The Dissipated Grandma Sheep (Another Mrs Sandby Cap)

MY first Mrs Sandby Cap was far too respectable. I needed another one.

I mean, no-one would go wooing a young maiden one morning in may in a cap like the one in the photograph below. She might flirt coyly around her lappets, but her virtue is clearly linen-clad – and that is like iron-clad and only slightly more elastic.  No-one, if you follow my meaning, would be stealing this milk-maid’s cheese.

Tabubilgirl wears a white linen lappet cap. She faces the camera, her expression serious. Her finger rests on her chin.

No indeed. Lappet caps are inherently silly, and I have made that my hill on which to gather.

So I did! And it must have been an awfully big hill, because there was a hell of a lot of gathering in it.

I recut the Good Wives Linens Mrs Sandby Cap pattern in white cotton voile, and then I gathered, and then I added lace, and then I gathered MORE, and only when it looked like a lacy nightmare in a boudoir, did i stop.

A pile of lace-edged ruffle lies on a desk.

The tight u-bend around the lappet point took a few goes to get right.  Adding the lace to the edge of the ruffle extended its depth juuust enough that the regular gathering ration wasn’t quite enough – the ruffle spread out and turned inward like a concave cup.

I ended up sacrificing the gathers in the flat butt of the lappet, but in the end i got the u-bend to lie flat. JUST.

A close-up of an uncompleted lappet cap. In this picture the ruffle is being attached to the pointy flaps of the lappet.

And I gathered and I gathered, 

A close-up of a lace-edge ruffle being attached to a cap.

until suddenly, well, golly gee – here’s an exuberant lappet cap hanging up to dry after the marking pen has been washed out!  Gosh it looks pretty like that.

A lace-edged lappet cap hangs over a towel trail i a bathroom.

And at last – may I present- the milkmaid’s nightmare:

A woman looks quizzically at the camera - she is wearing an extremely ruffly lace-edged lappet cap

There is no universe in which this look has any dignity.

I look like a hydrangea bush.

I look like a pram in a paper-mâchié pantomime.

I look like a dissipated grandma sheep.

It is PERFECT.

A woman wearing an EXTREMELY lace-edged lappet cap looks at the camera. She is backed by a sun-lit landscape and looks very amused by all of it.
 
 
 

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