Previously on The Cassandra Stays Sew Along: Choosing Material for the Cassandra Stays Making Linen Buckram Making your Mock-Up  Fitting How to alter the Cassandra Stays pattern to be front-laced only Cutting Out & Basting Testing techniques It’s time to sew your boning channels! If, like me, you’re doing it by machine, that’s the work of a couple of hours. If you’re amazing and doing it by hand, well, I hope you have a looooooong queue of podcasts, films, and TV shows to watch! The Cassandra Boning Channels There are a number of different ways to mark the boning channels for the Ca ..read more

Previously on The Cassandra Stays Sew Along: Choosing Material for the Cassandra Stays Making Linen Buckram Making your Mock-Up  Fitting How to alter the Cassandra Stays pattern to be front-laced only Cutting Out & Basting You’re you’ve got all your Cassandra Stays pattern pieces cut out, basted together, and you’re ready to start sewing! Or are you… Testing Before you begin sewing, I recommend testing. Test: Thread colour Stitch length Boning channel width It’s far easier to check all of these on a small sample than to sew boning channels, realise they aren’t right, and have to ..read more

This is not a sponsored post.  I have no affiliation with Orba shoes. They have no idea I’m writing this.  It’s just that sometimes when you like a product so much you could almost kiss it, you need to share! Mistletoe on the ground, Valašské Meziříčí, Czechia.  This was the first time I’ve ever seen real mistletoe! (almost.  I’m from the Pacific.  We don’t kiss things that go on our feet, or put them on tables, or stage them with food.). In planning my Europe trip I realised I really needed good walking shoes which I could wear with any outfit.  I scoured Welli ..read more

Previously on The Cassandra Stays Sew Along: Choosing Material for the Cassandra Stays Making Linen Buckram Making your Mock-Up  Fitting How to alter the Cassandra Stays pattern to be front-laced only   You’ve chosen your fabrics, made some buckram for the historical version, made a mock-up, fitted it to your figure, and transferred all your alterations to your pattern.  Now it’s time to cut your fabric! Cutting Out First, double-triple-quadruple check that you have made all your alterations to your pattern piece.  In English we say ‘measure twice, cut once’.  I had ..read more

I haven’t quite managed to get Rate the Dress back on a same-time-same-day-of-the-week schedule, but at least it’s happening weekly-ish, give or take a day or two.  Let’s find out how you like this weeks(ish) offering of an 1880s day dress that blends simplicity and extravagance. Last week:  the Marchesa a la modé in puce and coral Everyone appreciated the Marchesa’s portrait last week, and the way it clearly showed her personality and interests.  Most of you also appreciated her very fashionable outfit, but not everyone was entirely on-board.  Things that came in for criti ..read more

In the interest of this blog not being all-Scroop-all-the-time, here’s one of my favourite random things about the Czech Republic: all the pretty pastel building! Everywhere we went the buildings were painted to the most delicious colours. From big apartment buildings in cities: To whole town squares of delicious ice-cream hues. I also really like the way each building just built its own roof and paid no attention to the one next door! To modern apartment buildings: And every single one of them delighted me! (although I am disappointed that Banána isn’t a yellow building!) These we ..read more

What time is it?  Time for the most exciting part of mock-ups: fitting them!  Follow along with me for tips on analysing the fit so you get it perfect for you. Previously on The Cassandra Stays Sew Along: Choosing Material for the Cassandra Stays Making Linen Buckram Making your Mock-Up  It’s totally possible to do a Cassandra Stays fitting on yourself (especially if you’re making View B, the front-lacing version), but it’s much easier to have someone help you.  Even if they don’t know anything about fitting they can at least take photographs of the bits you can’t see you ..read more

You’ve chosen your materials, made buckram, now it’s time to make a mock-up of the Cassandra Stays to make sure that you get the perfect fit with your final pair! Previously on The Cassandra Stays Sew Along: Choosing Material for the Cassandra Stays Making Linen Buckram Why Make a Mock Up? It seems like a lot of effort, but making a full mock-up is so important for getting a good fit with your final stays.  To be a successful mock up it needs to be as complete as possible: fully boned, in fabric that behaves as much as possible like your final fabric. The good news is that making a mock ..read more

The re-launch of Rate the Dress came at the same time as the launch of the Cassandra Stays, and this week’s Rate the Dress is interrupting the Cassandra Stays Sew-Along, so I think it’s only fitting that I do a Rate the Dress featuring a garment that could be worn over the Cassandra Stays! Last week: a 1910s dress in white and orchid purple. Ooof, a very mixed bag of reactions to last week’s Rate the Dress!  Everything from a perfect 10 to a devastatingly low 3!  Most of you liked the dress…except, that is, for the back collar.  But others felt that there were too many discordan ..read more

It’s time for an update to my 18th century buckram making adventures!  Back in 2019 (how did the time go so fast!?!) I posted about experiments in making buckram from both historically accurate gum tragacanth, and modern xanthan gum. Both worked, but I wasn’t 100% happy with either – tragacanth was only available in pre-mixed form in NZ at the time, and thus prohibitively expensive.  It also smelled to high heaven.  Xanthan gum, whilst cheap, wasn’t accurate and doesn’t have the fabric-nibbling-creepy-crawly-retardant qualities of tragacanth. So I read every source I could find ..read more