Custom Dress Wish List

A competition for a custom dress over at Shristi Studio has got me thinking about dresses - wrap dresses to be exact. I love them, yet I don't own one! Wrap dresses are so easy to wear anyway, but in the 1940s they were made of the loveliest fabrics and didn't have the often ill-fitting and gaping necklines that modern ones tend to have.

To enter the competition you basically find a picture of a vintage dress you would want copied, think about fabrics, and drop Shristi Studio an email! I think that Shristi Studio is more than capable of meeting this challenge judging from the beautiful retro-style dresses on offer already.

My fantasy dress will definitely be some form of wrap dress. Take a look at three beautiful examples of wrap dresses below.


Firstly, the lovely Fleur from Diary of a Vintage Girl modelling a 1940's vintage find.

Or what about this Swirl dress pictured at Fuzzy Lizzie Vintage Clothing?



And finally, a little later, but this 1950's wrap dress would be fabulous too! Pattern available to buy here on Etsy.

Vintage in a Heatwave

What glorious weather we've had here in the UK over the last week! I've enjoyed more than one evening with a G&T, look how beautiful the evening sunshine is over the water in my local park.

The heatwave has identified a gap in my wardrobe however, for cool, flowing clothes. All of my 1940s-1950s vintage and vintage inspired clothing is very fitted and not at all practical for hot, sunny days - shoulder pads and the extra layer of a petticoat would stifle me! On the BBC breakfast news this morning they had an interesting comparison between what we wear now in the summer, and what we were wearing in the 1950s - the contrasting photos showed topless men and bikini-clad women drinking beer in the park sprawled on the grass, versus neat rows of immaculately dressed gentlemen in sports shirts and ladies in neat dresses in their deck chairs.

I've made a list in my head of the summery buys I need to make, helped by watching A Good Woman (check out a fashion review here over on The Painted Woman's blog), with all its lovely 1930's day dresses and fabulous hats. The first purchase today was a 1930's style hat from a charity shop - modern, not vintage, but the label says you can squash it up and it will spring back to life, so that sold me right there and then! I'll be putting those claims to the test very soon.

Other items on my list are as follows:
- a playsuit
- 1920s/1930s 'sportswear'/tennis dress
- beach pyjamas
- apron dress

I thought about 1940's style high-waisted shorts, but again this is quite a fitted item of clothing. Seems I am leaning towards a 1930s look for summer, better start ebaying!

Vintage Jewellery: How do you know what it is?!

After my last post I did a bit of research on vintage jewellery, Art Deco in particular, and realised that the brooch I bought is paste not marcasite! Such a schoolgirl error, so I thought I'd post this link where the Vintage Detective explains a little more about how to tell the difference between marcasite, paste, and rhinestones, all of which are heavily used in much of the vintage jewellery you'll come across.

More posts to come to update on charity-shop and boot-sale finds, but first I have to get a working day out of the way!

Art Deco Brooch

Ooooh I have been looking foward to sharing this purchase with you! I've been hankering after a little piece of art deco jewellery for a while, and happened upon a brooch earlier this week - at just £10 I snapped it up! Similar ones I've seen recently on Etsy have been considerably more than that.



It has one stone missing, but it's hardly noticeable. I'm still looking out for an art deco necklace, but haven't found anything I've particularly liked that's under a few hundred pounds so far. There seem to be a few pieces floating around that were shoe or dress clips originally and that have subsequently been made into necklaces but I'd prefer something that was intended to be a necklace in the first place. The hunt shall continue...

The English Countryside: Part 2

On the way back from our adventure in Buckinghamshire we stopped in the beautiful Cotswolds at Bourton-On-The-Water, a village that doesn't seem quite real because of its chocolate-box perfection!




The sweet shop was adorable, I can imagine it looking even more enticing in Winter when there's snow on the ground and it's lit up inside.




And finally a shot of the fields on our drive back to Wales, the sun made them glow like gold!

The English Countryside: Part 1

This weekend the sun came out, hurrah! My beloved and I took a trip to Buckinghamshire in the heart of England, staying near Tingewick, a quaint little village filled with cottages and barn conversions. I would have been happy to move in to any one of them! Even the Scout Hall was a cute little chalet-type 1930's build. Here are some photos to feast your eyes on, it's definitely satisfied my need to watch 'Escape to the Country' for a while!






The next day we took a trip to Stowe Gardens, a National Trust property near Buckingham where you can enjoy the 18th Century landscape gardens and gape at the size of the house (which now houses a school for those who can afford the £26,000 a year fees for their children!). The gardens really are lovely and we had fun exploring, though overdid the walking and felt a bit crippled by the end and had to cut out from the guided tour. The day started off quite cold so I'm not wearing anything lovely and vintage in the photos I'm afraid, just warm leggings and flat boots for walking!




I liked the Chinese house, though the artwork was obviously not done by anyone Chinese from the very Caucasian looking figures!


The grounds are filled with towers, obelisks, temples, bridges, pavilions and other structures, all in styles mocking great civilizations (Greek, Roman, Egyptian).



Definitely worth a visit, though best on a warm day with a picnic and a floaty frock so you can feel like you really belong there!

Night Night for now..

1938 - Norman Hartnell Fashion Video Clip

Norman Hartnell (1901-1979) is a British designer that I ought to know about, being British, but only came across recently. I'm very impressed to discover that in 1935 he designed for the Royal Family, creating the wedding dress for Lady Alice Montague Dougal Scott's marriage to the Duke of Gloucester. He even dressed cinema royalty in his career - Marlene Dietrich and Vivienne Leigh among others.

I've found a clip of his 1938 fashion line for you to enjoy, and you can take a look at the website for more details on this prominent designer.



It's lovely to see a colour clip of fashion from the 30s, I've mostly been watching black and white films from this decade that I've been colouring-in mentally!

My Birthday Dress!

Here are a couple of pics of the Hell Bunny dress my Beloved gave me as a birthday present! I love, love, love it! It fits like a dream, and I adore the button detail on the front and the little bows on the pockets. The only trouble is there is no upcoming social event which I can wear it to, so I'll probably just end up wearing it with heels to do the vacuuming on some rainy day...




I've pictured it over a 50's petticoat I picked up for £5 in the car boot sale, and the tailor's dummy is another bargain from a local discount shop.

I also got a box set of Barbara Stanwyck films for my birthday from my Mum (a huge fan of old films!) and watched Double Indemnity last night, which is worth watching for a couple of fabulous shoe-moments alone! Never mind that it was nominated for 7 Oscars..

1940s Swansea Bay

I've had the most wonderful birthday weekend! On Saturday, it was a girly day trip to 1940s Swansea Bay, a little museum that I've driven past numerous times and always wondered about. They serve Camp coffee and Spam sandwiches in the cafe, but we weren't brave enough to try any so just headed into the museum where they have recreated an air-raid shelter, a 1940s street scene, and have a pictorial history of the war in South Wales. There's also a room with a few rails of 40's clothing, mostly uniforms, that you are free to try on. Any excuse for my friends and I to dress up!!




We then headed back to mine for a champagne afternoon tea - an absolutely huge spread, and we were quite stuffed and happy afterwards. Katy made fairycakes with lemon curd in, so delicious (and very easy to make too, just put a little of your standard fairy cake mixture in the paper case, add a teaspoon of lemon curd, and top up the cake mixture. The curd sinks to the bottom of the cake during baking).

In the evening, I hosted a Hatter's Tea Party - everyone had to wear a hat, of any description, and I served Pimms and lemonade out of teapots. It was fun watching some of the menfolk drink out of dainty little teacups! I have to say that Fleur's Peanut Butter Swirls went down particularly well, despite me having poorly executed the swirling part.

I also had attempted to do some 40's style curls, it ended up more pin-up than true 40s, but I was putting a hat on top anyway so wasn't too bothered. Here's a before and after comparison anyway, and you can also see a glimpse of my lovely 1940s dressing gown, which is surprisingly psychedelic for the time!



Then yesterday I made a quick swoop to the Blind Lemon Vintage Fashion Fair in Cardiff's Coal Exchange. I only ended up buying a magazine from 1952, but was tempted by a few 20s/30s evening capes. On the whole I'm not sure I have the patience for vintage fairs as there tends to be an awful lot of 60s-80s, which I'm not really interested in. Having to sift through it all can be a bit of a chore, so I always go straight to Vintage and Revival if they have a stall as they have the early stuff, and all the clothes have been properly measured and display the measurements on the tags.

All in all, a lovely birthday weekend - more pictures to come!

Fleur's Chocolate & Peanut Butter Swirl

It's 5am here and I woke up hungry and excited because it's my birthday! So a quick post until I'm tired enough to go back to sleep. Last night I had a go at making Fleur's recipe for a Chocolate & Peanut Butter Swirl (you can find it here)

Any excuse to put on one of my vintage aprons - I inherited them from my sister in law, originally to use in a burlesque act, but I wear them more in the kitchen than on stage now. They're not particularly old but I love them!





The recipe didn't quite go according to plan... I decided that instead of making a tray of it, to then divide into little squares, that I wanted to make individual ones in silicone cupcake moulds. However, because the little moulds are small there's not enough space to get the marbled effect drawing the skewer through the mixture, and I think the dark chocolate was too hot as well and it sort of just sat on the surface of the white chocolate and peanut butter mixture I'd poured in first.



I made such a mess in the kitchen too and only realised on a trip to the bathroom that I had a huge streak of dark chocolate on my cheek! Anyway, the end product has turned out to be what resembles Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! I did make a small tray of the mixture too and that has cut up nicely into squares and marbled quite well, so it wasn't a completely wasted exercise.



I think the moral of the story is that this recipe is meant to be in a tray, not cupcake moulds. Right, I'm tired enough to go back to sleep for a couple of hours now, a big day tomorrow with a girly day trip to 1940s Swansea Bay, afternoon tea, a Hatter's themed party in the evening and the Blind Lemon Vintage Fashion Fair on Sunday here in Cardiff. Will post some pictures of these adventures in the week.

Night night!