Stays. The first item you need for 18th Century costuming, and cruelly, the most complicated and time-consuming thing to make.
After much procrastination, using the size chart on the pattern envelope as a guide, I made a cereal box mock-up before cutting my fabric.
Many people who have made stays from this pattern have found it to be short-waisted. I have a long torso, so I added half an inch to the length of all the pattern pieces. The cereal box mock-up did not reflect the fit I later got with my fabric. While the length was fine, I ended up with stays that had a full 2 inches of ease at my waist and an extra inch and a half at my bust.
There are many ways you can have a long torso. Length from shoulder to bust longer than average? Or your hip-to-crotch measurement? Long rib cage? I think I have a long rib cage, but I’m not sure. More importantly, there is a really small distance between where my ribs end and my hips begin, which means where the tabs break became a bigger issue than the total length of the stays.
Advice: If you plan to make stays from either of the American Duchess Simplicity patterns, watch the entire AD stays video before you get started. I had the tab open on my browser with the video and even started watching it, but didn’t get very far. I came back to it after I started having issues while making my stays. The video answered most of my questions, but I had already made a couple of mistakes I couldn’t undo.
A couple of years ago, I started feeling called to adopt Surrender and Acceptance as my themes for the season I was in. My natural tendency is to be super controlling and neurotic, so those ideas were appealing on a conceptual level, but they didn’t feel easy to lean into.
Yesterday was The Longest Day. It happens once a year when we come back from our trip to Tobago. We fly in to JFK, then drive back up to Albany, and no matter how wonderful the weather is or how smooth the drive, it seems to take forever.
This time, everything went nearly as well as it could have. We made it through the whole process and home sooner than we’d hoped, on a beautifully clear sunny day.
At a rest stop on the drive home, I ended up stuck in a bathroom stall with a two-year-old who was terrified of the toilet, and discovered too late I was in a stall with no toilet paper.
My first love is historical fiction, but I’ve read a fair number of futuristic books as well. In the past year I’ve read at least five titles that take place in the future. What stuck out to me in all this reading was that A. I need to find me some Utopian Futuristic lit. and B. Dystopian Futuristic Lit and Post-Apocolyptic Lit isn’t fun to read anymore. Don’t remember seeing any post-apocolyptic titles here? I felt so mixed after reading them that I opted not to write a post about it.
Women’s suffrage has been on my mind lately with the hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, as well as the recent ratification of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), in the 38th state in January.
I wanted to introduce these ideas to my children and let them know that the struggle for equality that some would say goes back to the Garden of Eden is still actively going on in spite of the fact that some women got the vote 100 years ago.
