FANCY DRESS COSTUMES
Fancy dress costumes may be made very quickly. A certain woman who prides herself on being able to do all things in a hurry, invited to a fancy dress ball, accepted the invitation over the telephone to save time.
She let the costume go till the last day, when, at 4 o’clock, she stopped in at a shop and bought several yards of cretonne. Once home, with the help of pins and the maid’s services, she was sewn into her costume—that of a Watteau shepherdess.
The costume consisted of a pink satin foundation dress that she already possessed. The cretonne, pleated into the belt and puffed up into panniers, matched the satin. A wide stain belt laced up the front was the bodice. A little lace shawl made the kerchief. A last summer’s sailor was cocked up into a shepherdess hat with ribbon streamers.
Inside of 40 minutes the shepherdess was ready, telephoned for a taxi and arrived at the ball—a week too soon! It is well to look twice at the date of an invitation.
With an old party frock a pretty costume can often be made if not in as short a time as the one described.
A copy of a well-known picture can often be made with such light changes that they are hardly noticeable, says the New York Herald. The black and white balls that are so popular are even simpler, for fantastic costumes are more successful than those that are historical. A costume can be first planned with black and white cotton cloth, copying some poster or advertisement found in the back of the magazines or in the newspapers.
Peasant costumes are easy to make because all the pattern companies carry one or more patterns suited for costume balls.
Anaconda [MT] Standard 9 January 1916: p. 11
Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire: The very quickest fancy-dress costume Mrs Daffodil has seen at the Hall was worn by an absent-minded gentleman who, just before leaving his flat, realised that the party invitation called for fancy dress. He arrived wearing faultless evening costume, a peevish expression, and a single soda straw in his breast pocket. His character? “The Last Straw.”
Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdotes
You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales
Mrs Daffodil Digresses 