Wednesday 18 November 2020

Just a pair of stockings

I'm finding out this blog has been sadly neglected in the past years and there are lots of things I never posted about.

Like my stockings. Which I already made a couple years ago, for some HSM challenge or other - if I dug through the Facebook albums in the HSM group, I'm sure I'd find it, but I don't particularly care to do it right now.


It's my first attempt at sewing historical stockings (well, second, after a sort of rough mockup of my pattern), and they're nothing special in execution, wonkily sewn and not particularly historically accurate (there's lycra and machine sewing).

But they look the part.

And they contain three different tees, two thrifted, one of which was my orange tee from years ago after it stretched out of shape (and that's why I no longer wear lycra tees because if you don't have a dryer, they do sooner or later stretch out of shape while line-drying.)

The other thrifted tee was just bought specifically to make up for my lack of fabric in my original white tee.

That was my white Latvian tee, made in Latvia, from back in 2011. It got yellowish with use and also a bit stretched out of shape. (Don't believe people who say lycra assures your knits will retain their shape.)

So they are, in a way, a sentimental object.

And I'm currently knitting a wool(-ish) pair for colder days, so I decided these needed to be posted for the sake of painting the full picture.


My garters are two layers of plainweave cotton tape, paired up with vintage ribbon from my grandma. (I could have sworn I blogged about them and other stuff when I got them, but apparently it's one of a myriad of things I never blogged about.) I had ideas of embroidering some satin to put on the tape to make them really pretty, but that never materialised. So far.

Because it's "found materials", one of the ribbons is slightly different from the others. I actually rather like that my ribbons are mismatched and that my stockings are pieced. I often enjoy the mismatched and pieced items in museum collections more, because they have more... character, than the picture-perfect gowns that people are oohing and aahing over on social media...

 

Which reminds me - I've been pondering joining Instagram because that's where all the cool kids are these days, and when I blog I spend this huge amount of time writing blog posts that no one then comments on. So I eventually started reading their Terms of Use, where they keep talking about how it's aiming to be a personalised and up-to-date service, and yet somehow they fail to mention what it actually is, in the several paragraphs I got through. I backed out again at that point because a service incapable of telling you what it is that feels the need to instead keep wrapping pretty words around the fact they keep tabs on you... probably isn't something I want to sign up for, regardless of how many costuming friends are using it (and regardless of how many online services these days do the same keeping tabs thing). I've never been one of the cool kids anyway, why start now?

10 comments:

  1. I admire the way you used what you have - mismatched, even - for these stockings, Hana. I joined Instagram fairly recently; I like the pretty images - but if you can resist it, why not?

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    1. Thank you!
      And if you're on Instagram, you can follow Kate of Last Homely House (whatever her Instagram tag is, I found her on YouTube) instead of me if you don't already - it was one of the reasons I started considering it, and I think you'd enjoy her. :-)

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  2. I've actually taken a big step back from my sewing Instagram this year, and am not sure at this point what my involvement will be in the future on there. It's gotten so big that the algorithms mostly just let me see the most popular accounts in my limited time. And at least in the US, I can't even search hashtags for sewing patterns or anything now. They blanket censored everything because of "stopping the spread of election disinformation". So whether I ever get a comment there again or not, I'm planning to just revive my blog as a means to store my project information.

    Also, stockings are a clever way to reuse your tees!

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    1. Ah. Good to know, and rather reassuring in a roundabout way. Being able to follow through tags was one of the reasons that made it alluring; if that's gone, that would not allow me to find fellow historical costumers and them to find me, so that makes the whole idea pointless. Let's make blogs cool again! :D

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  3. Blogs feel so democratic -we choose what to follow and we see everything that blogger publishes. I'm so tired of algorithm driven popularity. So thank you for blogging. should probably start doing it again too. Just that most of what I do I'm not sure I can write about without going off on a rage!

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    1. Good thought!
      I struggled with following until recently, both for lack of time / peace of mind, and because I couldn't figure out how to un-follow so my feed was mostly filled with updates from sites I did not want to follow anymore. :D Now I've figured it out, so I think I'm getting back to it...

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  4. Yay for blogs! I was all about Instagram for a while there, and still post on it, but it feels very...disconnected. And temporary. And managed by a system that clearly doesn't have a clue what I like to see. Whereas I still deliberately come back to blog posts (some almost 10 years old) to see how other people made a certain gown or project. I enjoy reading what people say about what went right or wrong, what they would do again or not, and when they share any research they've done...and that's just not doable on Instagram. So thank you for sharing the stockings and your process!

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    1. Yay for blogs! Yes, that's exactly what I enjoy about them - and what got me into this years ago in the first place!

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  5. Please keep your blog alive! I have been thinking about making some stays and I stumbled across your blog post about a UFO transitional bra thing from way back in 2013! It's funny because I was so excited to see you wrote about what a word is in czech as I'm in CZ now, trying to figure out how to sew when I barely understand the terms in English let alone explaining to the old czech lady at the fabric store what I need and why.

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    1. Welcome to our beautiful, crazy country. :D It's funny because I'm hugely self-taught with the help of the internet back when there was very little sewing in the Czech corner of it... so I actually suffer from a similar affliction sometimes. :D
      If it helps, there's an OLD dictionary available online:
      http://www.digitalniknihovna.cz/mzk/view/uuid:e32e2a20-c9f9-11e3-b110-005056827e51?page=uuid:f633d490-e00f-11e3-85ae-001018b5eb5c
      - so it won't have all the terms that are around now, but it's a specifically textile dictionary so it might help for the beginings.

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