Your Wardrobe Unlock'd

Frog fasteners give a military edge to any Steampunk style. Here's an easy way to achieve the look without getting all tangled up.

Izabela gives patterns and details for creating the skirt, apron skirt and a detachable train with ruffled balayeuse for a wedding gown.

Cathy introduces this exciting and underused technique, and demonstrates how to make a peacock feather from the famous dress.

Gina Barrett shares with us the easy method for making yards and yards of tassel and pom-pom trim for your Victorian gowns.

The art and science of hand sewn buttonholes, looking close-up at museum examples and then making our own in four simple stages.

Gina Barrett shows us how to make Deaths' Head buttons, one type of the many different type of  passementerie buttons. 

How to create stand-alone miniature works of textile art with cord, thread and a few pins.

No matter how good a garment is, it can always be improved by adding some lace. Izabela looks at Punto in Aria and bobbin lace.

Izabela walks us step by step through the creation of an 1785 riding habit, including gold embroidered buttons.

Lynn finds out whether several tools and machines are worth the money, or whether they just make a simple job more complicated. 

Monochromatic Embroidery is an umbrella term used to describe a type of embellishment popular during the 16th Century.

Soutache is a fantastic looking Victorian trim. Even better, it offers a huge visual impact with relatively little work attached to it!

Christina translates some gorgeous but cryptic Victorian instructions into modern-style knitting and crochet diagrams, and then tries them out.

Five simple techniques can make a wide range of jewelry to provide the finishing touch to your Tudor or Renaissance outfit.

Hecklinger's Ladies Garments, published in 1886, includes wonderful engravings of fashionable trimmings. We add the instructions!

Knitted, embroidered, striped and painted: the Natural Form era had a diversity of stocking options for ladies.  

Far beyond plain black or white, catalogs of the era carried fancy knitted stockings in gold, green and bright cardinal red zig zags, striped stockings in cardinal red, garnet, tan, grey and blue and embroidered cotton stockings in red, gold, black and white.

So get ready to shop for the perfect stockings, thread your embroidery needle or grab your knitting needles! We're diving into the realm of stockings and socks with fashion reports, catalogs from 1882, stocking embroidery diagrams and  lots of knitting patterns for socks and stockings for all ages.

Ribbon embellishments are a recurring feature throughout history. Gina shows you how to recreate some of these effective details.

‘Flowermaking is an art rather than a craft.’

Many of the techniques for making artifical flowers are simple. The effect, with some effort and practice, can be wonderful. They can either mimic real flowers or merely suggest them, conveying what G.I. Somerville calls ‘the form and feeling of a flower’ .

The further back in time that you go, the more anachronistic modern trims appear... So what's a girl to do? Make her own, of course!

Feathers have been used on hats for centuries not just for their intrinsic beauty, but when you add feathers to a hat they retain a flow and bounce that makes them look almost alive.

In this article I'm going to cover several things that you can do to turn feathers into hat ornaments: burning, dyeing, stripping, shaping and clipping. These can result in some really eye-popping effects, from multi-coloured plumes to reconstructing the whole wings that Edwardian women so loved!