Knitting Tea Party

Today was Knit In Public Day. The library hosted a get-together on the front lawn, and a lady from the yarn shop downtown came as well. (And handed out coupons. Evil woman. I saw everyone from our little group at the yarn shop right after the library thing was over!)

Our knitting group, Weekly Fiber, meets Saturday mornings at various coffee shops to chat and knit (or crochet or embroider or hand sew or whatever--mostly knit). We assumed this event would just be a "come set up your lawn chairs wherever and chat" kind of thing, so we decided to bring a table and chairs, and I brought my fancy antique tea cups, tea set, coffee pot, and cloth napkins. That way we could still get our usual caffeine fix! One lady also brought muffins and scones.


It ended up that the library had a display of knitting books, chairs, and an awning... on the other side of the tree where we had room to set up in the shade. We felt slightly anti-social, sitting apart, but we enjoyed ourselves, and several people came over to say hi.

Melissa, Ann, me

After a while, a woman and her just-out-of-college daughter joined us and enjoyed some tea and conversation. It was a lovely morning with perfect weather! We're all very glad we went.

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Last week when I lived in the Luxury Tent for a couple of days, I got on a 1920's kick and researched fashion, shoes, hairstyles, makeup, food.... This website was a great help (and makes me really want to go to that event)! Then, of course, I decided to sew my own 20's dress. It wasn't just flappers! Very few women wore fringed dresses, headbands with feathers, and rolled down stockings. (There were no fishnets unless you were *gasp* in a burlesque show or similar.) However, long strings of beads were popular with everyone!

I liked the look of the boat-neck, kimono sleeve dresses, and rather than sew on trim, I wanted to do embroidery. I didn't use a pattern, just traced a t-shirt for the general shape, measured the length I wanted it to be, and made it a little extra big to begin with--it's easy to make things shorter, but rather harder to make them longer!


I had the dress mostly "built" in a day. Over the next few nights, I did the embroidery, starting out with the little flowers on the sash (which were pretty wonky, but it's not really noticeable), then doing the ones along the neckline and bottom hem.


The neck facing was the most fiddly bit. I ended up hand-stitching a little of it because I had to fudge it to make it work, but I think it turned out fine.


The skirt is in four panels: the front and back are flat and plain, and the two narrower panels at the hips are gathered. The embroidery pattern (which I made up) could be little four-petal flowers, like lilacs.


I call this dress the Lilac Garden Party Dress.