The Industrious Lady

 Octagon Dress with Bretelles Guys, I'm in  love... in love with a new pattern company!  Truly Victorian is Great, past patterns is definitely a step into the past, but they seem to do a very certain look of the era and a very similar look. In the years encompassing the civil war era so many new looks and styles were coming out, so many that the big historical pattern companies didn't have. Which to be fair they can't carry every single style for the entire era, they only have so many people to draft so many patterns. But after pp and tv for so long, this girl needed a change, a Change the Octagon Ladies Repository brought. A good basquine bodice... she got it Need outerwear for winter... they have 9, yes 9 outerwear patterns. A wateau wrapper, Godey's 1863 shows a wateau back dress and been obsessed ever since  and so much more! And a link to the website h ere So many pretties to make, good thing I have that weird obsession with hoarding silk. For the first project ...

  Empress Sissi Dress: Side Story Diversity is what makes the world interesting. 10 people could look at the same painting and come away with 10 different interpretations of it. This was the case with the Winterhalter Sissi painting dress. However, Otto from facebook was different.  I posted the photos below in a sewing group on facebook, and my rendition of the dress was apparently an insult to him and an insult to his Empress. I had made the dress the wrong shape, the sleeves were too puffy, and I believe he called the tulle shawl a "fluffy abhoration."  Which is fine, he clearly loves his Empress. Otto from facebook is entitled to his opinion. Until about two weeks later. This man, all the way over in Italy and across the world tagged me in a facebook post. What was in this post? Otto's rendition of the Sissi dress and he had tagged me in it and expressed again how much he hated my floofy concoction and had made his own better version.  He had made a dress out of ...

Sissi Wedding Dress Part 3: Skirts and Floof So in the original Winterhalter painting, I can see two layer of fabric. First we have the base in a white or cream color, then the sheer overlay. For information on how the fabric was selected or a more in depth look at the research process follow this link  There are different ways of constructing historical skirts, my preferred method is the one used by Mrs. Marion Pullan in her 1860 book "Beadle's Dime Guide to Dress-Making and Millinery." Here Mrs. Pullan instructs "At the preset time a skirt should be at least four and a half yards around the bottom... Seven breadths of the ordinary 21 inch wide silks are sufficient for a skirt." At the time fabrics were only 21" wide and could not be made into the tube that we see today, instead the author writes that the fabric should be cut into breadths or panels as we might call them today. She also suggests that the skirts be made of 7 panels or 21 inches. Giving half...

  https://www.pinterest.com/pin/57843176451203674/ Unknown Pinterest source.  Painting appears to be late 1850's, and shows a lovely Jenny Lind fan in use. https://art.famsf.org/fan-jenny-lind-or-palm-type-mirror-19838336 Jenny Lind fan from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Dated to late 19th century but very consistent with 1860's and 1870's Jenny Lind styles. Bone Handle, the palmettes are referred to as being starched paper. https://art.famsf.org/fan-jenny-lind-or-palm-type-78688 Jenny Lind Fan from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco dated to 1860. Total height is 9 1/16" tall, and is made of starched silk. I started with bare bones of an old tore up celluloid fan.  Using the length of the fan stick I drew up a floofy doopy shape. In this case my bones were 4.5" long so the pattern for the fabric was 5" long. The fan was already broken, so in this case I added a new piece of lace to stabilize everything. This is my new best friend, at least for us...

Bodice Bodice, who's got a bodice? THIS GIRL!! with a mockup complete it was just time to take it apart and reuse it for the lining. The idea was to use the tan cotton as a base, with the white silk as the fashion layer with the organza overlay on top of it all.  These back pieces are a little tricky, it needs to be top stitched.  I left one side of the cotton a little longer than the other. This allowed for rolling the long side under like this. Pinned it for posterity.            Once the bottom was pinned down I was                              able to iron the top part of the bodice down and sewed                                        through both layers. So both the top and bottom seem are  sewed down. 

 2021 was rough for the industrious Lady Blog and my dear followers you deserve an apology. In the spirit of being a poor adult who also has a certain addiction to silk, I spent the last year without active internet service or a working computer. Any posts that were made were done using the computer at the local library. As one can imagine, that made blogging and writing about projects pretty rough. And boy is there a lot to write about. The only thing that got me through was petting the pretty silks and chocolate, lots and lots of chocolate.  2021 might have been rough for writing but a huge new event happened that my dear readers don't know about yet, I got married. And of course in the spirit of industry and fun, I made my wedding dress. As I sat as a now engaged human, a choice had to be made, the choice of what kind of fun dress to make. And it had to be the perfect dress... the ultimate dress... and then it hit me. What dress in all of 19th century history is most close ...