Out for a spin

Guess what I and five other lovely ladies from the Swedish 19th Century Society did last Saturday?

Wheee!

Such a luxury, but I haven't taken a ride in a horse-drawn carriage since I was a child, I think. Totally worth the expense!

We had planned for a sleigh ride, but there wasn't enough snow so we had to settle for wheels instead. Didn't matter!

To the right you see my friend Helena, who graciously
let me borrow some of these pictures to post here. She took the initiative
to start the Swedish 19th century society last year and invited me to help out
a bit so I made the society's web page which you can check out, although it's
only in Swedish for now.  We're also on Facebook.

My curls straightened faster than you could say "jinglebells".
By my side is Caroline who takes many of the pictures I put on this blog nowadays... Thank you, dearest.

I made a few new things to wear for the event but I'll have to leave it for another post. I had to wash the gown afterwards and now it needs a good ironing.

Natalie outside the tiny café where we warmed up.

It was a chilly ride but we went for hot chocolate (by a fireside!) afterwards.

I really want to do this again. We saw two wolves! Okay, wolves in captivity, but still...

Finished gown for the 12th Night Ball

Hello again, and a happy, prosperous New Year to you all!

In my last post, I showed you some in progress-pics of my spangled gown.

I finished it last week, just in tme for Gustaf Skål's 12th Night Ball.

It was a lovely event and I enjoyed it very much in spite of severe sleep depravation. As usual, I didn't take any picture because I lack a sufficient device for that, but I bugged a lovely, young mademoiselle to take some shots of me in the gown.

I was just about to leave when the photos were taken and, as you can see, my hair was in its final stages of collapse:



I had my hair cut a couple of months ago so there isn't so much I can do with it yet. I had managed some very nice curls but didn't use enough hairspray and pins so things got quite messy (but I had awesome volume for days afterwards!).

The flash revealed my underthings! Oops!

The place was crowded but my train hardly got stepped on at all. And I only lost two sequins!




Overall, I was rather pleased with the gown, but:

a. I really could lose some weight,
and
b. it needs much, much more embellishment! It don't mean a thing if it aint got that bling, or something.

Luckily, I have lots of sequins left so there's something for me to do during those long winter nights.

Except that I'm busy as a bee with completing about a million things for an event on the 28th. It hasn't been without backlashes and revised plans and I'm still very disoriented and confused about what I need to do and in what order. But I think I'll save that for a later post!