MLS Designs

and mine is so nearly finished!!! I've decided not to do the fur trimming after all, so all I have left to do is the lower sleeves and it's finished :) while I as all dressed up for a fitting I took a few teaser photos for you:





My Emmy-boo decided she needed to help, and then she decided she'd do a lion impression as well for good measure, silly old thing!



The only trimming it has is the gold silk lining in the hood and the buttonholes, and the fabulous buttons! they're casts of Roman coins! I'm imagining a brother or lover brought them home from the grand tour for me ;)

I've stopped working on the Brunswick for a while, and moved on to something much more girlie ;)



Our reenacting friends came round at the weekend and told us about a Burns Night party that the Charles Edward Stuart Society are holding on Saturday, and did we want to go if there were any tickets left? Of course we did! and also of course, it meant I'd need a new frock ;) Unfortunately Rob told me today that there aren't any tickets left :( but so I figure, why not carry on with it and see if I can get it done by Saturday anyway :D
I had a hunt through the stash, unfortunately I don't have many dress lengths of fancy fabric, but there was a short length of pale pink taffeta, and I think I have just enough to make a 1770s en fourreau round gown. I should be ok as long as re-cutting my fronts doesn't take too much fabric! I foolishly rushed into it without doing a proper mockup and the first version was a disaster! It was only pinned together though, I hadn't yet sewn down the en fourreau pleats, so I was able to re-do the pleats to fit the new back without having horrid visible stitch marks!
I'm planning to trim it very simply, with either white silk gauze box-pleats or puffs of some very pretty white silk 'smooth chiffon' I found in town yesterday. The trimming will just go round the neck and a double row around the cuffs, more of a posh day dress than an evening gown, and it should be perfect for Williamsburg :)

I wish I had some photos to share, but so far all I've got to show for the past few days is a nearly finished habit shirt and two nicely fitted mockups :( One is for the waistcoat for my Brunswick, the other a new lining for the 'jacket' of the Brunswick and to be a base for all my other gowns. I hate this kind of progress!! I know that now I don't have to do any more tedious fittings for dresses, I can just go straight to making up the lining and drape the pleats of a sack or an en fourreau gown, but at the moment it still feels like I've achieved nothing! Oh well, tomorrow is another day :)
Talking of tomorrow, I have big plans for my lunch break, (and my bus ride home!) I'm really hopeful I can finish my habit shirt. The collar is pinned in place, and then I have to gather the sleeve ends and add the cuffs. I think I can manage that, then all I have to do is decide what to make my ruffles from. I really wanted to use a very fine linen, but have completely failed to find any in the UK :( So my options are, the same linen as the shirt, which is pretty nice, but not terribly smart, or cotton lace (the embroidered net type that looks a bit like tamboured net) or, if I have enough, some silk/cotton mix (or Swiss muslin or something else that I use for Regency chemisettes and things) Any suggestions? (The ruffles will be detachable for laundering)
Just before we went to dance practice I cut out the linen lining for the Brunswick waistcoat from some scraps of pale blue linen, (stash busting again!) it's a lovely weight for lining, and the pieces are too small for anything else, in fact, they're so small I've had to piece the fronts :) I love having to piece things, it's so period correct :D I'm using a dark Claret coloured corded silk for the Brunswick, so the waistcoat will look quite funny with it's pale blue back :) And I may end up lining the Brunswick itself with some other equally unlikely colour ;)