The Industrious Lady

  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 ...