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?