My first dressmaking project

Vogue 2909 is the pattern I have chosen using a thick purple silk with a black synthetic anti-static lining. The picture on the pattern is shown above.

I first made a toile using some left over lining from my recent curtain-making project.

The toile was made from the pattern based on the size corresponding to initial measurements, but it needed significant adjustment. These are my notes of the two fittings.

Changes were transferred to the paper pattern and the pieces cut out.




When doing the toile the tailors' tacks didn't stay in well. For the silk I used a proper basting thread which was much better. Most of these tacks mark the darts.



To stop the fraying I overcast the edge all round with thin cotton thread. The next picture shows the dart being basted, using pins inserted vertically to line the tacks up. I feel more comfortable sewing the silk by hand. I intend to use the machine more for the lining.

Reconstructing a George III cruet

When my grandmother was moving in the 1970s she gave away some of her furniture and effects to members of the family, her new purpose built flat being much smaller than her cold, damp maisonette. Other items which she felt were of no interest or value were thrown away.

A teenager at the time I had limited knowledge of antiques but when peering into her skip my eyes alighted on a curious piece of metalwork. It was completely black, with a base, four feet, seven rings - five large and two much smaller ones - and a handle. I had a look underneath to see if it had any marks to indicate it was made of silver but there was no familiar lion passant or leopard's head so it was clearly a worthless piece of electroplate or pewter. It appeared to have my grandfather's family crest engraved on it so I reckoned it was worth taking home anyway along with a cheap, badly chipped painted metal badge of my grandfather's school.

After applying some polish it became clear that there was plenty of silver plate left under the tarnish - in fact there were no signs that the electroplating had worn away. I dont remember how long it was before I looked again at the marks or how long it was before I realised the thistle, castle and other marks meant that this was sterling silver assayed in Edinburgh, and made by Patrick Robertson in 1764. This is what it looks like today.

On doing some research I found that it was the stand for what is known as a "Warwick cruet", that it would have held three silver casters and two silver-capped cut glass bottles, whose tops would have been placed in the two small rings when the cruet was in use. My mother had been given a Georgian caster as a gift many years before and sure enough it matched and fitted one of the rings. Other casters had been given out as gifts to other members of the family it seems so the set had been broken up. Given the kerfuffle surrounding my late uncle's will and other family politics, negotiating the reunification of the casters was out of the question, so there the matter rested until a couple of years ago.

The idea of reconstructing the cruet in something approaching its original form had long been in the back of my mind. With the increasing availability of auction catalogues and dealers stock on line I started doing some searching and soon came across a caster for sale by a London dealer of the same date and the same maker as my mother's. After checking sizes and designs it turned out to be very similar, and although larger, of the right size to fit in the front ring which would normally hold the largest caster.



One more caster and two silver topped bottles and I would be there. My heart leapt a couple of weeks a go when I found just the right pair of bottles coming up at auction.



But then I saw the date of the sale, which had been the previous day. I had missed them and they had sold for an affordable £100. I was so annoyed with myself. But studying the picture stirred a memory. Many years ago I had carefully checked all my mother's glassware collection to see if any bottles would fit and none had. However there was one bottle whose black metal top looked very like those in the auction catalogue. Could this be from one of the missing bottles? Last weekend I had a close look at it. It was unhallmarked but clearly silver and of the right design. The acid test would be whether it fitted the small ring. It did, perfectly. It can be seen in place in the picture with the casters. It must have been kept and refitted to a different bottle after the original had been lost or smashed.



So now what? I am thinking of having the silver bottle top copied and of commissioning a pair of modern reproduction cut glass bottles for them to go on. It will almost certainly be more expensive than hanging on for another old pair to come up at auction, but this feels like a more honest way to proceed and one which preserves more of the original. For the last caster I fear there is no option but to wait until one appears on the market.

As a footnote, my mother's family did not apply for their coat of arms until the 1790s, had not been wealthy earlier in the century nor had any links with Scotland as far as I know. The cruet therefore was probably bought second hand and the crest engraved on it several decades after it had been made.

Rediscovering a family portrait

Jane Royds by James Lonsdale, circa 1830

In 1910 the banker Sir Clement Royds published The pedigree of the family of Royds, an extensively researched genealogy of two closely related branches of his family. The Roydses rose from struggling yeoman farmers to great wealth on the back of the wool trade in Rochdale and Halifax during the second half of the 18th century, subsequently moving into banking and land ownership. The book includes a large number of photogravure reproductions of family portraits. My copy came to me as part of my late uncle Kenrick Armitstead's family history archive.

Jane depicted in The pedigree of the family of Royds

Most of the Rochdale branch's portraits followed the line of descent of the landed estate. This was sold shortly after the second world war and in 1988 Jimmy Royds, the heir, sold the Royds portraits, including Lonsdale's magnificent full length one of James Royds, to Roger Royds of Braidwood, New South Wales - a distant cousin. However not all the portraits in Sir Clement's book found their way to Australia. James's daughter-in-law Jane Hudson, who had married his eldest son Clement, had also been painted by Londsale. The picture seemed to have disappeared without trace - until I came across it on e-bay.

The portrait as it appeared on ebay

In 2003 I acquired an oil portrait of the artist Mabel Royds, my Royds great grandmother's first cousin (Jane was my 3xgt grandfather's sister-in-law). That portait was painted in 1911 and too late for Sir Clement's book, but it put me on the look out for others. After trawling fruitlessly through many pages of Google results I came across the above image, which I instantly recognised from the book. Critically the sitter (and artist) had been identified from the label on the frame.

and the crucial label on the frame

The picture had been offered by an American seller a number of times with successively lower retentions until it had sold to a buyer in New York for about $1,500. It seemed clear that the buyer was not a dealer, but I got in touch with him anyway to give him some information about the sitter and ask for a photograph for my collection.

before cleaning

Over the next few weeks as we exchanged correspondance it became clear that he had been taking the picture round the main New York sale rooms and had been disappoitned by the estimates he was given. Eventually I made my move and offered to buy the picture at a price which gave him a comfortable profit. He accepted and the picture was shipped back home.

Detail

The New York e-bayer had been scrupulously honest about the state of the picture. It was in poor shape, as was the frame. There was some loss of paint and the whole canvas had been coated with polyurethane varnish while the gilded frame - probably original - had been covered in cheap gold paint. My restorer Ros Whitehouse, http://www.rosalind-whitehouse.com/, believes the picture must have been kept in a damp place for some years. She lined the canvas then painstakingly removed the polyurethane with a scalpel before taking off the grimy varnish beneath. The frame was an even bigger task, but much of the original gilding was eventually uncovered and retained.

As a family document the picture is invaluable and this is how I had been regarding it. But what about its quality as a work of art? Lonsdale was a famous painter in his lifetime. He had been a pupil of Romney and had a prolific output, depicting most of the leading figures of the day, although today he is little known. Only two of his portraits are on permanent display in at the National portrait gallery. One is of Caroline of Brunswick, wife of Geroge IV, which bears some resemblance to Jane Royds's portrait:

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/largerimage.php?LinkID=mp02794&page=1&role=art&rNo=5

Judging from some of his other work I suspect he was happier painting men than women. Jane's bust seems anatomically implausible and Queen Caroline's portrait has an awkwardness about it. One of the NPL's curators went as far as telling me it was one of her least favourite pictures in the gallery. Even after the inevitable flattery, Jane was clearly no oil painting herself. My wife disliked the picture, and from an aesthetic point of view I can sympathise. I ended up giving it to my mother.

There is another portrait of Jane Royds. Probably painted ten years later, and on a grander scale, it used to hang with that of her husband in the family bank in Rochdale. This eventually became part of RBS and was in the vaults of their archive the last time I enquired after it.

Dark green colour scheme at Alnwick

Alnwick castle, featured in the current edition of Interiors magazine, seems to have been redecorated recently. Its dining room has a dark green colour scheme which I am now studying with interest. They have used silk on the walls, rather than my humble wallpaper.

There is a slight coincidence here. One of my portraits is of the Countess of Northumberland, an ancester of the present Duke. She later married the Earl of Montagu who built Boughton House. She sat several times for Lely. The original version, of which mine is one of many studio copies, is still at Boughton.

Curtains now in place, but how to pull everything together?

Three swags and one tail have now gone up so I am starting to see the effect. I am quite pleased with my efforts, considering it's the first pair of curtains I have made. There are some defects. The fringe is causing some puckering in two of the swags because I pulled the thread too tight.

The bigger issue now is how to pull the whole colour scheme together. The gold of the silk is brighter and yellower than the ochre of the woodwork, cornice and gold of the picture frames, and the current rugs, cushions, furniture table lamps etc are still a bit of a mess. I think I need to reinforce the gold colour of the silk eg by use of cushions and lampshapes. I also need to choose a fabric for a chaise longue I bought at auction and which is at the restorers.

What should this be upholstered in?

Interior decorating is hard to get right.

First Swag Completed

The first swag is finished (only five more to make now):

The fringe came with the ends sealed with cellotape. When I took it off everything started unravelling which was most alarming. I coped with it by oversewing several times. A better solution, which I learned from some helpful people on http://my.decozo.com/index.php, the soft furnishing and curtain making discussion forum, was to use glue. This was confirmed by a quick visit to Henry Newbery's shop just off Oxford Street http://www.henrynewbery.com/contact.html. They recommended using a hot glue gun, then hitting the end down onto a piece of glass to cool it and flatten the end.

The full swag, complete with lining interlining and fringe, behaves a little differently from my mock up in lining fabric. It holds its shape much better, but doesnt come down quite as far even though it was made from the same pattern.

I am quite pleased with the appearance. One purpose of the green and yellow fringe was to tie the curtains into the wallpaper, which is a dark green damask design, from Watts of Westminster (no relation) http://www.wattsofwestminster.com/. The green is a good match with the wallpaper but the yellow in the fringe, which is a cool lemon, doesnt really match the yellow of the silk which is a warm gold. I am not entirely happy with this, but I guess I will need to wait to see the whole thing assembled and in place before really being able to judge.

Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian"

Thanks to the wonders of Bookfinder http://www.bookfinder.com/ I have now manged to track down a copy of Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian". It is a fairly weighty quarto volume, published privately, documenting the all too brief life of Julian Royds Gribble VC. It was assumed that he had died on a first world war battlefield, but it was later discovered that he had been captured and was a PoW. Before he could be released however he succumbed to the flu pandemic.

Norah, his grief stricken mother, seems never to have been able to come to terms with her son's death and in 1923 published this biography, including all the letters he had written to her as a child. It is almost too poignant to read.

Norah, a member of the Royds family and my great grandmother's first cousin, was painted by Singer Sergent when she was younger. The Taubman museum in Roanoke, Virginia now owns the picture and has named their cafe after her. http://www.taubmanmuseum.org/

It is difficult for us now to understand this kind of suffering. My grandmother lost her twin brother in WWI but her way of coping seems to have been the opposite of Norah's. According to my mother she never spoke about him.