Category: making things

You Are My Sunshine

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, making things, material culture, Research2 Comments
Miniature painting, probably 1815-1820. Private collection.

The best things turn up when I’m looking for something else entirely. First came the miniature, now in a private collection, with the lovely carnelian or coral jewelry and the bright yellow dress. I’ve got some yellow cotton with a red and black print pattern in the cupboard, so this dress seemed within reach.

And then, while looking for something else, I found the right fabric! Not that I can buy it, mind you. It’s already owned and in use, in a gown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And not that I haven’t spent some quality time searching the interwebs for similar fabric, which can be found if you look hard enough. Fortunately, better sense prevailed and no cupboard will burst with an additional five yards of block printed silk.

Woman’s Day Dress, English, ca. 1820. Yellow silk brocade exported from India. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 1996-164-1a,b

Still, the fun bit is finding two such similar thoughts, one in paint and one in cloth, without even looking. that means there are more bright yellow Federal or Regency gowns out there. All it will take is the looking.

Auction Season: The Holiday Sales

On By kittycalashIn making things
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Lot 1159 Antique Gold, Carbuncle Garnet, and Diamond Bracelet. Yes, those are rose-cut diamond flies.

First come the jewelry sales, the big guns like Sotheby’s leading the way with sales as crazy as Marie Antoinette’s jewelry (Royal Jewels from the Bourbon Family of Parma, technically, though it sounds more like a delicious lunch than a sale), but the smaller houses play, too. Skinner’s sale closed December 5, Freeman’s earlier, but later than Sotheby’s. These are not sales I bid in, but they are places to see things you’d might not otherwise see. Garnet bracelets with rose-cut diamond flies? Not something I see gracing the wrists of my fellow Metro riders or grocery shoppers.

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Lot 7, Contemporary painted tin hat trade sign, 20th Century. 7″ x 13.25″

Once the serious stuff has sold, the fun begins: the toys! Pook and Pook’s two-day toy sale begins December 7th, and you might call it whimsies and toys, since it begins with shop signs. Who doesn’t want an enormous tin hat? What’s the point, you ask? Why look, if you don’t collect? Because you can collect– information, screen caps of reference images, ideas for things to make, and a visual reference library to fill in the blanks of what you read. The steam engine that breaks in The Railway Children seemed crazy to me as a child, and I assumed it was just a model of a steam locomotive. But no: there were steam toys and accessories, from lighthouses in moats with Indians in sailboats to working looms to….steam locomotives.

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Day Two, Lot 521, Large Bassett Lowke live steam train locomotive and tender, 3 1/2″ gauge, engine – 13 1/2″ l.

The darling thing even looks like Percy, filling in the gaps of the origins of Thomas the Tank Engine, Edwardian children’s stories, and the wonders of the steam age (which you can replicate, if you choose). Hard to believe, in our age of safety, that steam engines might be de rigueur in the parlors of well-to-do Victorian and Edwardian families. (Perhaps your childhood was not as full of E. Nesbitt, Kenneth Grahame, and Arthur Ransome as mine, but if your mother’s primary caregiver was born in late 19th-century Great Britain, you might grow up with an attachment disorder and a taste for fabulist literature of the early 20th century.)

Day One, Lot 230,
German dressmaker and milliners shop room box.

And then there are the dioramas or room boxes, many, if not most, German. These early 20th-century displays give us a sense of the kinds of craft or hobby activities people enjoyed, front-facing dioramas. I think you either “get” them, or you don’t; not everyone wants a miniature world to control or fantasize about, but from the perspective of someone trying to understand what the past looked like, these can provide a three-dimensional view of what are usually only black and white images. Are they perfectly correct? No. But they do give us a sense of the kind of visual stimulation people encountered and enjoyed shopping and playing.

Day One, Lot 220, Papier-mâché milliner’s model doll.

There are dolls, always divisive (they’re creepy or cute, few folks fall in between) and they have they own usefulness. None in this Pook sale tell us much about early toys, but there are a couple of early 19th century examples to remind us of what children played with in the past, and how new fashions were disseminated. In the case of the milliner’s model doll at left, we get a good sense of the Apollo’s knot hairstyle, and a pair of red slippers I would love to have. The back view is equally useful, for it is only with three-dimensional objects (dolls or sculpture) that we can get a complete sense of a hairstyle or costume. With enough looking, you can extrapolate, but there’s nothing like being able to see the past in the round. That’s even better than the telephone-book-thick catalogs from Sears and J.C. Penney that arrived before the holidays in decades past.

Frivolous Friday Returns: Dressed Intentions

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Dressed Intentions, making things11 Comments

Every morning, I sit at the table in the main room of our townhouse in the dark with my SAD light. To my right, I watch the sun rise over the fence, and every morning the orange-blue-pink-purple morning sky delights me. This hasn’t been the easiest year, but it has been bittersweet, cold and warm, like a winter sunrise. Lady Cat’s death was dreadful, and the last memory I have is ugly but goading. She fought so hard to stay alive, every single moment; remembering that, I am ashamed any time I verge towards the hopeless, and try instead to reach for the light.

So, despite the creeping feeling of hopelessness that lurks around the edges of something I want very much, I thought I would carry on with a partial fulfillment of desire. Three weeks ago, I more-or-less asked Drunk Tailor to marry me.*  This was exciting, and pleasing, and generally felt like a good thing to finally express. The hopelessness creeps in because, after an unhappy afternoon and evening of calculations, the truth is we can not afford to marry until I land a job with health insurance benefits.** However, that doesn’t mean we can’t have a party of some kind at some date-and-place-to-be-named.

The sunrises make me think of fabrics and dresses, colors and textures. What began as an idea for a wedding dress has morphed into a party dress, which was easy enough because I never intended a “traditional” dress— unless we are talking about being in an enormous pile of Turkish Angora kittens, white floof isn’t for me.*** The sunrise colors appealed to me, and I ordered swatches from Silk Baron, planning on a dress-and-jacket combination.

I played with combinations for a while before settling on two groups. I’ve narrowed those down, I think, to cordovan silk velvet with winter sage taffeta. Cross your fingers there’ll be enough in stock when I can afford to order the fabrics! In the meantime, any Vogue pattern called “Average” is likely to create excitement in fitting and sewing– plus, a zipper! I haven’t set a zipper in years, so this project should have all the funs.

One way I thought I could cheer myself up and make the best of this intractable situation was to make this a blog-able, documented project. It’s outside my usual time zone but within my style preferences — you say bolero, I say Spencer– so why not make it a project I have to do? Pretty clothes can be a way to get joy out of disappointment, so from muslin to finished garment, let’s do this thing.****

*More-or-less because in the written proposal I made, I recognized that marriage might be a financial impossibility.

**This revelation capped a pretty awful seven day stretch that began with one day of excellent news, followed by multiple job rejections, frightening health insurance premium calculations, and the now-quarterly revelation that my workplace cannot afford to pay me for the hours I’ve already worked this month (and possibly not through the end of the year).

*** The best nap I ever had was in the back of a Subaru Outback, on a stack of bayonets. I dreamt I was in a pile of kittens. It was a warm spring afternoon (kittens) but I was getting poked by sharp things (bayonets, also, kittens).

**** Pending supplies. $212.50 for fabric is right out of my budget scheme at the moment– that’s a lot of chickens, cat chow, or half a health insurance premium, depending on the metric you prefer.

Pink on My Brain

On By kittycalashIn making things, material culture, Research

I no longer remember where in the wilds of the interwebs I found this charming servant, but find her I did, three years ago. I probably came across her researching servants, and found her striking (since she is), so saved the image while moving on to Pyne or Krimmel for more geographically appropriate sources. Still, I’d picked up a remnant of brown and pink printed cotton at Genesee, and had a start to this ensemble.

A scrap of that print was in my pocket when my dear friend (formerly m’colleague) and I went took the train down to New York for a fabric spree. We went in late June (Genesee was early that year), trying to use up vacation time so we didn’t lose it before the end of the fiscal year– any year I didn’t have a hip replacement, I tended to lose a week of vacation so we were motivated to take time off.

I remember that my favorite dress demonstrated a peculiar friendliness, and required a safety pin for modesty’s sake. I remember m’colleague being overwhelmed in the crosswalks at Herald Square, and taking her hand to get her through the sea of bodies and cars. (She grew up in a very small town in northern Rhode Island, where apple orchards were within walking distance; I grew up on the north side of Chicago, taking the bus to the Loop.) But at Mood, I found the fabric that I knew would make the petticoat.

Pink tropical weight wool, don’t ask me how much a yard. I don’t remember, but it was certainly more than I’d paid for any fabric before, with the exception of silk dupioni I bought for a wedding dress. Madness, I thought– but beautiful madness. I started on the short gown (see above) with an extant European garment as inspiration (probably found through Sabine’s work); then I started on the petticoat.

And promptly dropped the project while I changed my life completely. The short gown I finished, and wore as a housekeeper for some Wednesday afternoon programs, but I never managed to get that petticoat finished– until this past week. The pink and black bonnet needed an ensemble, and half of it was present, in the form of the Spencer.

But what I wanted to do was to recreate that plate, short gown, cap, and all. I’m still short the black silk apron, and my cap will always be Anglo-American, but I got close enough to be satisfied that I reached the goal I set three years ago. What I did discover in trying to replicate this image was slightly unexpected, and entirely useful. Just as fashion images are exaggerated today, so too were they exaggerated in the past. M’lady in the image at top is elongated– I’m nearly six feet tall, and I cannot achieve her length. Granted, the waist on my short gown is lower than hers, but still: she’s drawn as if she has the proverbial “legs up to here.” What’s useful about this, and about trying to recreate images from the past, is that these exercises reveal some of the foibles and preferences of the past, which help us see past the filter of the present and get closer to understanding the past.