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The Metropolitan Museum

The Antique and Vintage Dress Gallery

I love the details on this boating dress from The Antique and Vintage Dress Gallery.
I especially like antique clothing galleries which keep sold items on display, always a good source of reference material.

Meg Andrews' Antique Costume Sale.

Meg Andrews is having a sale!
Meg's got a great selection of unusual items reduced at the moment.
These everyday items of men's accessories are fascinating - she asks in her shop what was the use of the man's pockets? I can't work it out.
I love the detailed photo's of the stocks, under-stocks and braces.
There are some great textiles which also appear to be reduced right now.
Bargains.

Tidying the Studio

I think I am going to stop saving things like these, I am just going to take them home and use them.

Swedish Lace Collars

Recently, on our trip to Sweden, I was shown this gorgeous box of old stock left over from my friend Helena's father's haberdashery shop. The shop closed a long time ago but Helena and her mother couldn't bear to part with a few special items and these boxes of crisp, white collars are stored safely in the garage.

Helena spent many childhood Saturdays writing price tickets and working in the shop. The collars, all still bundled into matching groups with perfect red bands are adorable as they are but for costume purposes, they are ideal for a period school project or a script with lots of little girls in matching outfits; when you look in the box and rummage around the designs it's easy to imagine them all walking smartly in croc behind their teacher.

Furoshiki - Japanese Wrapping Cloths Part 2

This is my treat to myself: the Indigo Furoshiki I bought from a fabric dealer in Japan.
You can see the cloth has been made with widths of homespun fabric, like kimono garments, which goes right back to the Tilke conversation I was having in this post.

The writing on the corner is the label, a Saki brand I think.

Look at the beautiful wear and tear where the stress has been on the corners, the torn off knot is intact on the left side, like a full stop after years of lugging. The broken edge has worn so thin through hard work, I can sense the repeated tying and untying and the weight of the load and, as with all used workwear, I feel the presence of the worker. In this instance I think the feeling goes even further back, through the fingers of whoever stitched it together, patched and mended it, right into the hands of the weaver who was likely working at home.

I'm not sure what to do with my Furoshiki right now, maybe I'll stitch it onto a heavy linen sheet and make a bedspread, one thing I know is I want it to carry on working in some capacity.

 

... and if you peer hard enough you'll see a lovely spot of darning diagonally up and left of the price ticket.

Abernyte Antiques

Abernyte Antiques Market in Perthshire is always worth a mooch.

Furoshiki - Japanese Wrapping Cloths

At the flea markets the traders arrive with piles of kimono and fabrics folded inside lovely wrapping cloths called Furoshiki. Far more environmentally responsible and frankly much nicer than a checkie or plastic bag, they also double up as a useful mat on which to display the wares. I managed to convince a couple of friendly stallholders that we needed the cloths to transport our purchases back to the car rather than take more plastic nonesense, it felt like treasure.

The antique fabric dealers have some fantastic examples of indigo wrapping cloths, I bought one and will photograph it for blogging purposes at some stage soon.

Go

Boys nightshirts, a set of five, each embroidered with laundry markings which read 'GO' at the left side vent.

Lovely.

Whites

Ever since watching Patricia Norris's costume designs in 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford', I have been obsessed with shades of white, both on film and in fabric. I look at old linens even more than I did, which was a lot. The cleanliness of her Western designs was refreshing, elegant and calm. I realise I have been thinking about these shades of pale for three years now, inspired by this design.

Sackcloth Themed Searches

This sugarsack dress is on a plantation worker in Puerto Rico . I absolutely love it. The find, in the Library of Congress, prompted me to get lost on an online search of sackcloth clothing, some results are here.



Having often found myself looking at the amazing array of 1930's and 40's prints available to buy on American textile sites, I was regularly frustrated at the size of the bits available, some of this is due to the US tradition of quilting but the size of a sack of grain is responsible for a lot of what's out there for sale.
After the bottom fell out of the cotton market due to the arrival of cheap man-made fabrics such as Rayon in the 1920's, many grain companies started using this newly cheap cotton for their feed sacks. They realised how popular this cotton was with women who were using the cloths in a Make Do and Mend spirit, re-using the sacks and making clothes and quilts.

By the late 1930s there was strong competition to produce the most attractive prints. Artists were hired as this turned out to be a great marketing ploy. Women picked out flour, sugar, beans, rice, cornmeal and the feed and fertilizer for the family farm based on which fabrics they desired.

These are some examples of the prints.

Shirt Labels at Abernyte Antiques Market

Abernyte Antiques Market... A very successful visit.