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Advance 4914 at the Lan Su Chinese Garden!

7/28/2019

Just pictures, today. This is what I was doing last Sunday! My friends and I went to the Lan Su Chinese Garden in downtown Portland, Oregon. It's enclosed in walls in one city block, but feels quite spacious once you're in it, because of clever design and careful choices throughout. We picked a good day to go, as the weather was lovely, and a young woman was playing the guzheng, or Chinese zither. She was really good! After each song, she explained what it meant. For instance, she played The Fisherman's Song at Dusk, which is about fishermen coming home in their boats. As the sun sets, they cheerfully race each other to get home before dark, and the song gets faster, but keeps its rhythm, the pull of the oars faster and faster, the rills of water splashing and swirling.

The song reminded me of me and a friend once rushing to get our canoe to shore ahead of a storm on the lake where we lived. Energetic fun, but with a real deadline.

And since I was wearing my new dress that day, I got some lovely pictures to share!

If you want to read about the dress pattern or construction, here are the links:
Advance 4914, view 2, PATTERN
Advance 4914, view 2, CONSTRUCTION

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Advance 4914, view 2, CONSTRUCTION

7/27/2019

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Rainier Cherries. Too expensive to eat, but I can wear them!

Now that I am ready to sew Advance 4914, let me introduce my fabric. It is a polyester microfiber (more on that after the cut), which feels amazingly soft and has a gorgeous print of Rainier cherries. The print is busy, but most of the cherries seem to be hanging in one direction, so I think it has a nap.

The pattern calls for 3.125 yard at 42" wide, but this fabric is 60" wide (a fabric width not available in 1948, the year of this pattern). I do a bit of math (read: Google it), round up, and buy 2.5 yards.

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Advance 4914, view 2, PATTERN

7/8/2019

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THE PATTERN

Here is a beautiful pattern I've been antsy to try! Advance 4914, circa 1948, according to the Vintage Patterns Wikia, is a really interesting dress. Its yoke around the neck and shoulders (front and back) has two neckline options. It has a fitted yoke at the waistline (front only), and between the top and bottom yokes the loose bodice is gathered. Below the waist, more gathers in the front, but fitted gores in back. It closes with a side zipper (under the left arm).

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Home Needlework Magazine, June 1909

7/4/2019

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"My head looks like a pin-cushion..."

My co-worker let me borrow her original 1909 Home Needlework Magazine, which she'd found among her grandmother's things. I've taken copious pictures, to show the cool stuff inside! (The magazine is quite substantial, so you'll forgive me if I didn't copy the whole thing!)

If you're looking for more archives of this periodical, the University of Arizona's On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics has some later issues (from 1914, 1915, and 1916). Google Books has digitized a bunch of issues, too. And there are scattered excerpts of it on various vintage craft websites, but I don't know of a complete archive anywhere. I'd be happy to be corrected about that, though!

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Advance 4914 at the Lan Su Chinese Garden!

Advance 4914, view 2, CONSTRUCTION

Advance 4914, view 2, PATTERN

THE PATTERN

Home Needlework Magazine, June 1909

Karen Roy

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