Year: 2011

Pet en l’aire progress

Remember Madame Ornata’s gorgeous silk brocade pet en l’aire? No? Oh…that would be because I was a bad blogger and forgot to post about it for almost a year. Eeek. Sorry! To make up for that, I’ll give you a little update on the sewing progress, and in just a few days I’ll do a whole post with the finished pet and petticoat and the most gorgeous, drool-worthy stomacher ever. So, sewing updates! When I last posted, Madame O and I had draped the pet, using a lovely cotton voile for the draping so that it could then be used as the lining. We’d also cut out the glorious silk brocade she picked. After the draping, Madame O decided that the voile lining was too white, so she tea-dyed it: It looks much better with the silk brocade too: Madame Ornata then disappeared with all her fabric, and a few days later she casually mentioned that she had ‘gotten a tiny bit of work done’, and would I check it? Yeah, tiny bit! This is …

Friday reads: I Capture the Castle

Published by The Dreamstress

Writing Friday Reviews is hard work, and sometime I run out of things to review. Besides, they can’t be that interesting for those of you who don’t live in NZ and can’t visit the stores I blog about. So, I’m going to break things up by doing book reviews/recommendations/musings on Friday. Not the usual book reviews, but reviews of old, historical, and often quite obscure books. This weeks book isn’t so obscure: it made a list of the 100 most beloved English books, but it is historical, and is well worth reading. I Capture the Castle is (as I like to say in my brightest schoolmarm voice) “a bittersweet coming of age tale about a young woman discovering the joys and pitfalls of love and life.” Please don’t hold that against it! It’s also a beautifully detailed snapshot of English rural life in the 1930’s, and of the peculiar lines that were drawn between the classes in an age when social status was all about your family, and when even the upper class could be …

A faux-ribbon corset

Published by The Dreamstress

To go with yesterday’s sparkly pink tipped corset bones, I’m making a little underbust corset. The goal of this corset was to make Jill Salen’s ribbon corset using ribbon the same size as that used in the original. Problem: I couldn’t find fabric ribbon in 2 1/4″ widths Solution: take fabric, cut it into 2 1/4″ strips, and bind the edges. While I was scouring the fabric stores for ribbon, I picked up a cute black and white floral remnant. It went perfectly with some spotted fabric in my stash too! I’d actually had my eye on the black and white floral for a while. It’s a gorgeous 100% cotton grosgrain, so soft and lovely to work with! The cartoon-y aspect of the flowers dissuaded me from using it for a larger project, but I just couldn’t resist the last half metre (and on half off too). To make my ribbons, I cut 2 1/4 strips of the floral, and the polka dots. Then I cut the strips into the correct lengths, as I was …