MyFaireLady

(This is for a fellow costumer with a question about the headdress the lady in this picture is wearing.)

My best guess is that it’s either an open-weave (snood-like) hat OR it’s decorated to look like such.  I tried to exaggerate what my eye sees as the weave in the detail cut-out in the middle.  It looks like alternating bands of (open?) weave with bands of something more solid, ending in that little pointy thing on the top.  The shape is not unlike that of the lady’s hood right beneath in that they both frame the back of the wearer’s head.

Hope that helps!

Helping a fellow costumer fit a mock-up:

Using and Making Lacing Strips:
LOL! This is becoming a habit.  OK, so here’s another pic as a tip to a fellow costumer.  Eventually this pic will find it’s way onto a diary page…it may take a while, though.

So in the meantime, I’ll just say that it’s an example of the use of a lacing strip pinned on to the folded edge of the garment so that it is placed exactly where you want the actual lacing to end up.  This is just the way I do it, there are lots of other ways, I’m sure.  This is what works for me.

The strip is made up of a doubled-up scrap piece of canvas with a channel for a sturdy cable tie sewn in along the folded edge.  The next step was to add grommets next to the boning channel, then insert the boning and finally serge the whole thing for a clean, finished product.

The other thing to keep in mind is to leave yourself enough fabric next to the grommets so that you will have a place to pin or baste the strip to your garment.  I prefer pinning (and I use loooong pins with a nice big head) rather than basting, making sure to pin next to each grommet so that the strain of pulling the lacing closed won’t make the pins pop.  Even so, if you chose to pin, YOU ARE PINNING AT YOUR OWN RISK.  I am in NO WAY saying that you must do it my way.  I dislike handsewing, so I pin, even though I risk getting pricked now and then.  ‘Nuff said.

You can also just go ahead and make the strip as long as you are likely to need it for future projects as well.  Since this project was laced in the back, having the extra length of the lacing strips didn’t affect the fit at all.  I have a shorter set that I use for side lacing where having longer strips would be unwieldy.

Note also that my strip is spiral-laced because that’s how I intend on lacing the finished product and also for ease of fitting.  I just LOOOOOVE spiral lacing.  It allows me to fit myself and if I need help, it’s alot easier for DH to “get” what I need done if I just say, “Pull here until the edges line up.”

And one final point: I pin the lacing strip on top of the garment so that when I lace the strip closed, it will lie flat.  If I pinned it to the inside of the garment (OUCH!) the unfinished edges would flop out and increase the likelihood of the pins pricking me (double-OUCH!!!)

HTH!