I might as well face it, I'm addicted to piping

So in the end, for my maid's uniform, it was between Anna pre-1920...

...And Anna post-1920. 

And I only chose the latter because I didn't have appropriate white lace in my stash for the collar of the former, and, well, I wanted to do more piping. 

It's a very simple process - just cut diagonal strips of chosen fabric and sew them together to make one long strip. (Don't ask me why I sewed black thread onto white, I'm just lazy). 

Iron it in half lengthwise...

And, using a zipper foot, sew some string into the fold in one continuous length. 

I'm terrible at taking progress-photos, so here is a picture of the dress almost-finished. I just have to do the buttonholes really. 

The collar isn't quite the right shape, and I did have to add an extra little dart into it to to make it sit properly on the shoulders, so hopefully that won't be noticeable. Haven't decided if I'll actually bother to make the apron or not...knowing me I'll just get distracted by something else. Probably something else with piping. 

1860s day dress

Somehow I managed, between assignments, to make a whole Victorian-style dress in the past couple of weeks, complete with techniques I haven't tried before. (Ignore the lack of buttons though - I'm still awaiting them in the post). I used Laughing Moon's Ladies' Early 1860's Day Dress for the main part of the dress, but as I wasn't convinced about the sleeves, I used the sleeves from Butterick's Making History #5831.

The back featured some weird fake-seams which I managed to pull off pretty well:

And I did a whole 'lotta do-it-yourself piping, which I've also never done before. I thought it would be real fiddly and difficult, but it was real easy! I made metres of the stuff! Unforch didn't get any photos of it before I used it, so will endeavour to get some in the future. But here are some of it on the dress itself:

My next project will be a similar-ish style inspired by the maid's outfits from Downton Abbey. Despite them not being fancy or sparkly like the upstairs costumes, there's something about them I'm really drawn to. I like their simplicity and functionality, and above anything else perhaps I just relate more to the working class than the upper class. Anyway, here are some examples:

And here are a couple of other examples I found while Google-snooping.

I think I'll do a black one first and then hopefully source enough patterned green or something similar for another one. Now those wretched buttons better show up soon, I hate having UFOs lying around.