Tuesday, January 1, 2008

One of my favorite Christmas presents . . .


After the Mood gift certificate, and the Lowe's gift certificate, and the three (!) Borders' gift certificates. The boy tried his best this year to get me sewing-related books, and when he couldn't find anything new at the store, he improvised. I'll take a good used book any day. In addition to this one, I also scored a book on Art Deco textiles, which made me drool. This book is just plain fun - it's all reproduced pages from old Sears catalogs from the 1920s.
The only thing that would make it better would be patterns, but a lot of the things I really like have fairly simple lines and I like to think that maybe, just maybe, I could reproduce them without too much hair-pulling.

I love the coat on the left. Those insets in the skirt make it look more like a dress than a coat, and I love the wrap-around cuffs. Much as I loathe working with fake fur, I could deal with it long enough to do a collar. I think.
This one I had to add just for the giggle value - does that look like the "New Freedom in Corsetry" to you? I don't think so. All they did was go from pushing the girls up under your chin to squashing them flat, and Mother Nature will do that quickly enough on her own, without laces, elastic panels or any other instrument of torture. I'll remember this next time I complain about a poky underwire or the constriction of shapewear. Not so bad after all, right, ladies?

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