I had the most amazing  weekend, taking the class "An Introduction to the Study of Historical Dress 1850 -1900" with The
School of Historical Dress. It was basically like being taken to a museum, having them open the cases and invite you to touch, inspect the insides and generally get up close and personal with the most amazing historical dresses! At the same time, the person who wrote the books in the gift shop tells you all about the fashions and what to look for. We even got to see unpublished hand drawn sketches by Janet Arnold.
As part of the course we also got to try making bobbin lace (I came home and got out the hobbycraft kit I've had untouched for ages and made some basic lace on my own last night!), had a talk on the history of sewing machines (seriously fascinating!) and also learnt about how to make patterns from historical clothes (WAY harder than it sounds!!)
Oh, and I learnt what faille is, and how to pronounce it - I've been sayin 'fail' in my head but it's actually 'fay'.
I'm simultaneously really inspired and a little overwhelmed by how far away from historically accurate my stuff is. But as long as each project is better than the last I'm happy :)
They've asked that we not share pictures as they're planning on publishing more books based on some of these items, but I really wanted to tell you all about this and say if you can go, go!
http://www.theschoolofhistoricaldress.org.uk/

 Well, as you've noticed I haven't been keeping up with the HSF challenges very well (but its ok cos my target was to do 10 out of 26!) That doesn't mean I'm not inspired by them though! So, for those challenges I can't take part in but would really love to, I decided I share my imaginary projects!
For the stripes challenge, I'd love to use this Sahri which I bought around 10 years ago when I was a student - believe it or not, I paid £10 in the charity shop for this beautiful piece! It's been worn a couple of times as fancy dress, and was hung up in my room as decoration for a couple of years, but until now I've never found the design worthy of the fabric.

But thanks to HSF I now know exactly what I want to make with it! I was flipping through the Harper's Bizarre Victorian fashion book and came across this plate:

It's perfect! I think I'll have to carefully plan the trim placement based  on what I have available, and probably mix in some plain pink fabric but I LOVE  it! This is now on the 'to sew list' and hopefully will get made some time  this year!