Historical day at Edsberg castle

Once again we stepped back in to the old rooms of the mansion, or castle is the real term to use really. It is as so many other old buildings like it, placed down by a little cove so the scenery is quite lovely. I realised I hadn’t shown pictures of the house itself or the surroundings so here goes before we venture in to this specific days holdings. It was built in the 1750-60's to a man in the Swedish government.

Picture from 1906 I think, of the housemaids in front of the house.

So, to what we did this time. We were there to just make the old place a little more vivid, which was pretty much it. We had a little dressing show where I helped Tove put on her clothes in front of curious onlookers and I fixed her hair and let her have the great honour of wearing my newly made cap for the first time ever since it was finished earlier this summer. It is one of those peculiar little wired thingies and I just adore how it turned out with her hair!

She wore my dressing gown I made a few years back in a rush for a trip, before we started to put her clothes on. Some parts of them are mine to, like the pocket hoops. The dress however is made by another lovely seamstress. The funny thing is that I have things sewn in the same exact fabric, it would have been quite fun to match my jacket to her dress.  

But instead I ended up wearing my lazy-outfit, the quilted getup with a printed cotton, so called kattun, petticoat over. I also had a really bad hair day, so my hair just went simply up, no pretty rolls, no nothing, just a cap on. Sadly I got no pictures of another lady that borrowed some other clothes from my historical wardrobe which would have been nice to show, but I can show the clothes, because I had the same getup last summer, so here it is, and a more detailed view of the jacket:

But now the picture show from this day:

(I know the bedroom interior is totally wrong… but we are trying to make the best of it and hopefully it will change in the future.)

My hair after the pouff was taken out, volume much!

Till next time, toodeloo!

1780's silk gown

Well hello, I am really bad at updating this blog, but I am working in just as slow a pace in real life as well, especially now when summer is over. But I am trying to find the time for some sewing.

The latest produced is a 1780’s robe a l’Anglaise, although it is still actually not finished since I have planned for it to be just as decorated as the matching petticoat I did last year for another project that is slowly emerging. I totally fell in love with the blue coloured silk and I couldn’t stop seeing that thunder-blue Anglaise in front of me. I have always wanted a robe a l’Anglaise completely with decoration and separate petticoat all in the same fabric and this was it, so I saved up a bit more money and fortunately the fabric was still there in the store after the few months of waiting, so I finally got it! 

I am not actually a very blue person, I try to wear and sew as little as possible in that colour since I think it is mostly a quite boring and very common colour, but this shade of silk was just so beautiful, too beautiful to pass out on.

I have always had a bit of trouble with the construction of Anglaises, my body isn’t really made for that design since I have a long middle back with a sharp curve to it, but my hips and waist on the sides of the back are really high(it almost look like my waist goes right under the bust when I wear high waist clothing) and then at the front sides my waist drops again so it is hard to get a nice and smooth waistline and no wrinkles at the sides of the bodice. To make it even worse I have a really bad posture(not too visible in the pictures though which is good). Apart from that a new pair of stays with a higher back to help with the later would probably help a lot. I really need to do those stays soon…

Anyways, I am not totally satisfied but I think I will be more so after decorating it so that a few fixing extra seams will be covered up and it will be less visible that it was really tricky to make it mould to my body and still look like it should as an Anglaise.

I decided to wear it even though it wasn’t technically finished yet to a little get-together in a beautiful 18^th century house, and here is some pictures!