Throwback Thursday: Lucia

Here is picture of my great grandmother Lucy, (her full name was Lucia, a common name in Sicily), taken around 1904-1906. Grandma Lucy had emigrated to the US from Sicily around 1900, in the great wave of Sicilians leaving poverty and lack of opportunity to come to America.

I met her once when I was about nine; she was learning then how to write in English well enough so she could finally take her US Citizenship test. She had been too busy raising my grandmother and her six other children to take it when she was younger.

I love her sensible shoes.

Dress from 1957

My mother wore dresses like this, before I was around, of course. I used to peek in her closet when I was a kid and imagine wearing those big skirted floral pieces of fifties froth, with white gloves and those pointy toed pumps.

The Black dress for cocktails in the city, the flowered one for lunches at the country club.

I especially like the thought of going to my office in the black version. I'm the editor of Vogue, and i have the cool Miranda Priestly glasses, (the better to give cold condescending looks).

Where would you wear this lovely dress? Would you choose wool jersey, or silk shantung? Linen or pique? Wool crepe, or faille? Whatever your fantasy, if you are a size 16 (fifties sizing), bust 36 inches, find it here.

Ladies' and Misses' Elegant Slacks

Every year my wonderful brother gives me a box of vintage patterns for Christmas- how well he knows me!
McCall 6794 is from this year's batch.

Vintage patterns have some nice details that are well worth stealing and adapting to modern patterns. For example, the pocket facings, above. This solution allows the sewist to use a lightweight fabric for the inside pocket, but with a facing of the pant fabric so the pocket fabric is not visible. Very nice. The pants have a side zipper inside the pocket treatment that I might steal borrow for a skirt.
There is one page of somewhat terse instructions that include recommendations for a hand-worked buttonhole.(Because everyone knows how to sew). They don't mention suggested fabrics because everyone knows what pants are made of.
I love old patterns and cookbooks not just for the information they put in, but for what they leave out.
Old cookbooks assume we all know how to cook, so their recipes are "reminders" of how certain dishes are made. Similarly, vintage patterns sometimes don't mention fabric types,  seam finishes, or other techniques, because they assume that all sewists will just know to do them.
  A pants pattern from 1947 also tells us that women were wearing pants for casual occasions. I'm assuming this is "casual" because the background of the illustration is somewhat "countrified". Nowadays we'd wear jeans. Fun fact: designer jeans specifically for women were introduced in the 1960's by Andre Courreges (who also invented the miniskirt, along with Mary Quant.)

P.S. Wondering what the difference is between a Ladies' and Misses' sizes. The pattern does not elaborate. Everyone must have just "known" this as well.

Satin and Lace for a Princess

Lace and Satin Dress For Throwback Thursday

 I made this pretty dress for Ms. Hunting Creek's First Communion. She picked out the pattern, which has the V shaped princess-approved bodice, a full swishy skirt and little lace wing sleeves. The bodice is lace, underlined with the satin. Have you ever sewn with polyester satin? It is so slippery and slide-y and uncooperative! I had to resort to hand basting the satin to the lace for the bodice to underline it, because it just would not stay put. Once the bodice was done, then I had to hand baste the gathered skirt to the bodice and make the gathers even. I should have also underlined the skirt because I can see my hand hem in the picture,but I was working with a deadline here. Also, no one would notice but me, so the motto here was get the dress to the church on time. I had to send my husband away with his mom and the kids so I could focus on completing the hem. My mother in law (not a sewist) was driving me crazy by hovering and saying, "you'll never get this done in time! Why didn't you start earlier?Why didn't you buy a dress?"  If only she knew just how many times I had finished something just before curtain time, so to speak.

Of course, I did get it done in time - an hour to spare! almost cheating! Ms. Hunting Creek loved it so much she wore it several more times: Halloween, a school play, and of course, for Princess Dress up.

Blast from the Past

Voted Most Liberated Woman of MVHS

  Why it is certainly of the utmost interest to my Gentle Readers that I was voted the Most Liberated Woman of my High School Senior Class, I'd like to point out that the most interesting thing about this picture is not that smokin' yellow sweater vest (love you, 70's!) nor the huge collar of the petroleum-based shirt, but the pants, which I made myself. I made perfectly fitting pants at age 17! I attribute this precocity to the fact that I did not know at the time that pants were difficult to make. They are Royal Blue twill, have a fly zipper, patch pockets front and back, and they matched the shirt perfectly. (Full Disclosure:the shirt is my sister's. We had a Cold War of stealing each other's clothes that was only matched in ferocity by the US and USSR. It matched the pants perfectly! What else could I do?)