What Is The Portraiture Project?

Hello! My name is Ella and I love historical clothing.

Combining my love of blogging, sewing, and, historic fashion, I created the Portraiture Project which focuses on faithfully recreating clothing from paintings (no polyester here!) I hope you enjoy following me on my journey and learn something new along the way. I post updates sporadically that include everything from research and photographs to ideas and progress. This project has no timeline and deadline, just a world of ideas, a camera and computer to blog about it.

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18th Century Recipes for Perfumes, Pomatums, Powders and Cosmetics

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Hello, hello! I find 18th century cosmetics and hygiene history extremely fascinating. To say I was more than excited when I found The Toliet of Flora, a cosmetic recepie book published in 1772 would be an understatement! The full name of the book is quite a mouthful: The Toilet of Flora; Or, A Collection of the Most Simple and Approved Methods of Preparing Baths, Essences, Pomatums, Etc: Improved from the French. Now, I will not bore you with more details! I have linked the free Google e-book to the image below! Enjoy! Comment any recipes or interesting information you discovered:
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Godey's Lady Book Online!

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The Project is Finalized!

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Hello! Today I have some exciting news, I have my final-ish draft of the dresses that will be recreated as part of this project! It goes without saying that this is my dream project and although this list might change because hey, I'm only human and am a squirrel eyed seamstress this is the general idea of the list! Now, I do not want to get too overwhelmed so I am starting with only seven projects. Yes, I am crazy, why do you ask? As this project no timeline and actually not structure I just hoping to get to all of these dresses soon, even if that means this project takes two years or ten! I am quite awfully busy right now so I cannot go in and add the artists, dates and other important details of each painting but that will be remedied in due time. Now, in no order enjoy my fun little list, check back to see if anything changes soon:
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