Wool

I love wool! Wonderful to sew in and wonderful to look at. Here is part two on fabrics used in the 1940’s. The third and last one will be all about the silks. I must say that I think the notes sometimes are a hoot. Why does they say that wool velour is the no 1 for the French woman?

Cotton, linen and man-made fabrics

An important aspect when making clothes from a bygone era is the choosing the right fabric. It is perhaps not the first thing one thinks about, but how a fabric drapes plays an important part in how a garment looks. Just imagine a dress made of voile and then think of the same cut in velvet. This post is a list of fabric from the 1940’s. To not make it too long, there will be two additional posts that will cover wool and silk. I have translated this list from Swedish and though I hope not, there may be inaccuracies. If you spot one, please tell me! Some of the fabrics mentioned are stuff I have never heard of before, which makes it a bit tricky to translate. Sometimes I have felt to add to the original text; in that case I do so with bold letters.

Reprinted patterns

I have no inspiration at all right now, due to a really bad cold. My whole head feels like it been stuffed with cotton and I swear your IQ drops when it feels like that. So I take the easy way out and make a post that I almost finished awhile ago on reprinted patterns. Here is a little list on where you can buy some. I’m sure there are more of them out there, so if you think I have missed any, please tell me.

There are a lot of vintage patterns out there, but my problem with those is that I have a hard time finding them in my size. I am, what in the 1940’s was called, junoesque, which I think is a much lovelier thing to say than plain plus sized.

I read blogs

I read Susan´s Diary-Vintage Style Meets Heavy Music. It’s a small blog, but very cute and I really think it ought to interest more people. The focus is on the 40’s and 50’s and there are a lot of vintage photos. My favourite posts is the one where a number of Gil Elvgren's pin-ups are compared to the photos of the real models.

1940's manicure

I finally managed to make a proper half-moon manicure! We went to a big birthday bash yesterday and as I had the whole day off I spent some time on my nails. Previously I have tried ordinary tape to mask the half-moon and found that way too difficult. The main problems were the fact that it sticks too well, which makes it hard to handle and at the same time it's so stiff that it's difficult to smooth it down properly on the nail. Yesterday I tried surgical tape and it was so much easier!

I read blogs

I read Casey’s Elegant Musings . Odds are that you do as well, but if not, then you have something nice to check out. I have been following her for years, since the time she made historical clothes at LiveJournal and I have always been impressed by her ability to do beauty whatever she do, seemingly without effort. She is beautiful as well and very kind and helpful. There are always something interesting to read in her blog, among other things she do lovely tutorials, they are very informative and easy to follow. It was almost impossible for me to pick a favourite post, but as I know many struggles with pin-curls, here are a post about that. . Especially helpful if you have thick hair as pin-curls seem to behave very differently depending on your hair quality.

If anyone wonders which blog a spotlight then I can tell you that I spin my bloglist through a random generator and use that order. I will need to re-do that now and then as I add new blogs. I’ll try to do one every week, so sooner or later I should go through them all.

The Perfumed Court

After writing my last post I set out to see which perfumes I could find. Years ago a friend recommended The Perfumed Court and though I had forgotten about it I found it again when I searched for perfumes. To quote them, they:

We specialize in offering perfume samples and perfume decants of a superlative array of fragrances. What we do is spray, pour, or use sterile pipettes to take perfume from its original large bottle and repackage it in a smaller bottle (we only use brand new sterile glass bottles) so that the consumer can try as many fragrances as they desire before buying a full bottle.