Child Form Dressed for the Colonial Program

 Maya came over after school today and asked me if she could borrow the child form to use in her part of her fourth grade class's program on colonial America.  She will be dressed as a tailor and will be demonstrating and explaining what tailors did in those days.  She thought the child form would make a good prop.  We thought it would be good to put some clothes on the child form to demonstrate what it was used for, and so we went rummaging in our collection of old clothes that we've gotten from Tobacco Barn to use in making things, and we found a beautiful handmade child's white cotton coat that we had already cut a chunk out of.  Maya hemmed it to make it a short frock coat, using her treadle machine by herself to do the long hem stitch.

We had other projects to work on this afternoon, including making a faux tiger skin tuxedo jacket for the stuffed bear we made a few weeks ago.  This drawing shows one of the front pieces draped over the bear.  We kept getting waylaid into working more on the colonial project, as the program is supposed to be tomorrow evening.

We found a couple of antique flat irons that I dragged home from Italy one summer.  Definitely they will add to the tailor's workshop.  We also found my grandmother's old darning egg, an ancient home- made pin cushion that came in one of the drawers of my treadle machine, an old spool of thread, an old awl.  We did manage to get the whole jacket pinned and cut out, and Maya sewed two buttons on the white coat plus made a collar stiffener out of stiff mull to go on the coat.  Then Jesse moved in and decided he loved the pattern pieces as well as my pen.  This drawing shows him lying heavily on all of the pattern pieces after having batted them around enough to loosen several pins.