Summer Sew Along week 2

Reminder: Today is the last day to get your entries in for last week’s garden party dress and the accessory pattern will be emailed tomorrow.  Scroll to the bottom of this post for the links!

This week is an Edwardian “Ramble” Costume!

Are you up for a challenge?  Do you love making pleats and sewing on tiny buttons?  This is the outfit for you! 🙂  If your pleat skills are a little rusty, check out the guide below!

Because this week’s outfit is challenging, I’ll tell you in advance the associated accessory pattern for this will be the boots you see on Nisha, which will work for that size foot only.  If you’re shrinking the patterns and sewing along with a 13”-14” doll, these are similar to the boots from the French Fashion Doll series and that size pattern is here.  Pleats don’t always enlarge-reduce correctly, so you might need to modify them a bit.

Get the pattern here today only

Get a guide to pleats here (permanently posted)

If you want more info about the sew-along in general, please check last week’s post.

 

The Edwardian Ramble:

Today lots of people go hiking and camping, but if you think about it, we had to get a bit removed from nature for that to be considered “novel” and fun again.  When you live in a rural area, and maybe farm for your living, you might not consider it fun to walk a few miles around the countryside on a weekend.  You might also want to give your draft animals a rest, which means even a drive would be out of the question.

On the other hand, if you lived in a city, as more of the population were doing at this time, it was fun to get away from the crowds and smell fresh air.  Train travel made it possible for the middle-class, and for the very wealthy, the novelty of a “motor car” meant you could get to even more places.

What did girls wear to ramble?  Well for adults, dresses or “costumes” with a blouse and skirt or matching jackets and skirts were both options.  Patterns for these weren’t specifically labeled as such that I’ve been able to find,  but I’m sure, just like today, some people wore inappropriate clothing/shoes and regretted it later, much like modern would-be “hikers” who drive up a Colorado mountain in July in shorts and flip flops and wander around shivering for a few minutes before running back to their cars because it’s SNOWING.

This pattern is based on a Bleuette “Costume de Chasse” from 1907.  My thought was that if it was deemed suitable to wander in the woods for a hunt, it would have been equally suitable for something kids would have found more fun, like wandering around on a hillside gathering wild flowers (yes, they did that too, in great numbers unfortnately).  The Victorians did not understand conservation of natural resources the way we do today, and seemed to think that all of nature was at their disposal.  Accordingly, they stuffed their houses with astonishing quantities of it, from dried wildflowers to taxidermied birds to enormous collections of chloroformed butterflies.  If it doesn’t make you sad, it would look period-correct to accessorize this with a little net or jar and some little plastic/clay bugs or printouts of butterflies.  A little basket of silk/dried flowers would work too.

If you missed it, Last week’s pattern is now available here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/602390860/edwardian-garden-party-sewing-pattern?ref=shop_home_active_1

To participate in the sew-along:

• Step 1: post pic of what you made each week here:  https://www.flickr.com/groups/2825314@N20/
• Step 2: enter your email and the link to your pic here by next Thursday: https://goo.gl/forms/iA85Pu6rpSlCMxW62
• Step 3:  Receive your accessory pattern by email next Friday.