Over the last few years I have been collecting aka buying vintage clothing at estate sales and flea markets. You can only collect so many before you need to consider what you are going to do with all of the pieces. But not all vintage clothing has value - the owner may not have kept the pieces from moisture (musty smelling), heat, cold and the ever omnipresent bugs or moths! Also surprising how many smaller size pieces are available - have we really grown that much bigger since the 60’s??!!
Some of the less desirable pieces may end up in strips in my weavings or taken apart to be remade into something else. I decided to photograph some of the dresses while taking them apart as their construction was often very labor intensive.
This is the dart of a blue silk sheath dress with a beautiful border at the bottom of the dress. Since it had a large brown spot on it, I decided it would be better to use in pieces. The dress was lined and all of the seams had their edges whipped stitched. When I sewed, I never did that!! The dart even had seam binding over the opened dart to make it lay flat or smooth.
The ironic part is I decided to hand wash the silk and the big brown spot literally shredded in the water. As my sister said, that wouldn’t have been a good sale.
2 comments:
what an intriguing piece of cloth you've put together here it looks like a fish!
Ironically, the "fish" has been taken apart! This is what it looked like before I took out all of the stitches. Someone had spent a lot of time making this dress. The satin lining basically shredded while taking it apart.
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