A post that's long over due...

So, in my last post I was almost finished with my outfit for the May event and then I went AWOL from the blog, again. The last trebmling months of spring and the first month of summer has kept me busy,busy, busy. But now I've chiselled out some time for the blog and finally can show off my Edwardian outfit, that I'm very pleased with. Lots of images and more info after the jump, as usual.

An edwardian blouse

I'm making progress on my Edwardian outfit, albeit a bit too slow, but this upcoming weekend I hope I'll have the corset ad the corset cover in wearable condition. 

The corset have been a real hassle, I've lost count on how many times I've ripped out the boning channels on the back pieces. But today I've finally figured out in which order to sew them so hopefully the rest of the sewing progress will go better. I hope I will ha a corset to show you on Sunday :)

Now on to the subject of this blog post, the blouse.

HSM #3 Stashbusting - Edwardian hat

My plan was to try to participate in The Historical Sew Monthly Challenges this year but my schedule and my planned Edwardian event in the end of May has made it hard. My planned stash busting project, an Edwardian blouse  isn't finished yet (needs buttonholes and the cuffs fixed) and my HSM#1 Foundations project, an Edwardian corset is still in the works too. But I'll guess I've just have to suck it up and post things when they get ready...any ways. I finished this hat yesterday and realized that all the materials in it came from my huge stash, so it is qualified to be entered in this challenge.

The Challenge: HSM #3  Stashbusting,  An Edwardian hat
Fabric:Scraps of acetate duchess satin in two shades of purple
A sun bleached and worn sun hat made of paper straw
Pattern: None, made things up as I went along, looking at fashion sketches and photos from the period.

Year: circa 1905
Notions: Home made ostrich plumes, four purple ostrich drabs, two candle rings with mauve roses, some rather thick steel wire, sewing thread in black and purple and some home made black spray paint.

How historically accurate is it? My materials is 100% modern but the look is accurate so I would say 50%?

Hours to complete: 24 hours

First worn: Will be worn at the event in the end of May

Total cost: Most of the materials are scraps from other projects but I think I once paid about 0.5$ for the candle rings and about 5$ for the hat.

This hat started it's life as a regular sun hat. I used it a lot. It got sun bleached. It started to look worn. It got thrown in my stash for hat base use and I forgot about it. Then last spring I was invited to a suffragett luncheon. I very hastily threw togheter and outfit and made a super quick make over to the hat by makeing a sash out of some duchesse satin fastening it to the hat with osme sticheds and a brooch. Threw in some black plumes that I've made earlier for a 18th century masked ball and scurried away to the lucnheon. This is how the hat (and the rest of my outfit) looked:

I was never 100% happy with either the outfit or the hat. So when the May event came up, I decided that they both needed at make over. My biggest quarry with the hat was it's color, the flimsy brim and the high round hat crown. I started out by solving the color problem. I mixed rubbing alcohol with some artist quality black aceylic paint in a spray bottle and gave the hat a couple of thin coats on both the outside and inside. When it dried, it was even in color (not stark black but even) and it was matte instead of the horrible lustre it had before.

To lover the crown I followed this excellent tutorial, It worked really well but I think I accidentally made the flat crown piece a tad to big so my crown isn't 100% flat, but I decided that I could live with that.

To take care of the flimsiness of the brim I zig zaged a length of wire around it on the under side. Since this kind of hat needs to look good on both sides of the brim I covered the wire with some bias tape that I made from another duchess satin scrap. Then I started to play around with decorations, I just gathered all the materials I could find in the stash that matched in colour. I quickly realised that I somehow needed to make the brim a bit wider and I also needed to get more of the purple shade that I used for wire covering into the decorations. But how? Extend the edge with bias?

No, just plain bias satin would ble too flimsy...than I tried boxpleating a scarp to the edge...and it looked great! So I quickly made a 5-6 cm wide length of bias strip as long as I could squeeze out of all the scraps (I had to piece several small lengths together) folded it in half, pressed it down and ran a straight stitch a long whole it's length about 7 mm from the edge. Then I took my pinking shears to the sewn edge to get a prettier edge and stop it from fraying. Then the hat rested for a couple of weeks...until yesterday when me and a couple of other costumers met up for hat making day.

Then the brim got it's box pleated trim and the rest of the decorations sewn on. And here are the final result. (I'm madly in love with this hat and I cant wait to wear it!)

Highlights from five months of slöjd

So my last post was in September, and I had high hopes of getting back into blogging a bit more often. Well, that didn't happen. My slöjd course in school literary drained me, my days mostly looked like this:

05:00 Sound of the alarm clock

06:19 Off to school

09:00 - 16:00 Official school hours

16:49 Hop on the train to start journey home

18:50 Arriving at home, time to cook dinner, doing housework and collapising in the sofa

22:00 Time to go to bed

Repeat this schedule five times a week, with some added hours here and there for working late in school to get projects done. Also add in worknig 11-17 every two weekends as a personal care assistant and we have the reason to my blogging absence pretty clear.

But even if last semester was hard I learned a lot. And I created a lot. I can't show you guys everything I made because then this post would get like a kilometre long but I will show you the artefacts I'm most proud of after the jump. Warning, image bonanza coming your way!

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.