Sempstress

Yet another dry, dusty pile of academic writing… This time, the topic is the corsetry/torso support of the 16th century.  I find the full history of the artificial silhouette totally fascinating, and I’m geeked beyond belief on the actual genesis of the corset.  In the 16th century alone, a bunch of different devices are in play.  Corsets, obviously – who doesn’t know about the Pfaltzgrafin and Effigy corsets by now?  Wardrobe warrants also list stomachers (for Tudor gowns) made of pasteboard covered with tapheta – that’s certainly stiff enough to smooth the front of the torso into the signature tudor inverted, featureless cone.  By the end of the period, warrants talk about busks made of whalebone and wire, quilted with sarconet.  (How does that fit into a channel in a corset?!?  Or does the end of the era, with it’s open-fronted gowns, turn back to the same infrastructure used by the earlier tudor gowns with stiffened stomachers?  I have my theories, obviously….)

So here is…. Everything I know About 16th Century Corsetry, Read the rest of this entry »

This is an excerpt from a research paper I did a while back. The paper itself is 40 pages and covers 4 centuries of support skirts and corsetry. I figure it’s more digestible in smaller chunks. Please note: my regularly scheduled writing style has been suspended in favor of something more palatable to the hardcore academia types. Special thanks go to Stephanie for her proof-reading skills.

And now for Everything I Know About 16th Century Support Skirts… Read the rest of this entry »

Well, ok, by “made” I really mean “found one I liked a lot and hacked at it to get the details right then changed the graphics”. But, however you want to say it, Sempstress running under Wordpress is starting to look a lot more like home…. :)

In other news, Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official. I finally got my diploma in the mail today. I know that sounds kinda shadey, right, but I did the online thing and getting a diploma through the mail, though lacking a certain pomp and circumstance, is much more official than getting said degree from a Cracker-Jack(tm) box. It’s a Bachelor of Science (with Honors, conveyed so officially that they must be capitalized), and my area of concentration was fashion and business. It’s a real degree, from a real (read: accredited) college, and I worked really hard for it. But I enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed college so much that I managed to stretch it out for 16 years. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and THANKFREAKINGODI’MDONE!

In other news, because I can’t seem to follow directions and do things in order, I’ve finally started the process to petition for my AAS in Fashion Design, and I’ve joined the Society for the Preservation of Run-On Sentences(tm).

The world is full of straw hats. They are almost never the size and shape you’d like them to be. (That’s a known effect of the Law of Universal Irony, along with how the thread already in the needle is never a color that will work for your current purposes.) Fortunately, reblocking a straw hat is pretty gosh darned simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you need a knicker, or some other relatively non-denominational short, slightly poofy pantlet with a cuff at the bottom, and you don’t have time to make it from scratch. (Perhaps, for example, you have a cast of 37, and 9 or 11 of them are kids in Fagin’s gang and most of them are too short for proper long pants… Hey, it can happen!) Here’s the cheater’s method: Read the rest of this entry »

File this one under “possibly useful to some one, at some time, somehow”: this is a series of pictures of corsets I’ve made over the last several years. Each one shows me standing in profile, next to my dress dummy. This makes the changes in my shape imposed by each corset fairly obvious, and the pictures all together give you a pretty good idea what different types of boning and styles of corset can do for a girl. Read the rest of this entry »

I did fittings for kids in Oliver! last night. I survived, and no one cried (not even me.) Oh, right, there are 17 children in the cast. And they each play at least two parts, which require costume changes. I’m not good with kids, for much the same reason that I have no future in particle physics: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s pretty again! Yay! I like pretty…..

My apologies to anyone who was trying to read anything while I was bouncing through themes. That was probably ugly.

I just upgraded my wordpress install, and reverted to the most standard of standard themes. I’m hoping this will fix the issues people have mentioned about browser problems, etc. Please expect to see a new theme in the next couple of days – I miss my tagcloud and image frames already!