All posts filed under: Reviews: resources, books, museums

The Great Wellington Craft Crawl – Part 1

For the past few months I’ve been part of the Wellington Sewing Bloggers group.  I don’t do most of their challenges, because when they make patterns they have names like Tiramisu and Renfrew, and when I make patterns they have names like Excella and Anne Adams.  They are wonderful women though, and one challenge/get together I was definitely in for (well, I had to be, it was my idea!) was a Craft Crawl of Wellington’s sewing and crafty goodness, using the wonderful Craft & Textile Lover’s Guide to Wellington that Maryanne of Made on Marion designed as a guide.   A Craft Crawl is like a pub crawl but way prettier, in every possible way, and just as with a pub crawl, we crossed off the locations on the map as we did them. On this Saturday we concentrated on the outer-suburb craft locations. There are actually over 20 Wellington Sewing Bloggers, but it was just Zara of Off-Grid Chic (who has a sewing cat almost as delightful as Felicity, and makes amazing detailed garments), …

Friday Reads: The Cup of Froth

Any book that introduces its protagonist with the sentence “Slim, defiant, Charlotte outfaced them, her great eyes wide, her tender sixteen-year-old breasts straining at the bodice of her plain white gown” is probably only going to go downhill from there. I’m afraid that my initial fears about Marie Muir’s The Cup of Froth were well deserved.  It was uneven, overly emotional, ridiculously dramatic, and a very modern interpretation of a historical period. Despite all of this, I persevered with the book, because the story it was telling, if not its own way of telling it, was so interesting that it deserved my time.  Blogging about the book seemed particularly timely, as the Charlotte of The Cup of Froth, she of the “great eyes,” is Charlotte of Belgium, later Carlota of Mexico.  She came up in discussions of this week’s Rate the Dress, because the fashions she is known for influenced traditional Mexican folk costume. Even badly written, her story is fascinating.  The child of Leopold I, King of the Belgians by his second wife, she …

A literary treat – Good Wives, 1910s edition (and the HSF Literature challenge)

UPDATE: As a bonus, this post is going to serve as the page for the Literature challenge, so leave your comments about your Literature-themed garments here! Just in time for the Literature themed Historical Sew Fortnightly challenge, I found this beautiful  ca. 1910 edition of Good Wives to add to my bookshelf: Isn’t it gorgeous? And it has the most glorious record of who it first belonged to: Awwww…  Second prize for attendance is a bit sad though… Look at the inside illustrations: I would happily make pretty much every-single one of these dresses! The fashions are impressively accurate, as long as you don’t mind that they are more 1882 than 1872: a decade later in style than the books chronology would support. They are particularly impressive when compared with the illustration in my previous edition of Good Wives, which dates to the ’40s. Tee hee!  Isn’t it hilarious? It does make me froth at the mouth that they would pick the wimpiest scene in the whole book to illustrate though. The cover isn’t as …