Vintage repairs

Posted in Uncategorized by liztregenza

A few weeks back I took a few of my dresses that needed repairs to the wonderful Nanna Sandom aka Splendid stitches. I left 6 of my dresses with her, and what can I say? She did a WONDERFUL job. I wish I had taken pics of the dresses before so that you can see what I had done, but these are just a few of them dresses I had fixed.

Now, I have a bit of a thing with altering vintage. I will only ever alter things that have been altered previously, and this was the case with all of these garments. If a piece is in really superb original condition I don’t like to do it as I feel that it “alters” the history of the garment.

This is my infamous giraffe print Horrockses. The back of the dress had been altered at some point and was incredibly messy. Look how great it looks now! I think I’ll be wearing this at Epsom festival of vintage…it should make me pretty easy to find.

This one had a new zip put in it. I think I bought this about 4 years ago and hadn’t got round to putting the zip in. I’m so happy to have this back in my wearing collection…I’m wearing this one tomorrow night so I’ll share pics of this properly on tuesday!

And this STUNNING Rhona Roy dress is one of my best recent purchases. This had been previously taken out, so I had it taken back in to fit me better around the bust.

If you need your vintage repaired visit splendid stitches website.

21Aug2012

The best of my Horrockses collection

Posted in Horrockses by liztregenza

Today I’m bringing back one of my favourite Horrockses for yet ANOTHER blog post, this is because I’ve had some rather exciting extra information on it… and an extra part added to it.

This is the Horrockses in question, which i was wearing in the latest issue of Vintage Explorer magazine.

Now, shortly after I posted about this dress in May a lovely lady got in contact with me and offered to sell me the MATCHING SHAWL, of course, I couldn’t turn down an opportunity like that, as it made it a complete outfit. Like the dress this was also in perfect condition.

This dress was not only special to me because of the stunning fit, but also because it was one of the dresses used for the Horrockses bed linen collection.

You can read the full details of the dress in this blog post:

http://queen-tree.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/my-new-horrockses-dress.html

At the time i assumed that the dress dated between 1955 and 1958, and was very happy to find out that my dating was infact BANG ON correct. The lovely Tessa Richards of Rainbow Valley Vintage tweeted me a picture of MY dress as featured in Vanity fair in May 1958.

I love it when a tale about a vintage dress all comes together!

19Aug2012

Exciting new Horrockses purchase…and other vintage fun.

Posted in Horrockses by liztregenza

Yesterday my Ma and I took a trip to Salisbury and came away with some vintage TREATS. In posts such as these I normally like to save the best purchase till last, but I am SO excited about this one that I have to share the best one first!!!

Here is my stunning new Horrockses that I picked up. This little number dates to the mid fifties roughly and the complicated cut suggests to me that it is a John Tullis design. What is interesting is that the dress has two labels. Its normal Horrockses label and also a store label “Maison Tesink” Fred H. Laan Den Haag”. I looked up the store and found this was in existence from 1956 in the Hague- Holland. (I don’t speak Dutch so this is what my hopeful vague translation is suggesting!). The reason why I was so intrigued is that normally Horrockses dresses purchased abroad would have had a different export label, but this has the label found in the UK.

The dress, even better, was picked up for a mere £50. Which for any dress this beautiful is reasonable- but for a Horrockses I thought was a great price.