All posts filed under: Sewing

Things I sew – historical and modern

Pilot Frixion pens – my newest favourite sewing trick

These are Pilot Frixion pens, and they are my newest favourite sewing toy: They have been around overseas for a while, but haven’t been available in NZ for that long, so they are a relatively new toy to me. Pilot designed these as erasable pens: you can write with them, and then use the special eraser end to erase the writing with friction. Only it’s not really friction that makes the writing disappear. It’s what friction creates, which is heat. And that makes them perfect for marking fabric for sewing. Let me demonstrate! You start with a plain piece of fabric: Write on it! I use my pens for marking darts, pleats, notches, drawing out embroidery designs, marking dots for cartridge pleating: anywhere you want to be able to make a fine, precise line that is going to completely disappear. For this demonstration, I’m just going to write a slight mis-quote of one of my favourite Katherine Mansfield lines. The actual quote is “Modern souls oughtn’t to wear them” with the ‘them’ referring to stays …

A 1900s English Wool walking skirt

Published by The Dreamstress

Exoticism and romance is a funny thing isn’t it? It’s so dependent on place and perspective. Hawaii, is, for many people, the very definition of an exotic, romantic destination, and everything from and about Hawaii is coloured in that rosy glow. Growing up in Hawaii, and growing up on Bond, Boston, Burnett, Lewis, and Wynne Jones, and later Stevenson & Austen (and even later, Rowling), England and Scotland were my idea of exotic, romantic locations (sorry Ireland & Wales, somehow you got shafted in the romance stakes when it came to my childhood literature). Mackintoshes and golashes sounded thrilling, and Guy Fawkes was fascinating. I wanted to do all the weird British things I read about, and all the weirdly British things that my family did anyway (tea, baked puddings, but sadly, not Christmas Crackers, which my mother had as a child, but which we could never figure out how to import into Hawaii (they won’t ship them because of the firecracker component)) were that much better. Perspective is everything though. I met some lovely …

Adventures in Elizabethan ruff-making

Published by The Dreamstress

I made an Elizabethan ruff! And it turned out really well (not perfect, but really well). And I am extremely pleased with myself. And it’s really, really close to perfectly historically accurate! Making a ruff turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be simply because there is so much rubbish information about ruffs on the internet. (Granted, there is rubbish information in books too – Tudor Tailor doesn’t do a good job of making it clear when they are using a historically accurate method and when they use a theatre one, for example, and even Saint Janet got things wrong on occasion. So I like to read EVERYTHING and then collate all the evidence in the hopes of arriving at something at least reasonably plausible.) So I had to weed out all the advice about 1) cutting yourself a really long strip entirely on the selvedge (this immediately read wrong to me because it’s hugely wasteful of fabric, and fabric wastage is rarely historically accurate. Plus the grain will be …