All posts filed under: Admire

Emily’s Wedding Dress

In celebration of her first wedding anniversary, here is Emily’s wedding dress! I’ll only do wedding dresses for very, very special people anymore, and Emily definitely qualifies. Not only is she a dear friend, but she’s the genius who keeps my blog and ScroopPatterns.com running. Emily herself blogs at eversoscrumptious.com, though her blog is on hiatus. As with all the wedding dresses I’ve made, the end result was a collaboration between the bride’s ideas and my sewing experience. Our inspiration for the dress was late 1950s & early 1960s cocktail and evening dresses by designers like Balenciaga and Jacques Heim. Emily liked the overall silhouettes, and the lush fabrics used. Key design points we wanted to incorporate were a fitted bodice with scooped necklines, little cap sleeves, a natural waist, and full bell skirts with lots of swish, and flatter fronts. Plus amazing embroidered fabric. We settled on a slight dropped hem, to take full advantage of the fantastic fabric. I draped the pattern myself, using my princess-seamed dress block as a starting point. For …

Winter 1915-16 dress, thedreamstress.com

The ‘waiting for bluebells’ winter 1915/16 day dress

Published by The Dreamstress

I’m extremely excited to be showing you a fully done, properly photographed, newly sewn historical outfit. It seems so long since that has happened! Too long… This outfit was also a long time coming. It was on my list as a wardrobe hopeful for my Fortnight in 1916 experiment, based on fashion advice articles which extolled the virtues of jumper dresses over skirts and blouses, as a wool jumper frock was more durable, and could be worn for many more days than a cotton blouse without needing washing. I based my own ever-so-practical jumper frock on this page from The Pictoral Review Monthly Fashion Book, Dec 1915: I loved the double-button detail, and the asymmetrical crossover bodice, both so typical of the mid 1910s. It just seemed to period-perfect, but also so classic. I also liked the severity, especially with the grey, black & white colour scheme, though the palette on these pages is so limited that it’s not the best indication of what colours the frocks would be made up in. I’m quite certain …

Madame O's Rilla Corset by Scroop Patterns thedreamstress.com

Madame O’s embroidered Rilla Corset

Published by The Dreamstress

I had a fantastic group of testers for the Scroop Rilla Corset, and they all made amazing corsets. With every Scroop Patterns I select testers from all over the world, to make sure that the instructions are universally clear and comprehensive, but I always try to have at least one local tester, so I can see their resulting garment in person. With the Rilla that was particularly fun, as Madame O was one of my local testers, and she embellished her test corset with her fabulous embroidery (remember the embroidered buttons she made for this wedding dress?). And she’s let me photograph and share it! This is a test version of the Rilla Pattern, so doesn’t look exactly like the finished pattern does (the main differences are the shape of the front cut out), and Madame O tried single boning construction to see how it would work (answer: not nearly as well as double, so stick to the pattern!). SaveSave