All posts tagged: Polly Oliver

The Polly / Oliver jacket is done, done DONE!

Well, only three weeks late for the Historical Sew Fortnightly Challenge, and 5 years and 3 months after I started it, the Monstrous Regiment inspired Polly / Oliver jacket is finally done! I’m very proud of the end result, but it does suffer from being five years behind the times where my sewing skills are concerned. I re-fitted and draped as much as possible, but there was a limit to how much I could rescue the original work (which wasn’t the best example of my sewing skills five years ago to start with, having been draped and started in a mad rush). There was many a time when I was tempted to can the project, scrap the fabric, and move on to something easier. Looking at it, I’m actually amazed that I didn’t. The sleeves were just as troublesome and difficult to finish as the rest of the jacket, I put them in, tweaked, adjusted , set them, re-set them, bag lined them, took that apart, flat lined them, set them, re-set them, re-set them, …

Polly / Oliver: Coming up to the final skirmish

Published by The Dreamstress

Polly Oliver is so close to done. I just need to set the sleeves and collar. I hope… Everything has been a bit of a battle so far – very Borogravian: always fighting (thanks to Jenni on facebook for making this link!). Still, I’m quite pleased with how it is looking, even if I have put at least 14 lines of stitching into every single seam (that isn’t an exaggeration btw. I counted). First, five years ago, I sewed the jacket together without any flat lining (stitching lines 1), thinking I would line it, but it was too soft and also not historically accurate, so I unpicked it, flat lined in in dark blue twill (stitching lines 2 & 3), and basted it back together with red piping between the seams (SL 4 & 5, because every time you sew a seam with piping you have to sew on the piping, and then re-sew the seam. Then I fitted it, unpicked the piping, moved the piping, and resewed the seams to the new fit …

Tutorial: How to ‘antique’ cheap gold buttons & jewellery

Published by The Dreamstress

Polly / Oliver is almost finished, I’m just stuck on it because I need to try it on to check the fit, and my cold has gone to my lungs and I can’t breath with a corset on…so…. While you wait to see the finished jacket, here is a clever tutorial with a technique that I developed to solve the problem of matching the super shiny cheap-gold looking jacket buttons to the beautiful dull gold buttons on my waistcoat. In this tutorial we’ll take super bright, shiny, cheap gold buttons (or jewellery bits, or anything else that is all metal and cheap gold-colour) like the one in the upper-centre, and turn them into the copper ‘penny’ colour of the one to the left of it, and turn those into the lovely antique gold colour of the rest of the buttons. I can’t take full credit for the tutorial – I owe the first half of it to Mrs C, who learned it from the amazing Nini of Things Unseen. Their technique got me most of …