All posts filed under: Historical Sew Fortnightly

The Historical Sew Monthly Challenge #10: Heroes

I can’t believe it’s already almost October, time for the 10th Historical Sew Monthly challenge of the year, and time for me to be deciding (with lots of input from you, of course!) if there is going to be a HSF/M 2017! The theme for October’s challenge is Heroes:  Make a garment inspired by your historical hero, or your historical costuming hero. While I may be becoming more cynical in other ways, the older I get, the more I am a fan of having lots, and lots of heroes.  I just feel that you can never have too many people to admire and attempt to emulate the good qualities of.  In everything I do, whether it’s cooking, historical costuming, writing, teaching, or simply being a (reasonably) nice person, I do it better than I might have because someone, in some way, helped teach me to get to where I am: and each of those people  is a hero to me, and deserves acknowledgement. So the idea behind the Heroes challenge was to give us all …

The Historical Sew Monthly Challenge #9: Historicism

The Historical Sew Monthly Challenge #9 is Historicism:  Make a historical garment that was itself inspired by the fashions of another historical period. Up until the early 19th century, to the best of my knowledge (caveat: my pre 1660 fashion history is pretty weak, so I’m happy to be corrected here!) historicism in fashionable dress was predominantly focused on emulating and borrowing from ancient Greek and Rome.  I say fashionable dress, because regional styles in certain areas often used elements that went out of fashion in the main centres decades, if not centuries, before.  This isn’t historicism in its truest sense, because its a case of styles stagnating, rather than intentionally borrowing from the past. Depending on how you look at historicism, one exception to the reliance on ‘the ancients’ as an inspiration from the past is the robe de coer.  The robe de coer, based on Louis the Sun King’s favourite elements of female dress in his youth in the 1660s and 70s, was implemented as the required court dress in France in the …

Sewing with a Singer 27 for the Fortnight in 1916 thedreamstress.com

Sewing in 1916

As part of my Fortnight in 1916 project, one of my goals was to make a garment using period techniques and my Singer 27 machine, just as a woman would have done in 1916. As you can see, I succeeded!  It was quite an interesting experience, and I did learn quite a bit about sewing in the period. For the blouse pattern, I took a pattern from an original 1914-16 blouse in my collection: When I purchased the original  blouse  it was unfinished – the vestee part in front was only loosely basted in, and there was no front fastenings.  I secured the vestee, and added hooks as a  less invasive alternative to  buttons and buttonholes. I’ve worn it once, as it’s extremely robust, and I really wanted to understand the fit. As my original was unfinished, it made it easy to study the construction.  I’ll do a full post on the original shortly, rather than focusing on that now, but will note  two  of the interesting clues that it did yield.  First,  it was …