16 Search Results for: excella

The ‘Penciling it in’ skirt

I’ve been having fun finding music to match my ‘me’ sewing lately.  This week’s me sewing is a ’30s skirt, so it needs one of my favourite swing songs,  Lavender Coffin.  Great to dance to, and a good conversation starter — we have an ongoing discussion of ways to make a lavender eco-coffin.  I’m advocating dye made from blueberries or java plums.  It’s not like the colour needs to last! (yes, I have macabre interests). On a much more random note, I’ve also been doing a lot of sewing to Julietta Venegas lately.  It gives me a chance to practice my rapidly fading Spanish.  If only I’d known I’d be spending my adult life in New Zealand I could have spared myself years of torture in language classes, or at least taken something I was good at, like Hawaiian. But whether I understand it or not, I enjoy Julietta Venegas.  I particularly like  Limon y Sal  and its cute silent movie aesthetic. Right!  The sewing!  The skirt! This week’s theme on the Sew Weekly is …

Swiss waist, waist cincher, corset, and corselet: what’s the difference?

For this week’s terminology post I go back to last week’s Rate the Dress, and Rae’s comment about whether Victorian women wore corsets outside of their dresses. The simple answer is, they didn’t.  But they did wear Swiss waists & corselets outside of their dresses, and these can look a lot like corsets if you don’t look closely.  So what are these things, and how are they different from corsets? A Swiss waist  is a boned, pointed underbust garment worn over skirts and blouses or dresses.  Unlike a corset, a swiss waist NEVER fastens with a metal front busk.  Swiss waists can have a flat front, with no front opening, or can lace up the front with hand worked eyelets (never metal eyelets).  The backs fasten with lacing (also with worked eyelets, not metal eyelets) or buttons.  Swiss waists were extremely popular in the 1860s, worn by empresses and common women alike.  In the 1860s they were more likely to be called corsages (an un-specific term for a bodice), swiss bodices, swiss belts, or swiss …

A Little Bit of Red dress

Last week I blogged about all the stuff I wanted to get finished for Art Deco Weekend.  I didn’t get everything I wanted done, and that wasn’t all a bad thing – it turns out that evening gowns aren’t really a great idea for street dancing in sweaty heat (actually, street dancing and sweaty heat aren’t a good idea either, alone or together). One thing I did finish was my floral chiffon 1930s dress. It’s made from Excella E3137, one of my vintage patterns.  I made it up without the hip ruffles, because really, hip ruffles? I’ll do a proper review of the pattern in a bit, once I finish the dress properly. I mean, it’s finished properly (rolled hems, French seams & double sewn seams), but I’m not happy with it.  Somehow it just looks uninteresting.  Somehow I failed to notice that except for those hip ruffles it’s just a sack with quirky seaming.  And the quirky seaming doesn’t even show with the print!  Maybe it needs those hip ruffles after all!  So I’m …