Year: 2011

Pintucks are evil

It’s true. Idle hands are the devils work, and seamstresses with too much time on their hand invent time-wasting sewing techniques like pintucks. Ergo, pintucks are evil. In other news, having determined that pintucks are evil, my house has turned into a den of iniquity. I’ve been pintucking for three days straight. I’m wearing a path in the carpet between the ironing board and my sewing machine. My life goes: iron a crease. Trot to the sewing machine, fabric in hand. Sew a tiny stitch just in from the crease. Trot back to the ironing board. Press the resulting pintuck. Flip the fabric and carefully measure and iron a new crease. Repeat ad nauseum. To make it even worse, the pintucks in the two back panels of Emily’s skirt are curved. You heard that right folks, curved pintucks. It’s the ninth circle of hell, and let me tell you, those curves are really treacherous. Dante just forgot to tell you that Satan is wearing a dress with three neckholes and curved pintucks all over it. …

Rate the Dress: Ecru, black and gold in the 1850s

Published by The Dreamstress

I was expecting that last week’s JP Worth dress might not be the most popular garment ever with you, dear readers, but I certainly didn’t anticipate the level of loathing and revulsion in your reaction! Everything came under fire at some point or another: the lace (old rugby socks), the silhouette (matronly and frumpy), the colours (Halloween-y and clashing), but most of all the bows! Only two of you actually liked it, and even those two thought it needed improving. Poor JP’s creation received the lowest rating ever: a 3.3 out of 10. And that’s not even counting the three people who tried to rate it a 0 out of 10 (I moved their rating up to one, because zero is not a number, and it’s not on the rating scale). On the bright side, the unfortunate frock did spark the most entertaining comment thread ever! On reviewing my ‘Rate the Dress’ selections, I realised I have rather ignored the 1850s. I suspect it is because most 1850s dresses look like most other 1850s …

Emily’s 1903 evening gown: matching the fabric

Published by The Dreamstress

Having determined that Emily’s dress was made out of a fabric very similar to silk razimir, and having gotten over my initial shock at the extremely pink colour and decided that the colour was integral to the dress, I had to try to find the same fabric. Or at least a fabric that acted in the same way. I searched, and searched. I ordered fabric and fabric samples off the internet, and got peculiar corded silks, weird sclumpy twill weave silks described as silk ottoman by someone with no fabric knowledge, silk twill that was lovely but didn’t behave when you tried to pintuck it, and other unsuitable fabrics. I scoured the fabric stores in Wellington and further afield. I did find one gorgeous piece of palest pink silk razimir (which the fabric store, also incorrectly, called silk ottoman), but alas, at $150 a metre it was beyond my budget. Also, even if I could have paid $150 a metre, I would have been far too scared to dye it a deeper pink. And it …