40 Search Results for: 1916 fortnight

Felicity the sewing cat thedreamstress.com1

Five for Friday: What I’ve been up to, June Edition

What I’m working on: Trying to accomplish things faster than the disaster roller coaster that has become my life can run them down. I’m not sure what’s going on, but sometime between June & November last year Murphy’s Law decided to take a really personal interest in my life, and annoying, time consuming, money demanding things have happened one after the other. You’ve heard about the epic computer crash of January 2017, and then there was the stove that decided to stop working and needed replacing (buying appliances is pretty much my least favourite activity in the world, and takes forever), followed by ‘Oops, it turns out your electrical system won’t support a modern stove, you need to re-wire a big portion of your house’. This was followed by ‘Felicity needs dental surgery’, which is scheduled for next week and a bit, so I’m a little freaked out by that… And that’s the stuff I can tell you about (there have to be some boundaries). There are perks to some of the disasters. For example, …

Costume College 2017 – I’m teaching!

Published by The Dreamstress

I’m very excited to be going to Costume College again this year – and to be teaching again! I’ll be teaching three classes, one each on Friday, Saturday & Sunday. I’m being quite brave teaching three classes (and sadly, it means I’ll miss lots of other peoples classes – the huge drawback to teaching), but I was so excited about these three topics I couldn’t decide which to pass on, so offered all three as choices. The first is my favourite rant: Beyond the Fringe: Unravelling the Myth of the 1920s Flapper Imagine a flapper. The popular concept is of mid-1920s young women, with fringed dresses, sequined and feathered headbands, sleek bobbed hair, and few inhibitions. This class will explore the historical truth behind the flapper myth, from the British origins of the ‘flapper’ in the 1900s, to the rise in popularity of the term in the 1910s, and the way it evolved into the feminist movement of the 1920s, and was then re-invented over the course of the 20th century. We’ll look at where …

1917 combinations and petti-slips thedreamstress.com

Combination-a-thon, or how I came to have more wearable combinations than anyone else alive in 2017…

Published by The Dreamstress

When I was planning my wardrobe for the Fortnight in 1916 I knew I needed lots of combinations to wear under corsets: enough to have a reasonable week’s wearing before I did laundry. I was using Wearing History’s fantastic 1917 combination pattern. Mid-1910s combinations are serious fabric hogs, so I rummaged around in my stack of vintage sheets, and unearthed half-a-dozen of the thinnest and most seamed. On my first round of cutting I cut out three, carefully folded them all in one parcel, and set them aside for sewing. (who can guess where this is going?) The next night I cut out another 4, which would give me 8 in total (I already had a completed one): near the upper end of what my research suggested was a normal amount of first-layer undergarments for a middle class woman to have in any single season. A few days later I sat down to sew all the combinations. My first three? Nowhere to be found! Determined searching and re-organising failed to unearth them, so I persevered …