It's Caturday!

Kids, crayfish and a cat, living together in perfect harmony.
Annibale Caracci.

Museum goodies

An early holiday gift from three Swedish museums: The Royal Armoury, the castle of Skokloster and the Halwyl museum? Yes, please! Link

These three museums now have an online database with a vast collection of objects from the middle ages and onwards so here is something for all tastes:





The website is in Swedish only for the time being, but to make a simple search for garments, type "kläder" (clothes) in the search field on the front page and you'll get hundreds of results.

Happy browsing!

Cristmas in 8 days...

...here in Sweden, as we celebrate on the 24th.

This year I decided to make gifts by hand to a selected few, and they are all costume related! No pics yet, in case those selected few should stop by here, but after the holidays I'll make a post about it.

So these projects have kept me rather busy lately, but every now and then I've been able to work on something for myself.


This is supposed to become a round gown of the 1790s for the 12th Night ball in January.

It's a dark navy cotton ( that looks much darker in reality)that I had planned to use for something entirely different but when I started on this project, I thought it would be perfect as the base for a masquerade gown, since the Gustafs Skål's traditional 12th night ball has a masked ball theme. I would go as some kind of Nox/Luna goddess and the dark cotton would be the night sky and the sequins stars and moons and stuff.


Except that this 12th night ball didn't have a masquerade theme! Oops. I had to think again. And unpick a lot of sequins.

I had planned to have the phases of the moon running along the hemline and I kind of stuck with that concept for the current design, but much more simplified as you see. Overall this is a very simple design compared to the real gowns of the 1790s.

As a comparison:



The KCI

Imatex

I know my limitations so a simple design is quite allright for me. I've still used about 1,500 sequins. I will use some more for a couple of rows on the sleeves too.


I think the cat likes it!

Anyway, is anyone else having problems with Blogger? It's very weird for me, I only have "Add image" and preview options in the toolbar and I kind of hate how Blogger is dealing with images. Aaargh!

It's Caturday!

This cat is very much alive but it has gone to kitty heaven - So. Much. Fish! Om nom nom...

The ray. Jean-Baptiste Siméon-Chardin, 1728

It's Caturday!

There is a terrible pun here somewhere but I'll spare you. I have no idea where I got this picture.

How to get those big, lovely images from the KCI site

Hello everyone,

perhaps I'm the last person in the world to figure this out, but if not so maybe someone could benefit from this.

You all know how the KCI site updated their site with much, much better photos and a nice zoom feature a while ago? It's great but sometimes you wished you had a larger, full image of their beautiful garments. It turned out you can, with a little fidgetting.

I'm using the Google Chrome "Inspect element"-feature in this example, but I'll show you how it's done even if you don't use Chrome.

First, let's find a garment you want to get a full, large image of

. I choose the red and white striped gown for this example.

Right-click the image and choose "Inspect element" (as it should say if you're using an English version of Chrome).

Now a little window will open at the bottom of the page.

One row will be highlighted, but it's not important.

We are interested in the line two rows up. There's a link there that looks like this, in this case: /archives/digital_archives/photos/28_xl_AC05316.jpg Note that it ends with ends with .jpg and has "xl" in the title. Click!

Oh, shiney! A new window with a big, crisp image for your viewing pleasure will open. That's it.

Now, if your browser doesn't have an inbuilt feature like this it's still easy to find the treasure.

Right-click anywhere on the image or the text and hit "View source" or "View code" or whatever your browser calls it.

You should get a new window with a lot of code. Hit Ctrl+F to search within the code. Search for jpg.

There will only be two results and you should probably get the right result first, but make sure it has "xl" in the name. If it has, click the link, and have fun with your image!