All posts tagged: Flora Klickmann

Rate the dress: Lace and fur in 1910

Well, you have had two weeks now of vivid red Rate the Dresses. You liked the rose-red of Charles I’s outfit better than the tomato red of the 1860s dress, but other than the colour Charles’ 1610s outfit didn’t fare too well. You rated it a paltry 4.7 out of 10, and dubbed it a representation of the ugliest period in fashion ever, but I daresay it would have come off worse had it not been red. Popular as it may be, I can’t show you red outfits for every Rate the Dress. It would get monotonous, and I think it gives them an unfair advantage. Personally, I’m a huge fan of neutrals, partly because I feel a neutral frock really has to work for approval: if it isn’t right, you notice, where a bright colour can hide shoddy design. Shoddy design is, of course, a matter of taste and time. It had never occurred to me that this was a fashion no-no, but in Flora Klickmann’s Flower Patch books, she complains about the “innappropriate, …

Doilie, doily, doyley, doiley, d’oyley or d’oilie?

Published by The Dreamstress

I came across a copy of the Girl’s Own Paper from 1912, and was very intrigued by the handwork section, and in particular, by the spellings in the handwork section. You see, the Girl’s Own Paper spells doily d’oilie. How peculiar! At first I thought it might just have been an old-fashioned term for doily, and I have never noticed it before. To make matters more confusing, the magazines ads spell it d’oyley So I thought a bit more, and realised that I was sure I had read 19th century articles about doilies, and d’oyleys, but never d’oilies. So I did a bit of research, and guess what? I can’t find a single mention of d’oilies or by that spelling in anything but the Girl’s Own Paper. New Zealand newspapers from the turn of the century spell it doily, d’oyley, doyley, and doilie, with the first spelling being vastly more common, and the last only appearing for a brief period at the turn of the century. But why all the variants? I think I have …

Friday Reads: Flora Klickmann and her flower patch

Published by The Dreamstress

I have a confession. Sometime I buy old books in op shops just because the books are pretty. I know. This is usually a really stupid habit, because our house is quite small, and I generally have to give the books back to op shops when I realise they are less fun to read than to look at. Sometimes though, my “Oooh…bookey pogey bait” habit pays off, because I end up buying books that I have never heard of which turn out to be fantastic. One of these fantastic and unexpected finds was two books by Flora Klickmann: The Flower-Patch Among the Hills and Between the Larch-woods and the Weir. I really almost didn’t buy the books. They were $5 each, and I’d never heard of Klickmann. And they weren’t actually that pretty. But I did, and they are fabulous. Klickmann was the editor of the Girls Own Paper in London, and the first book (The Flower-Patch) started out as articles for the magazine. This means that both books are more a series of anecdotes …