All posts tagged: 1910s

A wedding dress of 1911

Tara wrote me last week with a fascinating query.  She’s trying to recreate her great-grandmother’s wedding dress, but all she has is a tantalizingly brief  description: the bride looked charming in a gown of silk marquisette trimmed with Oriental lace and Irish crochet buttons over cream satin with lace coat to match.  She wore the bridal veil and orange blossoms and carried pink carnations. As Tara says, not a lot to go on.  She want to know what the dress might have looked like, patterns that could use as a guide to making it, and what silk marquisette and Oriental lace (or their modern equivalent) are.  I thought this would make fun series of posts, so over the next week I’ll try to answer, with lots of pretty pictures! For starters, let’s do what all brides do when they plan their wedding: look at inspiration images in wedding magazines! There weren’t any proper wedding magazines in 1911, but the Women’s Own Magazine did do ‘A Page for Brides.’  I’ve already blogged about the bridal headpieces …

Rate the Dress: Colour + drape + embellishment = ? in 1912

I’m supposed to be on the beach on the Sunshine Coast in Australia not worrying about blogs and students and sewing (and hopefully not spiders or snakes or sociopaths either), but I have wireless internet, so I’ve been naughty and added up the ratings for last weeks  daring  1830s ‘sexy sailor’ costume. Unfortunately it seems that most of you were too confused too comment, and those of you who did just rated it on aesthetics, since you couldn’t figure out the costume. What was the outfit supposed to be? Aesthetically it divided you, with most of you either loving or hating it, bringing it in at a middle-of-the-road 6.4 out of 10 Hopefully this week’s rate the dress, a striking 1912 frock from the Italian costume collection Abiti Antichi, will leave you neither confused nor uninterested. The display and presentation of this evening dress may not be ideal, but you can still clearly see the daring combination of gold silk satin with tone-on-tone embroidery, black velvet and net trim, iridescent beading, and a flash of …

Bridal headpieces of 1911

I’m currently working on a wedding dress, so I’m a little wedding mad this week (not that this is particularly unusual for me!). To inspire you, and me, here are some gorgeous images of bridal headdresses from 1912. The veils themselves might not have aged that well, but the models sure are timeless beauties. Sigh.  Aren’t they gorgeous.  The models.  Still not sure about the headdresses.