I’m a massive fan of sewing gadgets — things you never knew you needed until you get them into your craft room. Miniature darners? Hem markers? Loop turners? Yes, yes and yes. The only problem is that the UK market seems to lag a bit behind in gratuitous gadgets, probably because everything is so expensive here the Brits can’t afford to be as gung-ho about New Shiny Things as Americans.

But now I’ve discovered Sew-Quick, importer of foreign sewing shinies to the UK! In the finest tradition of UK online shops, Sew-Quick is practically undetectable by Google search. I only stumbled across it while looking for a Perfect Pleater (curse you, Wearing History!). My jaw slowly lowered as I clicked through their product list. Snapsetters! PerfectFuse, stay tape, Steam-a-Seam! Mini vacuums for cleaning your machine! Individual issues of Threads! And a panoply of the delightful little gadgets collectively known as notions.

Fiskars 12-in-1 sewing tool, for when you need to Macgyver that hem

Sew-Quick are located in Scotland and emphasize their customer service and shipping speed — I’ll be interested to see how they stack up against other domestic sewing supply businesses, some of which take several days to dispatch and/or backorder items for weeks without telling you. Warning: Do not compare Sew-Quick’s prices with what Americans are paying.

Another place to waste an hour and £50 is Shibori Dragon, a US online shop that specializes in Japanese sewing and tailoring supplies. Superfine pins (they make ordinary pins feel like nails) and the satisfyingly precise Chakoner marker are available, as are Omnigrip rulers and, oh dear, a whole bunch of Japanese fabrics, threads, quilting kits, stencils and more.

Just won the lottery or looking for somewhere to spend the kids’ inheritance? The Thimble Society sells exquisite antique thimbles, pincushions, needle cases, sewing sets and more. They would probably recoil in horror if you announced you planned to actually use them.

Rabbit pincushion, only £480

If you really want to lose yourself to lust, try Googling “sewing chatelaines”. A chatelaine was an early, feminine version of the Swiss army knife — a metal clasp that attached to a woman’s belt and from which she could hang small, useful items such as thimble cases, scissors, needle and thread holders, bodkins, memorandum books, spectacle cases etc. They started in the middle ages as utilitarian objects, but quickly became decorative. Some could be stunning, like these 18th and 19th-century chatelaines from the V&A:

Complete antique chatelaines sell on eBay for anything up to £1200. You can assemble your own modern-day chatelaine for slightly less from LACIS, Treasured Finds, Buckaroo Bobbins or Simply Scissors.

Where do you go for your favorite shinies?

I may have been a little unfair to Charlotte Gray in an earlier post. It’s a visually beautiful film with some moving moments and talented performances. Plus I could watch Cate Blanchett for hours. But it does have significant flaws, mostly involving the usual Hollywood tinkering with the novel and the kind of niggling implausibilities that do more to sabotage my suspension of disbelief than gaping, obvious plot holes. For instance, having recruited, trained and deployed a valuable foreign agent, would SOE actually be that relaxed about letting her waft off to a cushy admin job after just one mission? Why does Charlotte’s lipstick never smudge, even after vigorous pashing? Why are the French speaking English but the Germans speaking German? And is any man, let alone two in a row, really dumb enough to believe that women in the midst of armed crises are likely to succumb to sudden transports of lust?

Since this is Frockporn Friday, however, the most pressing question is the one involving costumes. If Charlotte was parachuted into France with only the clothes she stood up in, where did she get the exquisitely tailored series of outfits she wears throughout the film?

But Charlotte has austerity-proof superpowers. Anything she puts on is crisp, new, perfectly fitted and instantly fantastic. Whether she’s hobnobbing with posh spies and handsome airmen in London…

…charging around in khakis…

…or sashaying out to a rendezvous with a French contact…

…she always looks stunning. She even looks stunning in 1945, when the war had ended but clothing rationing was still in force and austerity was at its most austere. The hat! The HAT!!

There are some wonderful color combinations in this film. Here we have sort of burgundy and… what would you call this shade of blue? Anyway, it’s nice.

But this has got to be my favorite outfit: bottle-green suit and rust red blouse and beret.

The cut of this skirt is beautiful… a little too beautiful. Just look at those double pleats. Don’t you know there’s a war on?

Here’s the blouse I love.

I’m tempted to have a stab at altering good old Simplicity 4817 to clone this blouse outright, because it’s so simple even I could manage it. Basic tie-collar blouse with bodice gathered to yoke, four waist darts, self-fabric buttons, pleats at the sleeve cap so there’s no setting in to worry about… easy-peasy.

It’s interesting to watch period period films and modern period films side by side to observe how different costumiers interpret an era’s styles to suit the sensibilities of their time. Women’s hair and makeup in Charlotte Gray, for instance, is relatively natural compared with the impossibly “done” look favored in films from the 1940s. The wardrobe, by contrast, is very slick — there’s nary a pinny or rayon floral print in sight. Perhaps the costumiers felt that audiences would associate flowery dresses and tightly curled crops with old ladies — ironically, the very people who lived through the war for real. I guess that’s fashion lapping itself. Nevertheless, Charlotte Gray‘s “modern vintage” is a nice source of ideas for those who enjoy a 1940s look but aren’t too hung up on authenticity.

Suggestions for further Frockporn Friday films most gladly welcomed!

If I were a millionaire and weren’t on the ration, I would be all over these. As it is, I’ll have to content myself with ruining your budget.

I’m pretty sure UK clothing manufacturers were prohibited from using lace, so the trimming on the bodice is a little surprising. As one commenter pointed out, it could easily have been added by the wearer — lace was unrationed and still available to buy.

What’s also interesting is that, because the fabric isn’t wide enough to allow the slip’s full length to be cut on the bias, the hem has been pieced, which looks pretty startling in a commercially manufactured garment:

And here’s a beautifully cut tweed utility suit by probably-Charles Creed:

The lines are extremely simple, but the designer’s added a bias inset at center back for interest:

It was a stroke of genius getting high-end designers on board for the Utility scheme. As I have found out to my cost, it takes much more skill to make a very simple garment look good than something with a lot of frou-frou. The cut of many utility suits is superb, which goes a long way to make up for their relative severity.

If you don’t live handy to the V&A (or even if you do), I suggest you check out their Fashion in Detail books, which go into considerable detail about these and other garments held at the museum, along with glimpses inside at the garments’ construction. Drool!

Three centuries of frock porn from the V&A trip over at my Flickr set!

Tagged: 1940s, austerity, history, pr0n, underwear, utility ]]> http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/02/06/utility-fashion-at-the-va/feed/ 7 Susannah Utility slip Utility slip, bodice detail Pieced hem http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/10/the-rocket-age-dress-simplicity-3580/ http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/10/the-rocket-age-dress-simplicity-3580/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:05:33 +0000 Susannah http://cargocultcraft.com/?p=895 ]]> Fabric is a drug. I discovered this the first time I saw Michael Miller’s Painted Rockets.

Five minutes after first laying eyes on this print I knew I had to have it or live the rest of my hollow, blighted life haunted by irreparable regret. I also knew exactly what I would make with it. It was as though the heavens opened and the Craft Gods spoke: Let There Be a Rocket Age Dress.

Simplicity 3580 is a classic Mad Men-era shirtwaist dress. I bought the pattern at The Vintage Peddler.

And here is the finished dress. I can never get over the wonder of looking at (or wearing) something I made that was only a picture in my mind a few days before.

Store-bought clothes are so miserably skimpy these days that a skirt this full feels totally luxurious. I would love to see how this looks with a crinoline, but I’m not sure I have the guts to actually wear one.

I feel like a glamorous teacher in it (Miss Swetnick?), or the genteelly alcoholic mom in a Raymond Carver story.

This dress went together without many tears, except for the sleeves. (See below.) I wish I’d started sewing on quilter’s cotton instead of on linen and wool, because it is so well-behaved and forgiving to work with. It holds folds extremely well. And creases. Working the wrinkles out of an acre of cotton every time I wash this dress eats up nearly an hour of my life. I hate ironing so I rarely bother to do it properly. This is only one of many, many reasons I would make a lousy ’60s housewife [mops spilled sherry off laptop with sleeve].

Lessons Learned:

• Choose your interfacing with care. I guess it’s one of those things that only comes with experience, but I keep choosing interfacing with the wrong hand or weight for my projects. In this case, I was in a hurry to finish the dress so I used some interfacing from my stash, which turned out to be too crisp and made the collar and bodice front a little stiff.
• Let go of hem paranoia. I hand-finished the hem to this skirt. I put in way too many stitches (as in every 1/16″), often picking up more than a single thread of the skirt fabric, and pulled my stitches too taut, all in the fear that the hem wouldn’t be sturdy enough. This resulted in hem show-through on the right side of the skirt.
• Don’t trust the pattern blindly. I had all sorts of trouble with the set-in sleeves, partly because the pattern wasn’t particularly well drafted, partly because too much ease was allowed for a cotton fabric and partly because of my own ineptitude. Subsequent research suggests that many commercial patterns have badly drafted sleeves and inaccurate instructions (too-large seam allowances, for instance) requiring you, the seamstress, to redraft the sleeve and set it in according to your own lights if you don’t want puckers and drag lines. If anyone else has figured out a fix for this problem in similar patterns, I’d love to hear it.
• Foundation garments allow for glove-tight fitting. I fitted this pattern to my figure without foundation garments, which resulted in a more relaxed fit because my measurements can fluctuate slightly. For the true Mad Men fitted-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life look, I would have had to commit to period foundation garments and wear them every time I wore the dress.

Still, I like this dress — just putting it on creates a sense of occasion. Cocktails in the bomb shelter at five!

I spent a grand total of about 2 hours this evening whipping it up into another dirndl. This time I only had to sew one seam because I just used the whole length of the fabric as one big panel and stitched that up the back. And, of course, because it’s a border print, I didn’t have to hem. Sadly, I didn’t splash out on quite as much fabric as for the mermaid dirndl, so it’s a bit less full. Also, the gathers and waistband went together with more difficulty than the last one (I never did read any instructions for Fuse & Fold… I should work on that) so even though it looks just as presentable from the outside, I know it’s not perfect and therefore love it slightly less. (This is part of the reason why I’m terrified of having children.)

I came to love the mermaid skirt in the less than 24 hours between deciding on impulse to give it to my friend Gaia and actually parting with it, so it was a bit of a wrench to see her put it on and float away into the night. But she’s had a rough time at work lately and needs a little stardust sprinkled into her life. This skirt will do perfectly for me. I can’t wait to bring my cowboys into Parliament.

I love how easy it is to be ladylike in vintage designs. I don’t love how often ladylike = uncomfortable when it comes to wearing 20th-century clothes in the British climate. Realistically, I’m going to freeze my ‘tocks off in this flimsy little skirt. How did our mothers survive in all that cotton and rayon? Britain cast off a huge amount of baggage when it shed its petticoats and started following sinful American fashion, but sometimes, when I’m huddling in an exposed bus shelter for half an hour on end, I think it may have gone too far the other way. In my subterranean room with the blow heater on last night, I read this passage in Gwen Raverat’s charming Period Piece with envy:

This is what a young lady wore, with whom I shared a room one night — beginning at the bottom, or scratch:

1. Thick, long-legged, long-sleeved woollen combinations [like a modern union suit]

2. Over them, white cotton combinations, with plenty of buttons and frills.

3. Very serious, bony, grey stays [corset], with suspenders [garters].

4. Black woollen stockings.

5. White cotton drawers, with buttons and frills.

6. White cotton ‘petticoat-bodice’, with embroidery, buttons and frills.

7. Rather short, white flannel, petticoat.

8 Long alpaca [!] petticoat, with a flounce round the bottom.

9. Pink flannel blouse.

10. High, starched white collar, fastened on with stufs.

11. Navy-blue tie.

12. Blue skirt, touching the ground, and fastened tightly to the blouse with a safety-pin behind.

13. Leather belt, very tight.

14. High button boots.

I watched her under my eyelashes as I lay in bed. She would have been horrified if she had known that I was awake.

Horrified, probably… but warm.

London is very sartorially samey for a world-class city, and sewing is a niche hobby inspiring awe and wonder in this country, so fabric pickings are fairly scant, unadventurous and pricey compared with those in America. Ah, America. The magical land where everything is for sale, usually at half price. I got 2.5 yards of this amazing cotton print for the comparatively refreshing price of £20 including international delivery at Sew Mama Sew:

It has squid!

The skirt went together like a dream. Not having to mess around with a pattern was a nice change. I didn’t even cry once, although I did come close — when I discovered the hard way, after breaking two needles and spending half an hour picking out a thread jam with tweezers, that Singer sewing machines really are designed to work only with Singer needles. Way to build brand loyalty, guys!

I made a waistband with the aid of Vilene Fuse and Fold (a boon to the lazy perfectionist) and a lot of guesswork about size. Then I just ripped the remaining fabric into three 28″ lengths and stitched them together selvage to selvage, meaning I didn’t even have to worry about finishing the seams. I ran two rows of gathering stitches along the top, dropped in a zipper at the back, gathered the fabric to fit the waistband, turned and topstitched and slapped on a button at the back. After a few false starts with my machine’s blindhem stitch, I was done by 9 o’clock.

I guess this fabric is quilter’s cotton, but I’m already casting around for other clothes I can make with it. It is the easiest fabric I’ve ever sewn with. It’s on grain, it’s crisp and grabby enough to make pins almost unnecessary, it gathers beautifully and it holds a crease perfectly. Why I started my latest sewing jag with a Regency corset instead of this project I don’t know.

Here is the finished skirt. I need a wider belt, but you get the idea. It’s fun yet womanly. I find this deeply satisfying in a world where most women’s clothing looks like it’s made for either National Trust grannies or child prostitutes.

Enchantment Under the Sea!