The Tea Rose, by Jennifer Donnelly

At first I was not super into this book, but it's basically As The Crow Flies with a female main character. The writing style is even kind of Jeffrey Archer-esque. Fiona Finnegan's father is killed in a deliberate accident for being a union leader, her fiancé, Joe, is forced to marry his boss's daughter (Millie) when she date rapes him, and then her mother's killed by Jack the Ripper, her baby sister dies of illness, and her brother kills himself. So she goes to America, getting on the boat by pretending to be married to Nick Soames, her new awesome gay BFF, and that her remaining little brother is their son. Once she gets to New York, she takes over her drunk uncle's store and becomes set on becoming a tea merchant and ruining her ex-employer, the man who had her father killed. While I'm not a huge fan of it, I give Donnelly props for taking a typically masculine story and giving it an incredibly strong female protagonist and I'm going to finish it.

I really do try not to make a huge deal out of clothing descriptions in books, but I've been holding off on this one for a while and it's finally snapped my tiny mind.

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Look, I get what Donnelly's doing. I've outlined stories where it happens. She wants to show her heroine as doing her own thing and being fashion-forward and changing the prevailing style, and since we prefer more streamlined clothes it has to be fussy->plain. Lucile to Chanel. But if you want to do that, you have to set your story in the proper time period for her to be plausibly taken as fashion-forward and not a prostitute or complete weirdo by the other characters.

First day of unemployment

Not much to say in detail - the patterning was trickier than I expected. The mourning dress's lining was cut on the bias, which made it a bit more annoying, and the sleeve was a nightmare for the same reason. I brought PoF with me because sometimes I find it helpful to look at a similar pattern (which I did for that lining a couple of times), but there were no 1840s long sleeves with pleats at the elbow to look at to try to figure out what I might be doing wrong. CoWC has one but I didn't bring it with me. It took me I don't know how long to get the angles of the bottom corners right. MAN. But I am happy with the end result.

The pink dress ... first off, I need to figure out the right word for the fabric. It's a very open weave, and quite stiff but not starched. ??? The lining was much easier than on the previous dress, but the outer fabric is all pleated and a PAIN IN THE ASS. I didn't even get to the skirt because it's covered in tucks and since they're graduated in size they kind of need to each be measured. On the other hand, I was correct that the bodice is 9" high, and that's awesome.

I'm not sure they realize how many things I want to take patterns of, but I plan to keep going back a couple of times a week for a while. Although it's more important that I find 18th century clothing - I'm going to call a few museums that focus on that time period tomorrow to see if they have anything, but I'm not optimistic. Williamsburg really cleared the area out, and it's a damned shame. Ugh ugh ugh now I'm thinking about it again and getting pissed off.