focused blog it used to be.

As a reward to all of you who read though this long text only blog post, here is David Bowie with a song to cheer you all up ;)

Best Regards

/L
*slöjd - it's a Swedish word that are hard to explain. Craft is the only word I can find in English but the word slöjd means more than just knowing the skill to do something. It's about passion, inspiration and enjoying the process as much as it is about the ability to make something.