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Hi friends!  I will be be travelling to Venice Carnivale again this year, so there will be a shipping delay until March 2nd.  All orders placed will begin shipping again by March 3rd.  You can follow along on my Venice adventures on my instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/dames_a_la_mode/?hl=en  

Oh the 1830s!  Such excess!  Such silliness!  Big hair and even bigger sleeves!  And oh yes...big jewelry to match.  Quite some time ago I received some vintage teardrops in the mail and they ended up being *much* bigger than I realized.  I tucked them away in a drawer thinking I'd never use them and then while doing some research on 1830s jewelry I came across this image:  Miss Major by John Wood Dodge, 1835.  Cincinnati Museum of Art. There are many examples of large-scale earrings in the 1830s, but these in particular had a resemblance to the pieces I had...

An 18th Century Ballet Costume When I started musing about costumes I wanted to take to Carnivale in Venice, I immediately knew an 18th Century ballet costume was going onto my list.  I'd always love the frothy, impractical silliness of these costumes but had never had a good excuse to make one.  But it seemed perfect for Venice!There's a large series of ballet costumes painted by Jean-Frederic Schall in the 18th Century, and while they are obviously stylized (um...look at those waists!) they provided my main inspiration for my dress Starting out I only had two specific ideas: I wanted...

It's time again for one of my favorite annual events: Georgian January! Back in 2015 I was dreading the onset of another grim and blah January, so I decided to host an Instagram challenge to share some pretty things to brighten up our month.  Boy am I glad of that, because it has become a wonderful tradition and a great way to start off the new year!  We have nearly 10,000 tags on Instagram at the moment, and I know this year will be even better! The rules are so simple.  Each day I give you a prompt and then...