At Her Leisure

I did finish the waistband on the 1920's dress I was embroidering last spring shortly after I wore it in San Jose in April. I never posted pictures of the finished project and found after I wore it at Costume College that I didn't get any good pictures of it either. There are a couple of pictures floating around out there, but they're general crowd shots, which aren't generally too good as costume documentation. I took a couple of pictures on the dummy the other day, and that's as good as it's going to get for now.







I am happy with the embroidery but don't love the dress. I never expected to love the dress because there's really nothing I love about the 1920's. There are some things that are better than others, and this is okay. The unexpected thing with this was that to have the blousing at the waist behave itself I had to put a couple of pins in the waistband and pin it to my slip. If I didn't, it wanted to sag at the center front since the sides were kind of sitting on my hips. Not a big deal.

At least now I have a 1920's dress so I'm ready for any summery outing that calls for that period.

I reached the halfway point on my embroidery this morning.

I have finished the 1920's navy cotton voile dress except for the embroidered waistband. I put the ribbon around the waist until I have the actual waist trim finished.



After five or six hours of work, I'm not quite through one repeat of the seven on the belt so there's no hope of having it finished for the first weekend in April, but that just means I don't have to spend every spare moment on it. It'll get done in its own good time, possibly by the end of April. We shall see.

I've finished 21 repeats of the pattern and just have 7 to go. Then I'll be able to make up the dress except for the belt. The belt has much more embroidery and will take much longer. I'm thinking the dress will be finished by the end of next week, but the belt will still take up another couple of weeks.

This is just a general progress update because I have a few things I've been working on the last couple of weeks.

After spending last weekend making a dress, I don't think it's going to end up getting hemmed this weekend. My husband is still playing in the garage so there's no way I'll get the hem marked and pressed and stitched in the next hour. Marking isn't outside the realm of possibility, depending upon when he comes in.

Last night I finished an 1840's bonnet I had started a few weeks ago. It was just down to the trimming, which is the unpleasant part of millinery. Why can't the thing have been plain hats with just a band of ribbon around the crown or something? Bonnet trimming always drives home to me how non-artistic I am. Yes, I am an engineer by training and by inclination. I am not an artist.

I spent a fair bit of time over the last two weeks reading and knitting. I've started the third ball of yarn in my 1934 Benedictine tunic and am nearly halfway through the decreases to the waist. It's really plain knitting - I'm past the raglan sleeves, and the patterned section doesn't come until the hip - so it's perfect for knitting while reading. I will have to buy some US2 (2.75mm) DPN's for the sleeves. I have 6/0-1 and 3 but no 2.

The border on my 1890-ish veil is finished, but I haven't gotten any further than that. I worked on the bonnet and then the dress and then got to reading, which does not work in tandem with lace patterns, and there she sat. I did chart the main pattern since I had read that there were two mistakes in the pattern - I had found one in the border but never found a second one - but that's as far as it went. It's been a weird two weeks with no TV on around me, which meant that I could just read and work on the Benedictine. That is bound to change soon.

I started a pair of embroidered 18th century pockets at the sewing circle a couple of weeks ago since embroidering the pansies during sewing circle sessions worked out really well last fall. I traced one pocket and worked on it one weekend and then didn't go to the sewing circle for the next two weeks. I'm using a Romantic Recollections pattern (https://romanticrecollections.com/product/mid-18th-century-pocket-hand/), but I'm doing it with backstitch and multiple colors of thread.

The next project is a 1920's dress with an embroidered yoke and waistband that I'm hoping to wear in April. I've got a pattern and printed it out. I've got the embroidery pattern, though I'll have to suit it to the curved yoke. The next step will be tracing the embroidery pattern. This will be turquoise embroidery on navy voile unless I decide some other color looks better with the navy.