The Dreamstress

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http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/107809

Rate the Dress: Bustle Era Border Print

Last week’s Rate the Dress was an evening dress for an event that didn’t usually call for evening wear. This week’s Rate the Dress is a morning dress for…well, presumably exactly what a morning dress was usually worn for.

Last Week: a 1920s evening-dress as wedding-dress

Last week’s wedding dress may have been a very unconventional choice, but it was a successful one! Almost everyone loved it, with the few slightly lower scores (it’s a good dress when 8 is the low score!) coming from people who just don’t like the 20s, and couldn’t quite get behind the corsage.

The Total: 9.6 out of 10

Resounding approval for the brides pick!

This week: a first-bustle-era morning dress in border-print cotton

This week I present an 1870s morning dress in a striking border-print cotton with trompe l’oeil ruffle effect.

*Morning Dress, 1870s, American, cotton, Gift of Mrs. Phillip H. Gray, 1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art, C.I.50.105.18a, b*

In the 1870s a morning (not to be confused with mourning!) dress was an informal dress, usually made in less dressy fabrics, such as cotton. A morning dress was worn at home in the earlier part of the day, before changing for the more formal events of the afternoon, such as visiting, attending events, or shopping.

Morning dresses were less deshabille than dressing gowns (also worn in the morning) and were considered tidy and formal enough for women to receive visitors who showed up before the prescribed visiting hours (even unknown visitors of the opposite gender) in.

For less well-off women, who had to do their own tidying and chores in the morning, morning dresses were meant to be practical affairs: simple frocks in washable cotton with small prints on darker grounds, which would hide small marks and stains.

This morning dress clearly came from the wardrobe of a woman of leisure, with maids to press all her ruffles, and a to-do list totally devoid of anything likely to stain or spot her, unless it was a cup of tea or ink from her morning correspondence.

The fabric is exceptional, and has been used lavishly, and with much care and planning.

Note that it’s been painstakingly pieced along the bottom edge of the overskirt, and on the back ‘sash’ pieces, to provide a simpler border with only the trompe l’oeil ruffle.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art seems to have gone very light on the pressing and de-creasing aspects of this dress, possibly because the fabric appears to be a polished cotton, which creases easily and doesn’t always react so well to un-creasing methods (especially after 130 years).

As always, please don’t rate the dress on the museum’s presentation.

What do you think? Would you bounce out of bed at the thought of wearing this? Or are you not-a-morning-person when it comes to this dress?

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 com

Cats! (of the farm)

Published by The Dreamstress

A promise: this post contains images of 100% authentic cats. No dancing cats, cat boobs, bad fur, creepy CGI, or alarming plunges into Uncanny Valley. There is, however, a slight risk of uneven editing.

Mum & Dad have six cats on the farm.

Four of them are the most adorable, sweet creatures you’ll ever meet.

One of them is amazingly not-a-disaster of a cat anymore.

The sixth one is a goose.

Terra

This is Terra. She’s the matriarch of the farm cats: not because she’s the oldest, but because she’s the most likely to get along with everybody else, and the best at getting what she wants in the cat hierarchy. She achieves this by just doing it.

She hung around the (now defunct) health food store in town. Mum asked around, and no one knew where she’d come from. She was incredibly friendly, and the farm was short of cats, so she came home with Mum. She was dubbed Terra by my sister because her coat was the colour of dirt (Mum, indignantly: “very pretty dirt!”). Her funny short tail with the broken end has been like that as long as we’ve known her.

She fit right in to the farm, although it almost immediately became obvious that while older Terra is round because she’s chubby, very young Terra was round because she was pregnant – so there was a little pause and the farm had its last batch of kittens before she could be spayed!

It’s very hard to get a photograph of Terra (and her daughters) because as soon as you pay any attention to her (such as aiming a camera) she assumes it’s snuggle time.

Before you know it you have one small, round, and very insistent cat butting her head against the camera and lacerating your skin with delighted kneading.

So all my photos of Terra are of her asleep, incredibly close up and blurry, or momentarily turned away to rub against something else before assaulting me with love again!

Maka

Maka is my dad’s cat. He’s a big orange and white tom, and looks like a bruiser, with his funny crinkled ear. Instead, he’s the sweetest, gentlest, most laid back cat you’ll ever meet.

Every morning Dad has a papaya with peanut butter for breakfast in the open ‘farm’ kitchen. And every morning Maka sits next to his chair, patiently waiting. No meowing, no standing on his paws, not even any gazing up with longing. And at the end of breakfast Dad gives Maka a tiny dollop of peanut butter. Maka sniffs it, accepts it graciously, and eats it. Some days he doesn’t want it, but he always sits with Dad for breakfast.

He’s very easy to photograph, because he’s so laid back!

Mum & Dad got him when I was visiting two trips ago: he belonged to friend of theirs, but was being bullied by their friend’s older tom. Mum & Dad had no male cats at the time, so Maka joined the farm.

TwoSocks

TwoSocks is one of Terra’s dauthers. She has two blackish right paws and two goldish left paws, hence her name. She also has the most phenomenal green eyes.

Unfortunately it’s very hard to photograph them, because she’s even worse than her mom. If TwoSocks decides she wants cuddles, you will cuddle her.

Seriously. She’ll tackle your ankles until you stop and pet her. If you’re kneeling down trying to plant things or pick things, you have an available lap. And she will climb on it.

TwoSocks has decided that the gardens are her territory. I stayed in the cottage nearest the gardens. Thus I was TwoSocks chosen victim for the duration of my stay. She figured out what time I woke up and ambushed me every morning.

Rumblestrip

Rumblestrip is TwoSock’s sister and Terra’s daughter.

Rumblestrip shares the family obsession with cuddles. However, she’s far smarter than her mom and sister. She has figured out that 1) if you get up to human height it’s way easier for the humans to pet you, and 2) if you don’t knead the humans until they bleed every time you get to sit on their lap or get held, you get to sit on their lap and get held far more often.

Due to 1), she is often to be found on tree stumps and benchtops and other items at convenient heights.

Also, she understands that if you pose for a camera you get reward cuddles!

Smart kitty!

Aster

This is Aster. She’s over 21 years old.

For most of her life she was a Dis-Aster if a cat. Mum & Dad took her in when the friend she belonged to had to move off island. But… she didn’t get along with any other cat on the farm, she whined incessantly, she ate everything she shouldn’t, rummaged in the rubbish bins, and she had a constant string of unattractive skin conditions.

We tried very hard to give her love and affection, because animals need those, but Aster didn’t make it easy.

But Aster has calmed down in her old age. She’s almost completely deaf, and she can’t hear herself, so she makes super loud crying meows, but she’s gotten cuddly and sweet.

She spends her days sleeping in the bins of drying tagete seeds (a type of marigold really good for crop rotation), making a nest in the roots of a particular avocado tree, and taking slow perambulations around the farm. She’s easy to love, and I’m so grateful we can do that in her last years.

Goose

This is Goose. He’s a goose. Obviously he’s a cat, but he’s a goose.

He showed up on the farm at the same time as Maka. It’s not uncommon for people to abandon unwanted cats in rural areas. The farm is pretty far off the main road, so they don’t see so many, but every once in a while a cat finds its way there. We’re pretty sure that’s what happened to Goose. He is socialised, but very scared of people: he was probably played with and petted as a kitten, and then abandoned.

Since he was around the farm, he got adopted once he trusted my parents enough to be adoptable.

He trusts my mom (she is the Source of Food), and loves Terra (Terra is not quite so enthusiastic – I think she feels she did her duty with her kittens, and did not sign up for another one!). Goose will let me and Dad pet him if Good Person (Mom) or Good Cat (Terra) is there to reassure him that we are Not Scary.

He still prefers to be faced away from you for pets though, so that he doesn’t have to see the Terrifying Hands. He likes the way they feel, but they are still alarming!

He’s a goose, but he’s named Goose because he has a goose meow. If you listen very carefully you can just hear his funny little honk in this video:

Wedding dress, 1927. Silk crepe, glass beads, metallic thread embroidery. Maker unknown. Gift of Robert C. Woolard. 1991.408a, Sponsored by Laura Barnett Sawchyn, Chicago Historical Society

Rate the Dress: the ’20s are back

Published by The Dreamstress

It’s the 20s again, and 1920s & 30s frocks are always what I think of when I imagine the perfect New Years outfit.* So this week’s Rate the Dress is a 20s dress for a festive event.

Last Week: an 1840s dress in striped silk

Last week’s rating were all over the place: a big chunk of 9s & 10s from people who loved the piecing and play of stripes; a smattering of middle ratings from those who liked it, but weren’t quite reconciled to the not-perfect pattern matching, the unusually low berthe, and the muted colours; and a few really, really low scores from people who didn’t like anything about it.

The Total: 7.8 out of 10

You can’t please them all!

This week: a 1920s dress

I think of ’20s frocks as the perfect New Year’s attire, but this week’s Rate the Dress is actually a garment for a different kind of ‘new’: a new beginning.

It’s a wedding dress, albeit an unusual blue sleeveless example that departs from the more common ’20s wedding dress trend, carried over from the Edwardian era, of a day dress (usually, but not always) in white or another very pale shade.

While coloured wedding dresses weren’t that uncommon in the Edwardian era and ’20s, evening dresses for wedding wear were. It’s possible that this dress may originally have had a matching jacket, which would have taken it from evening into formal day wear, but as it is it’s a distinctly avant garde example of a wedding dress.

The dress combines elements inspired by Medieval illuminated manuscripts, and Near Eastern architecture and tilework.

The blue evokes the colours of Moroccan tiles and the traditional hue of the Virgin Mary’s clothes. The beading and embroidery combine the arches and delicate latticework of Persia and the former Ottoman Empire with the more representational flowers and acanthus leaf scrolls of illuminated manuscripts.

What do you think? Do you like this slightly unexpected wedding dress, as a wedding dress, or a New Years frock? (still one hour to midnight in Hawai’i as I hit publish on this!)

Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10

(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, so I can find it! And 0 is not on a scale of 1 to 10. Thanks in advance!)

* Although pyjamas are what I usually end up wearing. I’m not really a New Years person!