When I made my new plant dyed 16th century German dress I knew that I would need to make a new smocked shirt as the old one was so fancy. So I decided on a medium weight unbleached linen fabric. Th…

Thank goodness for Rate the Dress! It means that I have a definite excuse to focus entirely on historical fashions at least once a week! We were having such a good run on Rate the Dress: so many 8+ ratings in a row! And then I posted the pink, pigeon breasted, ruffle-dy, smock-dy, totally over-the-top 1900s frock-dy last week. Pop! There went the high ratings bubble! It wasn’t too terrible: there were a lot of 6s, and just enough 8s and 9s to bring it up to a nice, round 7 out of 10. For this week’s Rate the Dress, we’re looking at a period I’m not such an expert on, and going back to the mid 16th century, to a ‘Portrait of a Lady’ by Peter de Kempeneer (Pedro Campaña). Though de Kempeneer was Flemish, he mainly worked in Spain or Italy, and this portrait probably depicts a wealthy Italian noblewoman from Ferrara The sitters gown makes striking use of gold striping to emphasise the cut of the gown, and the fashionable features. The …

That IS a really specific topic, isn’t it? I’m not exactly sure why this topic took my fancy, but for the last 9 months it has been a bit of an obsession. I wanted a project that was b…

maertyrer: attributed to Cornelis Engebrechtsz Saint Barbara and Saint Catherine early 16th century

I have found that for the ‘just stepped out of a painting’ effect, you generally need to address what you are going to do with the top of your head. For many locations and time periods,…

The Oscar-winning actor on portraying the formidable but forgotten woman who used her son to achieve all she could not.