Historical

5th Century AD Upper-Class Celtic Woman In Saffron and Green Léinte and Green Brat (for St. Patrick’s Day)

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Wikipedia says that “uncritical acceptance of the Annals of Ulster would imply that he [St. Patrick] lived from 373 to 493″ and for the purpose of paperdolling, I can be uncritical. This is my guess at what an upper-class Celtic woman might have worn during the time of St. Patrick. She wears a sleeveless saffron-dyed, heavily embroidered léine, which is a linen tunic, over another light green sleeved léine. At this point, the sleeves, if there were any, were long and straight; the larger sleeves that you might see at a Renaissance fair come later. The green fabric she wears as a cloak is called a brat, and it’s made of wool and edged with gold. She pins the brat with a white bronze penannular brooch, and she wears a woven leather belt.

I cannot say that this is entirely historically accurate; I’ve read about clothes from that time and done my best to make it so, but I’m no expert. I read a lot of great resources about clothing from this time period:

Ceara ni Neill’s Early Period Online
Paul Du Bois’ Book of Kells Images
Clothing of the Ancient Celts
Echna’s Celtic Clothing Page
Crafty Celts

Also, if you’re looking at the dress and thinking “Well, how would someone actually cut that out? Or were hand amputations common in the 5th century?” my advice would be to cut a line between the edge of the sleeve and the cloak and slip her hand through it. This is, of course, if you have already followed my advice (given somewhere…) to cut Sylvia’s hand away from her hip, so that dresses like Margaret Hale’s gown work better.

Brian told me I should have done something for Saint Urho. Maybe next year.

Moxie’s Tonic’s pink shirtwaist inspired by Pushing Daisies

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So I saw that Moxie Tonic had linked to me, and when I clicked through the first thing I saw was this sweet, hot pink dress she had made. It’s inspired by a character’s dress from a TV series called Pushing Daisies, although she made some changes to it. I don’t actually use hot pink much, so of course I wanted to try paperdolling it… It’s not quite like the original, I’m afraid, I think I didn’t get the collar right at all, and there’s too many buttons. I’ll pretend that it’s so blindingly pink no one will notice…

Sadly, though, my scanner kind of ate this one — I don’t know why, but when I scanned it, it previewed normally, but the actual colors ended up being weirdly super-saturated — yes, it’s possible even for hot pink — and it seemed to come out more… coarse, somehow. Lily’s gown yesterday did that too. (Plus this one has a few bands on the skirt…) It means I had to play around in Photoshop and try to make the coloring look like what I had, although it’s a lot less pink now, and it’s not so bad when resized. (The large image you see is 25% of the original, which ends up hiding a lot of flaws.) When I get a new scanner, I’m rescanning it, and then you all can enjoy how it’s supposed to be. On the upside, the dress looks pretty cute in blue, too.

Lily Bart’s White Edwardian Tea Gown with Pink Rose Sash from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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Now that I’m done with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I do think it’s time for another depressing period piece. This time I’m listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, read for Librivox by Elizabeth Klett. I’ve read it before, but I’m actually preferring audiobooks lately because I don’t skim so much and get more of the details, and I’ve been thinking of this book since I read this New York Times article about Lily’s fate…

So far there hasn’t been much description of individual dresses, but there’s so much about the culture that those dresses form such a part of. Here’s Lily Bart talking about marriage with Lawrence Selden: “Your coat’s a little shabby–but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop–and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.”

Well, even if the book does promise to be melancholy, there is a silver lining: the dresses from the Belle Époque are beautiful, even if Sylvia isn’t quite the desired S-shape. I remember later on she wears some form of white dress, but there’s not a lot of physical description in the book so it’s based more on vintage gowns from 1904 and 1905 I’ve been looking at, particularly this one.

Showgirl Outfit from “We’re In The Money,” The Gold Diggers of 1933

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You know this song — you’ve probably heard Bugs Bunny singing it. “We’re in the money, we’re in the money / We’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along!” Or, if you’re not a Bugs Bunny fan, perhaps you’ve seen this very scene in Bonnie and Clyde, as a short bit of sardonic commentary on their exploits. It’s from a movie called The Gold Diggers of 1933, a goofy, shiny Depression-era musical that, as far as I know, is the only movie to feature Ginger Rogers singing in Pig Latin. Upon reflection, I wonder if the coins shouldn’t have been silver…

I wouldn’t envy you, by the way, if you tried to cut this out and actually put it on a doll. Maybe drop the trailing coin boa on the one side and pretend it goes out behid her instead?