Your Wardrobe Unlock'd

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 across the history of clothing, from the heavily trimmed petticoat breeches of the seventeenth century to the tri-coloured cockades of Revolutionary France. The Victorians were obsessed when it came to ribbons, covering some 19th century gowns with a profusion of bows and rosettes.

Gina Barrett shows you how to recreate some of these effective details, starting with the simple bows we're familiar with and working through to more complex decorations.

‘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’ .

Jema extends Vicky Clarke's look at early period trims and Gina Barrett's discussion of Victorian embellishments by looking into trims of the 18th century.

It always seems such a shame, when having spent days, weeks, months (sometimes even years) sewing a fabulous gown, that the only option for trimming is either pretty but chunky upholstery trims or rather unsuitable modern "narrow wares".

The further back in time that you go, the more anachronistic modern trims appear. The supremely fine silk and cotton used to weave them has been replaced by chunky manmade fibres woven by machine.

Those that are available in silk are prohibitively expensive - that is, of course, if you can find anything even slightly appropriate in the right colours... 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!

My passion for Ostrich plumes started when I saw the opening credits of the 1997 movie Wings of the Dove.

Where do such plumes come from?

How do milliners fabricate them and can I create such confections?

These are all questions I asked myself then, and they led me on a course of study and experimentation. In this article I will share some of what I have learned along the way.

or My hat looks like it has a dead fish on top because the bow just lies there! How can I fix that?

One of the most often used decorative elements on late Victorian and Edwardian hats were bows and ribbon loops.

To a non-milliner, trying to recreate some of these fantastic hats may seem a daunting task. Here are some tricks that simplify things.

By now you probably have a good idea of what you'll be creating for your Single Pattern Project entry, be it historically correct or with an ultra-modern twist. Now it's time to start thinking about the details: the trimmings and embellishments that will complete your vision.

Our project gown uses quite simple trimming to great effect. This use of trimming, simple or elaborate, is very typical of the period - the Victorians loved their trimmings! They used it everywhere - furnishings, clothing, accessories, even carriages. If it could be trimmed, in all likelihood it would be trimmed.