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Rate the Dress: a 1770s belle in lacy bells?

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week I showed you Elizabeth Craven, Lady Powis, in her all-over embroidered early-Stuart jacket and skirt.  It’s an outfit that I love SO MUCH.  Everything about it makes me happy.  It’s got blossoms and berries and birds and bees and bugs and other ‘various sundrie spottes’.  It’s like Spindle’s End got turned into an outfit.  I want it, oh, I want it!  The only reason it isn’t top of my sewing list is that I would be 70 before it was done if I started today.

So, umm, slightly biased.

And many of you agreed, giving it a satisfying 13 of 27 10/10.  But some of you who didn’t agree really didn’t like it much, pulling the score down to 8.8 out of 10.  That’s OK, I still adore it!

Now, on to this week!

A confession: I just wasn’t feeling Rate the Dress this week.  We spent the weekend painting the house, and cleaning the house, and my Mon & Tue work schedule was incredibly hectic, and I just didn’t want to blog.  The post on privacy and perfection got published only because it was already written.

But it’s Wednesday morning, and I feel a trifle guilty about the lack of RtD, and (more to the point), Felicity has occupied my lap, at a moment when I don’t have much else to do on the computer.  So, courtesy of Felicity, you get a RtD!

And you know what?  I’m quite excited about it now that I’ve committed to it.  I did what I usually do when I’m out of inspiration:  pick a museum at random, and a costume term at random, and see what turns up.

In this case LACMA and ‘polonaise’ yielded this very feminine and spring-y pink and green ensemble:

At first my reaction was ‘eh, standard 3rd quarter of the 18th century pretty frock, not that inspiring, but I guess it will do’

And then I looked at it more closely and thought ‘well, actually that chenille trim is rather fascinatingly wacky’

And then I looked even more closely and realised ‘there are three dimensional lace bells on that thing!’  Not quite bell-bells, but more like flower bells: bluebells or harebells or something.  But still…three dimensional lace bells, just hanging off of it…

And the sleeves also have rather interesting petal shaped detailing:

And the stomacher they have paired it with have some rather fetching ribbon work going on:

Not to mention the shoes in a different green and white striped silk:

So, all in all, not the standard, boring dress I saw at first glance at all!

I imagine the lace bells would sway and bounce with the movement of the wearer, further adding to the layered, ornamented, embellished, all-encompassing Rococo sensibilities.

So what do you think of it?  Are the bells just mad enough to be fabulous?  Does the whole think work as an ode to perky, bouncy, über-feminine, pink-and-green, rococo-ness?  Or is it terrible and overworked and over-saccharine?

Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10

Privacy, perfection, and blogging

Published by The Dreamstress

Lauren of Wearing History just blogged about perfection and blogging.

It’s interesting timing, because I already had a blog post about perfection, reality, and blogging sitting half-finished in my drafts folder.  Every once in a while I pull it out, add a bit more to it, tweak it, and think about publishing it, and don’t.  So I guess now is the time.

I haven’t published it, because it’s not just about blogging, reality, and presenting the idea of perfection: it’s also about privacy.  Even talking (well, writing) about privacy is more revealing than I generally like to be.

You see, despite the fact that there are thousands of photographs on the internet of me that I voluntarily put there, and despite the fact that there are hundreds of blog posts about me, that I voluntarily wrote and published, I am an extremely private person.  I can count the people who know my biggest worries and secrets (the sort of things that Lauren blogged about) on one hand.  I don’t share, and I don’t talk.

I’ve chosen to blog: to attempt to entertain, educate, and share my world.  But what I blog about is my choice, and how I present it, and how much I reveal, is my choice.

Well partly.

Because my life isn’t just me, and your life isn’t just you.

If I am extremely private, Mr D is an intensely private person.  I’ve chosen to combat the lack of privacy in the modern world by making sure that everything there is out there about me has been pretty much written by me, Mr D has managed to make sure that (other than my blog) he doesn’t exist on the internet.

And Mr D is a huge part of my life.  So anything that is going on in my life, that is also going on in his, has to be discussed and agreed upon in terms of sharing.

And he’s not the only one – family stuff happens, and it’s not just my story.  And I do things with my friends, and it’s not just my story.

Part of the reason I blog about Felicity so much is that she’s a cat – she doesn’t get the same rights a human does.  Felicity has the right to love and food and shelter and medicine, but not to privacy.

Even  for the things that are just my story, I’ve chosen not to tell lots of them, because this blog isn’t about them.  It’s about sewing, and history, and fashion, about New Zealand, and Hawaii, and Felicity.

It is also about me, but it’s an edited version of my life: a version that lets me keep the things I want to keep, and that doesn’t distract  from the things that I want to teach and tell.

In order tell  the stories I want to tell, and to balance life and privacy, the parts in my blog about me are always truthful in spirit, if not always technically truthful: I might say I went somewhere on Saturday, when it was Sunday.   Or I might say I went for a drive and took pictures, when it was a walk to take pictures.  Or I might say I went for a walk, when it was a drive.

However, I have always tried to make this blog honest, and to be quite frank about sharing my mistakes and imperfections.  I’ve got no use for the costuming blogs that just show photos of the perfectly finished frock they made, and don’t tell you how they got there, or the mistakes they made.  They are pretty to look at, but there is nothing to learn from them, and you just end up feeling inadequate.  The really interesting, motivational costuming blogs teach, and let you learn from their mistakes.  Those are the kind of bloggers I find inspirational, and the kind of blogger I aspire to be.

So I’ve never hesitated to share my mistakes.  To admit when something completely isn’t historically accurate, because I read something wrong, or made a guess that a bit more logical thinking would have shown was wrong.  To share my sewing errors, as well as successes, as well as the things that just don’t work for me.  To tell you when certain items took a lot of effort and made me want to tear my hair out – because that’s a natural part of sewing for most of us.  To post posts where it’s clear my floor isn’t swept, and there are piles of fabric everywhere, and my frocks aren’t ironed.  To share my sewing room, even when it  is anything but tidy and glamourous.  To post photos of me grubby and un-made up  three days into a hike, and totally made up and still looking anything but flawless.  To post pictures of frocks even when I forgot the right undergarments, so they don’t fit properly at all.  To mention that zips break before photoshoots, and other ones are done in freezing cold weather, and sometimes I have to safety pin models in.  To  fess up to the occasional megrims, and to apologise when they overtake the blog.  To admit when I was wrong, and that I don’t get everything right.

And beyond mistakes, I’ve made it pretty clear that I prefer reality to perfection.

But I don’t think that not being perfect means I have to share my whole life.  I respect Lauren for being willing to be so honest about what she’s gone through, and I think it’s important that the bigger issues of life get talked about, but it’s just not my style.

I don’t think most of my personal moments would make my blog any more interesting, and I don’t think they would be helpful to you.  And sharing them certainly wouldn’t be helpful to me – when things are going on, the last think I need is everyone knowing about it and asking about it.  So I’ll continue showing you me as I am – as much as I can without infringing on anyone else’s life, and I’ll continue to be real, but no more.  I’m pretty sure that even private, I’m pretty obviously imperfect!

Terminology: Fourchette, quirks and other glove terms

Published by The Dreamstress

For this terminology post, we’re looking at glove terms: fourchettes, quirks, tranks and points.

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I love  these  words just because they are  so random and specific.  Other than glove makers and fashion historians, who would know that there are specific words for the different parts of gloves?

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The main piece of a glove, with the back and front of the glove and the tops and bottoms of the fingers all cut in one, with only one side seam, is the trank.  It’s shown in pretty pink in the photo above.

Going between the fingers, and attached to the trank, is the fourchette (in lovely lavender  in the coloured photo above), also called the fork or forge  which is:

A forked strip of material forming the sides of two adjacent fingers of a glove

In other words, this bit:

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It is from the French, for forked, because a fourchette is forked, and allows the fingers to fork.

Some fourchettes have an extra little V gusset at the bottom, called a quirk  (shown in beautiful blue in the coloured photo)  or querk (scrabble players take note!)  to allow more movement and better shape to the fingers.

A late 17th century description of the glove makers art describes quirks as:

Querks, the little square peeces at the bottom of the fingers

Gloves cut of very soft, stretchy leather did not always need a quirk, so their forchettes are a simpler strip, or have the quirk cut in one with the forchette:

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When the glove thumb piece and its quirk are cut in one, it is  a Bolton thumb glove.

Knit gloves don’t usually have fourchettes, and some modern stretch fabric gloves also forgoe them, but most leather gloves from at least the 17th century to the present have some form of fourchette.

Silver embroidered and lace trimmed gloves

Silver embroidered and lace trimmed gloves, 17th century

North and Tiramani’s Seventeenth Century Women’s Dress Patterns has two  excellent pattern for early 17th century glove with fourchettes (though sadly, they just call them forks) and quirks.

Usually fourchettes just form the space between two fingers, but there is a type of glove called a continuous fourchette glove, where one strip of fabric starts at the pinkie and runs up the side of the pinkie across the tip, down the side, up the next one, and so on until the end.

This type of glove may date back to at least the 13th century BC  (although the  glove mentioned in that pamphlet does not shows up on a search of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts collection database).

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And finally, if you have ever wondered about the seam lines across the back of gloves, they are called points  and originated as extensions of the finger pieces on gloves, to aid in better shaping.

Now, how many times can you come up with an excuse to use  these terms  in a week? 😉

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If you are interested in glove-making, I highly recommend  Eunice Close’s ‘How to Make Gloves’, or the aforementioned pattern in Seventeenth Century Women’s Dress Patterns.

Sources:

Close, Eunice, How to Make Gloves, 1950

Johnston, Lucy.  Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail.  London: V&A Publishing, 2005

North, Susan and Tiramani, Jenny.  Seventeenth Century Women’s Dress Patterns.  London: V&A Publishing, 2011

United States Army, Quartermaster Research and Engineering Command, Protection and Functioning of the Hands in Cold Climates, Volume 19