Several years ago now, I bought a roll of doll-scale vintage lace in an antique shop in New Harmony, Indiana. New Harmony Indiana is mostly antique shops – antique shops, book shops and cornfields on the edge of the wide, slow, Wabash river. For a visitor, it was summertime heaven on a slow Sunday afternoon – riding a bicycle by the Wabash, snoozing in the sun, and finding a stash of antique lace in the small local shops! It was perfect for making an Edwardian lace dress for an American Girl Doll
A year or so later, I picked up Vogue 7350, and with a quarter yard of some very fine Swiss cotton voile out of Mum’s stash, i made up the dress.
I’d always been a bit intimidated about sewing with insertion lace, but this pattern certainly got me over all of my fears! The hours picking scraps of tissue paper out of thread seams on thread lace as I stitched the yoke panels left me with no mysteries and no terrors. Lace is now very firmly do-able, thank you.
Yummy dress details:
And because I love making wired ribbon flowers, she needed a sash with a big bow on it. Just something simple:
The purse is the sort of thing that happens on Saturday afternoons when you have nothing scheduled to do and you can do exactly whatever you want to do. I had a scrap of white silk, a meter of beaded fringe and a bag of lace remnants from my mother’s wedding gown – I cut out roses from the wedding lace and appliquéd them onto the silk, and across the body of the purse I scattered clusters of embroidered petals and beads stripped from the fringing.
More beads made the purse handle and I stitched it all together by hand.
I adore it. It’s fabulous.
And so, Once More with Feeling:
Beautiful job! All she needs is a little shift slip underneath. 🙂 Nicely done!