La Bricoleuse

Costume Director Judy Adamson's period pattern class has presented their second round of projects in 19th century women's wear, and wow, are there some sleeves on these!


( Read more... )

Part One of this series addressed hairline tracing, wig ventilation, and mocking up a coal-scuttle bonnet.

Part Two dealt with setting the wig and covering the buckram base of the bonnet.

Here's how the whole thing turned out, trimming and styling!

( photos galore! )

Another of my long-term projects has gotten to a point that it's worth posting a midstream overview: 1830's hats & hairdos!

I'm doing this project in tandem with our wig master, Jaime Blinn-Bagley. Jaime is giving a guest lecture on lace-backed facial hair and hand-ventilated lace-front wigs to my millinery class.

The students are almost finished with a unit on buckram hat foundations and the next unit is all about wigs, how hats interact with hair, and hairstyles that are really more like hats (i.e., huge 18th c. Madame de Pomadour wigs with buckram infrastructures). If you want to cruise through a cool photogallery that illustrates more on this topic, check out these photographs of the crowns made for Dior's fall 2004 collection, where the crowns have wire foundations for the hairdos built onto them.

Jaime and i decided to choose a period in which hairstyles and hat shapes influenced one another; Jaime would front a wig and style it in the period style, while i simultaneously built a hat designed to be worn with the wig/style. In this way, she would be able to show my class the process of fronting a wig, and i'd be able to document how a milliner takes hair and wigs into consideration during the construction of a hat. So what'd we choose?

( 1830s: Coal scuttle bonnet with Apollo knot updo! )