Your Wardrobe Unlock'd

This month:

Trisha asks about creating a dress form for a French fashion doll and patterns for it. Shawn inquires about the historically correct way to piece an 1880 chemise Cathy explains about the DPP Corsets competition and FR

 

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.

Now that we have had an introduction into the fashion of the Natural Form, it's time to proceed with choosing the details of your outfit. There are many options depending on the year that's taken your fancy.

I will start by focussing on the particulars of fashion by year, and covering the three types of dress: Day dress, Evening dress and Ball dress.

The period 1770-1789 was a time of transition in Europe and North America. It is this period that historians have long considered the dawn of the Modern Age. 

Fashion often acts as a visual guide and barometer of social values and conditions, and within such a climate of change during the 1770s and 1780s, it was impossible that fashion would not be influenced.

"The ideal at present is the greatest possible flatness and straightness: a woman is a pencil covered with raiment" ~ October 23, 1875, Harper's Bazar.  

We shall be wandering into that very peculiar era of fashion in the Victorian Era, known as the Natural Form  with its Cuirass Bodice.

Since fashion is always intertwined with economics and war, I will take a summarized look at the socio-economic climate that occurred during this era.

Thank you very much for telling us what periods you'd like to include in the big vote! We had over forty separate pitches in the end, covering a very wide variety of periods indeed. Many pitches overlapped, giving Marion and I cause for heated debate over what the final options should be.

There was no right way to split them up, and we may not have been able to include your exact period as a narrowly defined focus. But we trust that, in narrowing it down to five Victorian choices and thirteen non-Victorian, your favourite will be covered...

Voting is now closed!

When you voted for the winners of 2009's Single Pattern Project competition, we slipped in some questions about what you thought of the Project, whether you'd like us to run another one and how you'd like us to change it next year. Here are the results of that survey, along with instructions on how YOU can get the ball rolling, this month, choosing the subject of next year's Project...

Right back at the genesis of YWU I wrote an article about what I called "Holy Grails".

I'm willing to bet that most of us reading this have such projects in mind. There's a book on your shelf that naturally falls open at a certain photograph; there's a bookmark in your web browser. But we never get around to trying - it's too impractical, too expensive, too difficult, just too much all around.

This year I've actually done one of these huge projects, when I recreated a vastly decorated Edwardian Worth gown (follow this link for a FREE slideshow of museum images), and I've got so much out of it that I'm going to use this article to pull you a little bit closer to tackling your own Grail. I'm going to tell you why it's worth trying such intimidating projects, and then show you how.

Who can enter? What can I enter? What are the prizes? When's the closing date?

Here's everything you need to know to take part in our unique YWU Double Period Project and competition! And you are going to take part this year, aren't you?

You've got a full year from now until our deadline in February 2011, so there's no excuse not to get going and try for one of our fabulous prizes!