You may have guessed from Saturday’s post that I’m working on shoes.  It was the first time that I’ve really tried to remake a pair of modern shoes into historical shoes, and it was an interesting process. The shoes started like this: cute, but a bit daft: I wanted them to look like these type of shoes: Mine don’t come as high up in the toe and around the foot, but there are example of shoes from the 1780s & ’90s that are cut lower over the toe and the sides of the foot: I liked the idea of being able to wear the shoes for anything from 1780 to 1800- more versatile. To re-make mine, first I took off the silly trim and bow: Then I cleaned the shoes. The next step was to re-paint the heel, to get rid of the anachronistic metallic teal leather colour. I first painted the heels pale blue, but it turned out too blue: I repainted the heels lavender, which I’m not much happier with.  I’ll repaint them …

Once I’d figure out a design for an 18th century fur muff that seemed historically plausible (clearly it wasn’t going to be perfectly accurate, as I was using a repurposed 1940s fox fur sleeve as my base) it was time to sew. To start out, I had to deconstruct the sleeve I was making the muff from.  I had assumed, based on the striped effect of the sleeve, that it was formed of fairly wide strips of fur, and the join of the strips formed each stripe.  Pulling apart the sleeve at one stripe would be very easy. Then I investigated the inside of the sleeve. Wowzers.  It’s not large strips at all – it’s a patchwork of little-bitty pieces of fur!  Can you imagine sewing that!?!  The work put into constructing this sleeve, and piecing all those minute pieces of fur, just floors me! This is the upper half, after I detatched the portion that I needed.  Look at all those little pieces! The sleeve head is shaped and supported by a fabric stiffener. …

As I mentioned before, I wanted to do a really complicated project for the Flora and Fauna HSF challenge, but alas, I couldn’t find the right fabric.  Instead, I’m saving my energy for two big upcoming projects, and making some fun little things that will make current or future outfits fabulous. The first of these is an 18th century fur muff.  The wonderful Lynne gave me a fur sleeve which had come off of her mothers 1950s fur coat a month ago, and I noticed how wide the lower sleeve was, and how it was a perfectly even tube for the last 14cm, and thought “Ooooh…super easy fur muff.” Famous last words… But that was all in the future.  First I needed to do a little research on 18th century fur muffs, to determine what the usual dimensions were, if my fur was plausible, and what they were lined with. After quite a bit of research, I’ve found depictions of 18th century fur muffs ranging from the early 1760s, up to the end of the …