This fabulous knits pattern is my homage to downtown Wellington: a pattern with options for everyone you meet among the cafes, universities, museums, and businesses of the Te Aro District.
It features dropped shoulders, a cocoon shape, and mix-and-match neckline, sleeve, and hem options for a whole wardrobe of looks in one pattern.
With so many options the pattern goes from fashion-student street-cool, to weekend waterfront brunch casual, to art-curator elegant at the national museum.
Get it on sale!
To celebrate the launch, the Te Aro Dress & Top pattern is 25% off for the next week. No need for a code: the discount is applied automatically at checkout.
Buy it now!
View A
This casual dress version features long sleeves finished with cuff bands, a matching hem band, nice big side pockets with curved pocket opening, and an oversized hood. It’s designed to end just above the knee.
View B
Is a knit top with finishing details that elevate it above a standard T-Shirt. It has a curved hem with side slits and a dropped back hem, both faced in lightweight knit fabric, short sleeves finished with bands, and a scooped neck.
View C
The dressiest version of the Te Aro features extravagant gathered sleeves in lightweight woven fabrics, a drop hem faced with knit fabric, the same pockets as View A, and a shallow scooped neck. The dropped hem is designed to sit just above the knee in front, and just below the knee in back.
Or Mix and Match…
Here’s a View B with View A sleeves & View C neckline:
And a View C with View B neckline:
And all the options are so comfortable and cozy they are basically stealth pyjamas!
I hope you like the pattern as much as I do. I have 9 versions in my personal wardrobe already!
In their first year of study students in the department learn, among other things: core sewing techniques; workshop practice; patternmaking; hatmaking; dyeing, printing and finishing techniques; costume history, and the costume design process.
By the end of Term 3 (out of 4) they will have made: a boned historical undergarment; a multi-part historical dress using theatrical techniques; a wired buckram hat; various accessories that utilise dyeing and printing techniques; and a pattern and completed garment which they have developed from a sloper.
In their second year of study students build on these skills, learning: advanced millinery; advanced corsetry; tailoring; costume for dance (often making costumes for the Royal NZ Ballet); and EVA & Worbla skills. In addition they do industry secondments and learn how to manage wardrobes for stage and screen productions.
At the same time these graduating students are asked to choose a costume design (it can be an actual costume design, a painting, concept art, etc.) to bring to life as faithfully as possible. They are given a budget of NZ$300 to do this. They spend all year (when they aren’t in other classes!) researching, testing, and building their costumes. They work with a model they have selected from among the students at Toi Whakaari to create a character and story for their costume.
The culmination of all this work for both years is Costume Showcase: a theatrical mini-extravaganza featuring performance and dance and their costumes.
It’s a chance for friends and family to celebrate the student’s work, and see it up close.
Unfortunately this year Covid-19 restrictions mean that we can only have a tiny audience for Costume Showcase, but that comes with a benefit for you.
We’ll be livestreaming tonight’s 6:30 showing of Costume Showcase!
I hope you enjoy the show! I’m phenomenally proud of all the students: they did all this despite missing 2 months of in-person tuition, and access to all our specialised equipment, due to lockdown.
And I’m phenomenally proud of the crew. The show is hugely directed and managed by current students or recent graduates, and they have done so well working around uncertainty and changing restrictions.
But wait there’s more! You can also follow @Toi_Costume on instagram for a peek into their world (the account is student-led).
Apologies that the blog has been so slow: not much but Rate the Dress, and even that not on a weekly basis. I’m just out of pep at the moment. All my energy is going toward teaching, and everything else feels like slogging through molasses.
I’m hoping to wrap up some big project this week, and have more energy, and thus be able to finish some of the fun blog posts that are sitting 3/4 written. Fingers crossed…
Not exactly to my surprise, not a lot of you were madly in love with last week’s dress. It was a lot. And even less to my surprise, the thing that received the most criticism was the rosettes. They were quite…distinctive. I really appreciated viewers who tried to imagine a person who this dress could really work on. While it’s not something I’ll every love for me, I could actually imagine a kind of person who it would suit and would look fabulous on, and who it would be so right for you’d just love it on them.
The Total: 6.6 out of 10
Eeep. Such a come down after weeks of 9+ ratings!
This week: a pink and green 1780s gown
The Musee des Arts Decoratifs describes this dress as a polonaise, and while it has decorative elements in common with some gowns that clearly are polonaise, the overall cut of this one is not typical of a polonaise. It definitely appears to have a waist seam, and its pointed back, while not clearly either an Anglaise or Italian gown, is definitely not the lobed skirt of a polonaise.
So, like many garments in the 1780s, an era of transition between styles, this dress has elements of many styles. In overall design it’s certainly a garment of its time.
The use of large quantities of a contrasting fabric for flat decorative elements is unusual in most 18th century fashion, but not the 1780s. In this dress the green trim is embellished with delicate metal embroidery featuring peacock feathers. Peacock feather embroidery was particularly fashionable at Versailles in the 1780s: the grand habit attributed to Rose Bertin at the Royal Ontario Museum features very similar peacock feather motifs.
While contrasting flat-trim appears in a variety of colour combinations in the 1780s, pink and green seems to have been particularly on-trend. I’m aware of at least four extant ensembles from this era with pink skirts and jackets trimmed with green facings. Given how many 1780s dress trends are named after actresses or characters in plays its possible that a particularly famous theatre costume came in this colourway and inspired the fashion.
I don’t know if the petticoat is original to the dress, or (more likely) one that was paired with it because it was a close-enough match.
This green, for the record, is not arsenic green: arsenic green is unsuitable as a colourant for silk because the copper turns dark in combination with silks sulphur content. Instead, this dress is an excellent example of how this shade of green could be achieved with natural dyes.
What do you think? Do you like this example of extremely-on-trend 1780s?
Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10
A reminder about rating — feel free to be critical if you don’t like a thing, but make sure that your comments aren’t actually insulting to those who do like a garment. Phrase criticism as your opinion, rather than a flat fact. Our different tastes are what make Rate the Dress so interesting. It’s no fun when a comment implies that anyone who doesn’t agree with it, or who would wear a garment, is totally lacking in taste.
As usual, nothing more complicated than a .5. I also hugely appreciate it if you only do one rating, and set it on a line at the very end of your comment.
