Welcome, friends.

I’m so pleased you found this little corner I’ve created to record my progress and share my work. Sewing and creating videos is such a joy for me, I hope you enjoy your time here.

One of my favorite clothing periods is the 5 years prior to WWI. So when started thinking about creating tiny dresses again last April, that’s where I looked for inspiration on Pinterest. This led me to an amazing cache of Ladies Home Journal archives.

I noticed that several of the designs I liked were attributed to a woman named Blanche G. Merritt. I was a bit nervous about diving into the patternmaking process, so I decided to procrastinate a bit by seeing if I could find anything else about her life.

She was born Blanche George in Jacksonville, Vermont and died in Rockville, Maryland in 1930. She attended art school in Boston and then went to Paris to study portrait painting. Blanche married Henry L. Merritt in 1901 in New York but he died when she was still quite young. She was a fashion editor of Ladies Home Journal and also worked for the New York Herald and newspapers in Texas and Arizona, where I believe she met her second husband, Kendall B. Cressey.

At this point I realized I was stalking a dead person and should probably stop procrastinating and dive into patternmaking!