A visit to a local museum

A week ago I finally went to see a small local museum that I've been meaning to visit for ages but never got around to go there. It's called Sailor's Home Museum and it's located in a building that was built in the 1730s. The rooms of the house are furnished in 1880s style to represent a sailor's home and tenant's quarters. Because I actually ought to be sewing for an event that's only two weeks from now, I'm simply going to share my photos from the museum without much further introduction.

We'll start with the tenant's quarters...

The wallpapers of the house were probably my favorite part from the museum. They were beautiful and I also loved that they weren't all perfect and spotless but they were partly crumpled on the walls and had imperfections in the matching of the papers.

Two of the rooms in the house also had painted walls instead of wallpapers.

The blue bed chamber was my favorite, of course! ;)

A close-up of the lovely wallpaper...

And here's the building from the outside...

The visit to the museum was nice although it was a very short one since I was there with someone who is almost not at all interest in history and who doesn't have much understanding nor appreciation for photography either. This is unfortunately not the first time I get reminded that you really should always go to a museum who is as much interested in seeing it as you... and who has the patience to wait for you to take as many photos as you like so you don't have to take them hastily...

The next post will be about sewing, I swear! ;)

Similarities...

This following fashion plate has appeared on my Pinterest feed quite a few times over the past couple of days and I guess many of you, who have already seen the said fashion plate and spent a lot of time browsing the pages of The Cut of Women's Clothes by Norah Waugh, have noticed that the cut of the dress depicted in it looks quite close to one of the patterns in the book (see diagram XXXII). It's a pity London Museum doesn't have photos of the original garment, that the pattern was taken from, on their online collections so we can't compare the fashion plate with it.

Journal des Luxus, December 1795.

This fashion plate also reminds of a quite similar dress (in cut) in a painting by Louis Léopold Boilly (below).

At the entrance (1796-1798), by Louis Léopold Boilly.

Why am I bringing this up on the blog, then? Mainly, just out of the joy of sharing and, secondly, because I find the raising waistlines of the 1790's very appealing and would love to sew a gown similar in style to these dresses in the future. This is something I'm only dreaming about so therefore it's not going to happen any day soon. But I wanted to write a brief post abut it anyway since the dresses of this type were definitely on my mind when I began to sew my pair of transitional stays that I think would work wonderfully for something like these gowns, with rising waists and gathered fronts.

Now, who's tempted to buy that fashion plate from Ebay? ;)