The Industrious Lady

Recovering a Modern Parasol So next to velvet, moire is my favorite fabric. And this lovely stuff showed up  at a local thrift store and just had to come home with me. Now this would be considered more of a bengaline than a moire but for sake of post turkey coma and commonly used terminology, any fabric with a "wood grain" pattern hot rolled into the fabric is normally called moire by the modern humans and thus will be dubbed in this article. So I cut a hole in my fabric for the top spoke, stuck it on the middle spoke, and pinched the excess fabric and draped it. Drew a chalk line with tailor's chalk and stuck it through the machine. Through sheer luck, I was able to get the seam lines to basically match up with the ribs so it looked pretty good. I then pinned the raw edges up underneath to do a raw hem. Probably should have ironed this. Part of any good creative process is staring at you creation for a good 2 hours trying to decide what to fix and what imperfections you ...

Mid 1870's Trained Petticoat  So what is a girl to do when she needs both a balayeuse and a petticoat for a mid 1870's ensemble? Why the handy dandy trained petticoat! There is a great source on facebook called 19th century sewing patterns, and has over a thousand patterns and fashion plates from just the early bustle and early natural form years. Yesterday's thimble has a great post about balayeuse that you can read about here  http://yesterdaysthimble.com/tutorials/balayeuse/ So this sweet little number is the best of both worlds of protecting the hem of my dress safe from dirt, especially that expensive silk that my heart yearned for for months. But, we have a problem... I am very, very, very American. Suckled on the teat of the standard system since I could hold a tape... on the original pattern is in centimeters. But have no fear, standard to metric conversion calculator is here.  Boom, there ya go. One converted drawing and somewhat kinda the right shapes. There wer...