The Dreamstress

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The Project: a few hints

Ever since late February I’ve been dropping hints about The Project – a massive, top secret endeavor that has been taking up huge amounts of my life.

I thought I would be able to show you The Project at the end of March, but it still wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be.

Then I wanted to debut The Project at the end of April, but I was still waiting on one major part I wanted to be in place.

In May I scheduled two different dates in which to take photos of the The Project, but things came up on both days.

By June, winter had come, and it was harder to get good photos.

Now that July is almost at an end, a reveal is so overdue almost feels silly and anticlimactic – it’s been 5 and a half months!

Obviously, it’s high time I told you what was going on!

Not today though. Today, I’m just going to be mean and drop a few hints about The Project.

The Project is sooo exciting. More exciting than all the pogey bait I’ve collected over the last year put together:

The project is big. Really, really, really big. Much bigger than my elliptical hoopskirt:

It’s not as old as the hoopskirt though. It’s actually fairly recent: 20th century even.

Not as young as my 1930s Ettie May hooverette dress though:

It’s not as old as my most recent project: a 1913 skirt though (photoshoot of that soon as well!):

Because it’s so big, it involves lots of materials, with lots of colours, but I will tell you that blue and purple feature rather predominantly in it, as they do in my Mackenzie Cardigan:

It also involves a lot of white, and you know how much I love white:

Of course it is gorgeous, but not nearly as gorgeous as Felicity, because what is?

And, as with all my projects, Felicity is very involved in it. Felicity loves to be involved!

Oh, and one final hint:

It’s in every single one of the photos in this blog post.

Have you guessed what it is?

Rate the Dress: Whoa…that’s plaid!

Published by The Dreamstress

I’m sometimes a bit sad when lots of people rate Rate the Dresses based on how a frock would look on them personally. For me, a huge part of the joy of historical fashions is that there is a look and an era for every figure, and they allow me to enjoy all sorts of shapes that don’t look good on me, but do look spectacular on others (the world would be so boring if the only clothes available were ones that looked good on me).

So last week’s discussion on the richly brocaded 18th century gown, and how it really did look better on one particular figure, and how many of you rather liked it for that, was an absolute delight. I’ve got to say though, I may not have the figure it looked best on, but I would wear that dress in a heartbeat, and lots of you agreed with me, because it rated a rather nice 8.4 out of 10, loosing a few points, perhaps because, as Daniel pointed out, it was gorgeous but still generic.

Switching our attention to this weeks offering, it’s a pretty good guess that if the title of the post is ‘Whoa…that’s plaid!’, the dress is going to date from ca. 1860. Today’s dress to rate does nothing to change that expectation.

This 1859-60ish confection of taffeta and striped picot-edged bows is made from very large plaid in shades of green and ivory with narrow pink stripes.

Woman’s evening dress, about 1859—60, silk & linen, 50.475, MFA Boston

Quite coincidentally, this dress, like last week’s frock, and the suit from the week before, from the MFA Boston. I’ve been on quite a roll with their collection lately. I’m not trying, but every time I find a frock that says something quite interesting (if not necessarily tasteful) to me, it just happens to be from the MFA.

Woman’s evening dress, about 1859—60, silk & linen, 50.475, MFA Boston

What does the dress say to you? I know a number of raters mentioned last week that they weren’t that fond of green. Plaid can also be a bit touch-and-go on Rate the Dress, and this is a particularly distinctive, assertive plaid in its scale. Does the expanse of skirt excuse the size of the plaid? Do the bows keep it sweet and dainty, despite the boldness of the individual elements?

Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10

The Mackenzie Cardigan and more excitement

Published by The Dreamstress

Though it’s not historical, I’ve been doing some quite exciting sewing lately – and pattern drafting.

The result?

The Mackenzie Cardigan!

Which is (squee!) almost certainly going to be my first commercially available pattern!

Being able to make my patterns available to other sewers has been a huge goal for me for the past few years. Teaching sewing as I do, it’s become very obvious how few well really well drafted patterns there are available to sewers. The gap is particularly bad for some garments that I consider absolute wardrobe classics – cardigans, knit wrap dresses, simple darted blouses, the iconic fitted dresses with set in sleeves, slim skirts, and at least 5 darts for fitting, and interesting shift dresses. The rise of independent pattern companies has been fantastic, as their patterns are often much better than the big five, but here in NZ they are really expensive. People are always asking about the patterns I draft for myself, but I haven’t had a way to pass them on.

I’ve been pattern drafting and and resizing patterns for years, but I was taught to do it the old fashioned way – on paper, and in fabric, and making the jump to computers has been an enormous undertaking for me. I’ve still got some tweaking to do, and I know I’m not doing it the ‘correct’ way, but the way I do it does work.

More importantly, the pattern works, and it doesn’t just work on me – I’ve tried it on a range of figures, and it really does fit women (with the expected minor tweaks to fit the huge diversity of women’s figures).

The cardigan is named after the Mackenzie Basin in the South Island of New Zealand, home to high country merino sheep, lupines, and impossibly blue skies. It’s perfect cardigan country.

The pattern came about because I love cardigans, and after trying every commercially available women’s or unisex cardigan pattern in search of the perfect (downgraded to good, and then to ‘OK’, from there to ‘Reasonable’, and finally to ‘Not totally horrible’) I realised that in order to have a good pattern that I could offer to my sewing students, I was going to have to draft my own. After lots of drafting, and lots of trials and tweaking, this is it!

Yay!

These photos were actually quite impromptu – Mr D and I went for a walk in the Botanical Gardens, and then stopped to watch some rugby league on a nearby field (Mr D is a huge League fan), so if my smile looks strained in some of the images, it’s the league 😉

This isn’t my first version of the cardigan, nor is it quite the final version, but it’s one I’m particularly fond of. I found the lilac wool at an op-shop, and the beautiful merino binding came from Fabric Warehouse. I’m so in love with the blue-grey that I sewed up all I’d bought, and then rushed out and bought another length.

In addition to the cardigan binding, I made the blue-grey merino into a T-shirt from a re-draft of my personal T pattern (I can’t find the original, and I’m afraid the re-draft isn’t quite as good). The one drawback to the shirt is that I can get a bit too matchy-matchy with the cardigan!

And I made a pair of everyday mitts, and there is going to be a pair of blue-grey stockings as well (and don’t worry, the stocking pattern will be available soon, and it will be free!)

So I’ve got a few more tweaks to do, and a bunch of business stuff to sort, but one day soon the Mackenzie Cardigan pattern will be available!