Robes de Coeur
  • Blog
  • Quilting
  • Clothing
    • Menswear
    • Womenswear >
      • Self-Made Patterns
      • Commercial Patterns
    • Hats
    • Miscellany
  • About
  • Blog
  • Quilting
  • Clothing
    • Menswear
    • Womenswear >
      • Self-Made Patterns
      • Commercial Patterns
    • Hats
    • Miscellany
  • About

The Chocolate Girl's Cap (March 2016)

1/29/2018

1 Comment

 
Picture
The Chocolate Girl, by Jean-Étienne Liotard [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Jean-Étienne Liotard was a Swiss pastel artist in the 1700's, and is one of my favorite artists.  I love the unique poses and facial expressions of his subjects.  Color-wise, I love how he uses plain gray or brown backgrounds to make his colors pop.  I love his blues.  There's a clean, refreshing look to his pictures, and a unprepossessing uniqueness to the people he portrays.  Unlike oil paintings of the time, which were formal and expressed rank and privilege, his pastels are informal, intimate. 

One of his more famous pastels is The Chocolate Girl, a young woman carrying a tray of hot chocolate.  She wears what looks like a cap or coif, but made from what looks like pink silk instead of the more common white linen.  It's sweet and pretty, and served as the inspiration for a cap I made about two years ago.  I already had a nightcap, but I wanted something prettier to wear around the house, to cover my hair so I wouldn't pick at it. 

Read More
1 Comment

A Strappy Red Dress

1/25/2018

1 Comment

 
A simple alteration, today.  My client had a shift dress with spaghetti straps.  The top of the dress had a ruffle over the bosom, which was sewn right-sides-together to the neck and arm holes, then turned right side out, thus finishing the neck and arm-holes and hiding all the raw edges under the ruffle.  Simple and cute.  The problem: the straps were too long for the wearer! 

Read More
1 Comment

Adaptive Clothing - zippers in pant legs

1/22/2018

3 Comments

 
"Adaptive clothing" is the term for clothes which are designed for use by disabled people.  The goal is to look like regular clothes, but to have adaptations that either make them easier to don, safer and more comfortable to wear in wheelchairs, or more practical for caregivers.  By their nature, adaptive clothes can be unique to the individual.  Recently, a friend came to me with a particular need: a man whose Parkinson's makes it difficult to get the narrow ends of his pants legs over his feet (even if you sit to do it, it still requires balance and co-ordination).  She asked if I could install zippers in the bottom of the pant legs so he could unzip them, get them on, and then zip them down?  I said of course! 

Read More
3 Comments

Why Are Women Always Right?

1/18/2018

3 Comments

 
Right-over-left, that is.  In the Western world, women's garments traditionally close right-over-left, while men's close left-over-right.  As an example, the Moss Brothers jacket I showed you on Monday is a women's jacket because of the right-over-left closure (as well as the princess seams giving room for the bosom, and the flared hips with slanting pockets for style).  That's why I was surprised to find no womenswear on their company website! 

Read More
3 Comments

TUTORIAL - How to sew a button on a jacket

1/15/2018

0 Comments

 
One of my medium-weight jackets (a nice wool tartan labeled Moss Brothers Covent Garden*, which has been very serviceable to me) lost a button on Christmas day, while I was shoveling ice off the driveway.  Since another button was loose, I took the opportunity to change all three buttons for prettier ones, and took pictures along the way!  The original buttons were plain black plastic shaft buttons.  The new ones are bronze flat buttons with maple leaves on them in bass relief.  There was even a worn area that needed patching, which makes me childishly excited.  If such things interest you (or childishly excite you), read on!

*It's a women's jacket, but I don't see any women's stuff on their website now, so perhaps they no longer make womenswear.

Read More
0 Comments

Quilted Jumps - begun 2015... finished 2018?

1/11/2018

3 Comments

 
Several years ago, when I was newly arrived in Portland, OR, and I had a basic, borrowed sewing machine and no experience with either pattern drafting or quilting, I found Sharon Ann Burnston's website and was taken with the idea of making my own version of 18th Century quilted jumps.  Mainly, I wanted them because I was cold.  I'm always cold in the winter, and I simply hate being cold.  The jumps appealed to me as a garment to keep my core warm and leave my arms free, which would be an improvement over wrapping myself in blankets, and more interesting and unique than the "puffy" vests which were then fashionable. 

Read More
3 Comments

2017, Christmas Gifts, & New Year's Resolutions

1/8/2018

1 Comment

 
Happy New Year, gentle reader(s)!  ;) 

This post is a grab-bag of recapping 2017, showing off my Christmas gifts, and looking forward to 2018! 

LOOKING BACK

As 2017 is done, I have now been blogging for a year.  I find I enjoy it as much as I feared (yes, it has been a huge time-suck!), but that it's also done what I hoped: kept me accountable for finishing projects and served as a portfolio I could point potential clients and interested friends to.  On my first post, I said I'd limit my posting to once a week, but soon I had such a backlog of posts and so much to say that I upped it to twice a week: Mondays and Thursdays, usually. 

Read More
1 Comment

Tatting Information for a Beginner

1/6/2018

2 Comments

 

A friend asked me to compile some information for her friend, who wants to learn to tat.  I thought: why not put my answer here, so it may benefit others, as well?  I should note that I'm not an expert tatter, but a beginner.  I am writing this to give a fellow beginner the vocab and links she needs to get started, and to point to the real experts!
Picture
Tatted Doiley, picture by Renata Niemczyk, via Wikimedia Commons

Read More
2 Comments

Rose on Snow - An Embellished Gown

1/4/2018

2 Comments

 

​A friend (B.) found a lovely wedding dress at a thrift store.  Check out the pricing history: originally $3,000, marked down to $350, then marked down to $19.99!  The tags were all still on, so the dress has never been worn for a wedding.  But it's clearly been tried on... a lot.  I suspect it was a floor model at a bridal salon, and when it got shop-worn, they discounted it.  Eventually it landed at Goodwill, where B. bought it. 

B. has a vision for the dress, though.  She planned to attend a Leukemia survivors' ball, and wanted to wear this wedding dress, but embellished with flowers to look less bridal, more fairy-like. 

Now, as Mark Twain put it in The Prince and the Pauper, "Let us change the tense for convenience".  (If he could do it halfway through a novel, I can do it in a blog post!)  Present tense for the project diary...
Picture

Read More
2 Comments

Making a Flower from... a Flower.

1/1/2018

0 Comments

 
Happy New Year to everyone using the Gregorian calendar! 

Have you ever looked at a fake flower--you know the type: plastic stem and fabric leaves and petals--and thought "too bad that's a big bulky fake flower; I wish it were softer and more sew-able so I could stick it on my dress"?  If that's the sort of thing you think, you're reading the right blog! 
Picture
If not... well... how does your brain work, then?  I'm really interested, because it seems like such a normal thought to me, and I'd be curious to know how someone thinks who doesn't have that thought. 

Read More
0 Comments

    Karen Roy

    Quilting, dressmaking, and history plied with the needle...

    Categories

    All
    1910's
    Alteration
    Antique
    Dyeing
    Embroidery
    General
    Hand Sewing
    History
    Lacemaking
    Mending
    Menswear
    Millinery
    Modern Elizabethan
    Musing
    Other Sewing
    Philippians 4:8
    Project Diary
    Quilting
    Regency
    Retro
    Self Made Pattern
    Self-made Pattern
    Terminology
    Victorian
    Vintage

    Blogs I Read

    The Dreamstress
    Male Pattern Boldness
    ​
    Lilacs & Lace
    Tom of Holland
    Fit for a Queen
    Line of Selvage
    Mainely Menswear
    Bernadette Banner

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017

    RSS Feed

Blog

Quilting

Clothing

About

Copyright Karen Roy
​© 2017-2022