1850s crinoline dress for my daughter
My daughter and me collaborated to make this lovely 1850s dress and a talma cape. She made the skirt and I made the bodice and the cape.
I made an 1898 tennis costume
I turned some old Ikea duvet covers into a Victorian 1898 tennis costume using an original pattern from La Mode Illustrée.
1840s Accessories: Cap, Bonnet, and Mantle
I made myself some warm 1840s winter accessories plus a lace cap that the ladies wore indoors. And then I went to a farmstead museum.
I made an 1840s dress for the holidays
I made myself an 1840s dress with the McCalls pattern number 7988. To make the dress work for the winter I added long sleeves.
A Victorian mourning dress: the bodice
My Victorian mourning costume is progressing and this time I finished the bodice. This was an interesting make with lots of inner structure.
Making a Victorian Mourning Dress: The Skirt
This autumn’s big project is the making of a Victorian mourning dress. This will be a series of three or four parts and in the first part, I’ll make the mourning skirt. This dress has been something that I have wanted to make for ages and it works nicely for Halloween. I found this nice and simple 1894 pattern from the online shop called Ageless Patterns. The shop is a bit hard to navigate, but all the patterns are actual historical patterns except that they have seam allowances and grainlines and some other helpful markings added. I think the dress would have been pretty modest at the time of the…
A Victorian lingerie dress
Lingerie dresses are those pretty frilly dresses that make the iconic Edwardian look with their lace inserts and pale colours. However, they first appeared in the 1890s. For a long time, I have wanted to make my own but sourcing that much lace was a problem. This kind of dress can use hundreds of euros worth of cotton lace which is way out of my budget. Then I had a stroke of luck and I found huge rolls of lace at the local Recycling centre. These rolls had hundreds of metres, some several kilometres worth of lace and they only cost about 15 to 20 euros each. Admittedly the lace…
I made a Victorian silk petticoat out of old curtains!
I turned a pair of thrifted silk curtains into a Victorian silk petticoat. I also dyed my cotton lace to match using common food items.
Two Victorian dresses in close-up
I got to study two Victorian dresses from the 1890s at the Espoo City Museum and I took my camera with me.
A Victorian bashlik hood at Espoo City Museum
I was invited to study the genuine Victorian bashlik hood at Espoo City Museum.