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Linen shirt 1750-1820
Men’s shirts remained fairly constant during the eighteenth century. All fabric was hand spun and hand woven, and shirts were cut to make maximum use of the linen in a series of squares and rectangles. The construction is both genius and practical. Shirts were the main undergarment for men and were made of linen; fine…
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1830s morning jacket
We found this lovely cotton morning jacket in one of the last clothing boxes we opened to document at the museum. It’s a wonderful example of a garment a woman would wear at home in the morning, before dressing properly for leaving the house later in the day. We were particularly excited to find this…
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1920s Robe de Style
The movie Downton Abbey, which opened in September, was the perfect excuse for our costume group to have a 1920s outing. I decided to make Robe de Style, a fashion of the mid 1920s that varies a little from the typical androgynous straight lines of many 1920s styles. A Robe de Style has the long-waisted…
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Handsewn 1790s dress
A project from 2016 I didn’t exactly start out to hand-sew an entire dress. However, at the time I was doing a fair amount of travelling so I took the bodice pieces with me and stitched on them here and there. When I’ve been home, I’ve been concentrating on writing, and I like to have…
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Regency Dress
A project from 2016 As well as a costumer, I’m also a novelist, and back in 2016 when starting my latest book, The Clothier’s Daughter, I began planning the cover as I knew I would be independently publishing it, and therefore had control over all the choices. Stock images of reasonably accurate Regency dress are rather hard…
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Linen Cap
A project from about 2016 – originally posted as a portfolio project but this WordPress theme doesn’t support portfolios. This linen cap is a very simple one, suitable for the late 18th and early nineteenth centuries. It was entirely hand-stitched from scraps of linen left over from a chemise. The fabric is from fabrics-store.com, and…