Sasha Festival 2024 Day 2 - Dress a Sasha set up plus dinner guest speaker and souvenirs

After the Children's Fund Auction had finished and the tables which had displayed those items were cleared, the Dress a Sasha entrants were able to set up our displays. We brought our display items (rather large) down to the room using the trolley I normally use for our boxes of street organ music (it is a fabulous multi-purpose trolley which can also be a sack barrow).

There were five categories in action for the 2 themes. Sadly there were no children at this year's festival, and only one teenager, who entered the English Garden assembled by Teenager category on her own. 

The two themes were English Garden and Afternoon tea, with Assembled by or Crafted being the additional elements to split into categories as follows:

English Garden - Assembled by Adult

English Garden - Crafted by Adult

Afternoon Tea - Assembled by Adult

Afternoon Tea - Crafted by Adult

Crafted means all the clothing apart from shoes/socks have to be made by the entrant. 

Assembled by means all the clothing is made by others and the ensemble is assembled by the entrant.

Now that my younger daughter is no longer a teenager, we both entered the English Garden Crafted by Adult. This meant we were competing with each other, however in the months leading up to the festival, we bounced ideas and encouraged each other, it never felt like a competition in our home and I was extremely proud of what my daughter created, especially as she learned so much sewing technique along the way.

I have blogged about what we created in two separate posts: Dress a Sasha created by DollMum's daughter and Dress a Sasha created by DollMum.

Because some people turned up a bit later than others to set up and I wasn't aware of a list of entrants (apparently 18 but only 15 arrived), not all the entries were grouped together in their categories and there was some confusion when a couple of descriptions were hand written on the wrong colour card for the category being entered (we had prepared and printed our descriptions in advance, so did not have that problem). Also there were some entries where the two themes were blended by the entrant and were labelled for one theme, though people might have interpreted them as being in the other theme. For future festivals, to avoid this confusion, I suggest having a printed list of entries in advance so the organiser knows exactly how much table space to allow for each category and each entrant knows in advance what their entrant number will be. If there is ever a Sasha Festival in the UK again and I can attend, please may I organise the Dress a Sasha competition before the festival commences.

Our photos in this post are our Dress a Sasha entries once set up. Photos of the other Dress a Sasha entries will be in a day 3 post, as we were not able to take photos of them until the following morning.

Fair Rosamund and The Secret Garden in the 'English Garden created by Adult' category

DollMum's daughter: Fair Rosamund and DollMum: The Secret Garden 

Fair Rosamund in her garden

Fair Rosamund from the side

Close up of Fair Rosamund's bodice lacing and embroidered waistband

Fair Rosamund in her garden, side view

The Secret Garden

Mary in The Secret Garden

Dickon and Colin in The Secret Garden

Colin tends his tulips in The Secret Garden

Robin, spade, roses, fox and tulips

Fox in the garden

Robin on the spade

Friday evening was dinner together in the conference room, some of us dressed up a bit for the evening. This was the first of the two occasions when we had table hostesses for each table. My daughter and I ended up on a table of 'spares' with no hostess because some people have guests so there is spillage of festival attendees on an additional table, but plenty of hostess gifts, so each of us received a different gift from different table hostesses, which was fun. I was thrilled to receive a gift from JoAnn (a gorgeous little tote bag containing a Peanuts book, a pair of Minnesota shorts with canoes on it and a lovely little white hat) and my daughter received a lovely Sasha logo dress made by Laura O.

Trendon Elliott and Melanie came to dinner on Friday evening

After dinner, we had a guest speaker, none other than John Doggart (son of Sara and John Doggart who owned the Trendon doll factory), who presented a fascinating talk with slides about the innovations which had lead to the factory production of the English Sasha doll. The Doggart family and its ancestral branches had clearly been a family of innovators/inventors/engineers and creatives, no wonder the Trendon dolls are so wonderfully crafted. He was also able to show how there was a Milton Keynes connection in the Doggart family story (John is a retired architect and had worked on some of the innovative buildings in the new town of Milton Keynes, he mentioned that Sasha Morgenthaler had visited Milton Keynes). He also explained that John and Sara had first become aware of Sasha dolls via the Graphis magazine, then the Lindt chocolate wrappers.

Friday evening dinner our table

Friday evening dinner

Friday evening dinner

Friday evening dinner

Smiles for the camera at the Friday evening dinner

John Doggart's talk about Sasha and the Innovators

John Doggart introduces Sasha and the Innovators

John Doggart mentions Bletchley Park

John references Milton Keynes innovations

Innovative architecture in Milton Keynes

John and Sara Doggart

Close knit and supportive family of innovators

Friedland contribution to an essential part in the Spitfire

Graphis magazine

Graphis article about Sasha

Graphis note about good toy manufacture

Technical diagram of innovative head mould for vinyl dolls

Sara Doggart and 
Brenda Walton with a Sasha doll

Geoff Lawton, one of the Trendon innovators

Sasha Morgenthaler gave young Jason Lawton a teddy bear called Pad when she visited the Trendon factory and worked with Jason's father Geoff.

Graphis description of the humanity of Sasha dolls

After John Doggart's fascinating talk, Petrana told us we could open our Festival souvenir boxes. There were lots of gasps of delight when we did because Petrana had made beautiful smocked dresses for each of us, with different fabric, so no two dresses were the same, with matching shoes and underwear. Thank you Petrana, we are delighted with our souvenir outfits. My daughter was very pleased to get a dress which goes well with black shoes, and I'm very happy with the gorgeous pale blue and white pattern and white shoes for my outfit.

My festival souvenir outfit box

My festival souvenir outfit by Petrana - wow!

My daughter's festival souvenir outfit by Petrana - just what she likes

Trudi my C1 Studio doll sits on our table after we had wrapped up our festival souvenirs again

It had been a very long, busy and interesting day at the 2024 Sasha Doll festival.

Sasha Festival 2024 - Dress a Sasha created by DollMum's daughter

After some thought and discussion my younger daughter decided she wanted to enter the 'English Garden Created by Adult' category for the Dress a Sasha competition at the 2024 Sasha Doll Festival, in Milton Keynes. She wanted to feature her Sasha White Dress doll Laura, who has lovely long auburn hair. She looked at paintings and pictures online to find a pre-Raphaelite painting of a girl in a garden she could recreate, and came across the 1854 painting of Fair Rosamund by Arthur Hughes. The story being depicted has a dark twist to it and for a young woman who wears Goth and steampunk influenced outfits as leisure wear, the legend of Fair Rosamund in her hidden garden appealed a lot, as did the composition of the painting. Both of us could see lots of possibilities for how to achieve that scene, we bounced ideas (it was never a competition in our home, even though I was entering exactly the same category) and she decided to treat it as a creative project which she knew would take time and effort to complete. 

The first challenge was deciding how to make the dress in the painting. We sorted through my fabric collection and found some possible candidates, but she was most concerned about how to make the bodice appear really close fitting to outline Rosamund's figure.

The bodice pattern for a Sasha dress I had made before wasn't quite fitted or long enough, so she redrew the pattern (first skill being developed) and made up the first draft using some spare old fabric from a skirt I had made years before. She wasn't satisfied with that version, so redrafted the pattern again and spent time carefully positioning and then stitching the darts using a sewing machine on both the lining (plain white fabric) and the main fabric before stitching the bodice together. She also drew the front bodice pattern for the gauze overlay fabric of the bodice, even though that part of the dress was the bit which was worrying her the most, as the fabric frays so easily.

L-R: pattern for gauze overlay front bodice, back bodice, front bodice pieces

Laura models the second prototype of the bodice

Close up of Laura modelling the second prototype of the bodice

Back view of the second prototype, pinned in place

Inside lining view of the second prototype of the bodice, showing the darts and seams

Once she was happy with the second prototype bodice, she cut the bodice pieces in the main and lining fabrics chosen.

The question about how to do the front edges on the gauze overlay part of the bodice was answered for us by advice from our local sewing shop when one of the staff suggested using the rolled edge stitch on my overlocker machine! It worked, and my daughter was so relieved as she had been trying to roll and stitch the edge by hand with no success at all because it just frayed! Once the rolled overlocking had been done, it was tricky to position the overlay pieces when stitching the bodice together, as the overlay pieces had their seams captured with the other pieces (she did not want to stitch it as a separate bodice and this was exactly the right decision). So there was a lot of precision fitting and stitching, done carefully (she was far more painstaking and patient than I would have been). The overlay fabric does not have darts in it, so was a bit oversize above the waistline, but once the fabric was captured in the side seams, the excess was trimmed and it stretched gently over the darts in the bodice.

Once the bodice was assembled, she did a double gather of the skirt piece then drew up the gather, pinned it carefully to the bodice and then hand stitched the skirt to the bodice, doing a tiny stitch around each tiny gather! I was amazed at the tireless precision. Once she was satisfied that the skirt hung right on the bodice, she stitched the lining to the skirt with tiny neat stitches (not photographed).

Stitching the skirt to the bodice with tiny stitches around each gather

Now the dress was assembled she hemmed the skirt by hand, catching the fabric on the inside by a thread each time so as to make the stitches almost invisible on the outside. Then came the creative bit she was looking forward to doing - the embroidered waistband. She put a 7mm wide dark green satin ribbon in a small embroidery hoop, selected a golden yellow coloured embroidery floss, drew out a scaled copy of the lettering from the painting of the waistband on some paper to get the size of the letters right and started embroidering the ribbon. She wasn't satisfied with anything less than perfect, unpicking stitches occasionally and showing me progress.

DollMum's daughter embroidering the waistband with Rosamund's name

The back of the dress was fastened with snap fasteners (press studs) and the waistband was carefully stitched to the dress once most of them had been stitched on, then the final pair were stitched in line with the waistband. Due to the fullness of the skirt, she decided the back of the skirt did not need to be joined as it was hidden in the display (and she was running out of time), also the fabric edges didn't need hemming because she had cut the skirt from the full width of the fabric, to get a good gather. She put the dress on Laura, fastened it at the back then rejoiced, on the Thursday morning just before the festival, in doing the final detail she had been looking forward to doing all along - the fine lacing of the overlay gauze bodice, using a single thread of cotton to lace the two sides of the bodice together from the waist up in a criss-cross pattern, stitching it while the dress was on the doll, so the tension would be right.

In the meantime, the base and backdrop was being created. Plywood boards were cut to size by our local timber merchant and my husband made up some brass brackets which were used with round head brass screws to fit the boards together. My base and backdrop was made in the same way.

My daughter printed out an enlarged version of the painting to get it to the same scale as the doll, then glued a section of the background of the painting on thick card. However, it didn't cover the whole piece of card, so she used lots of paper leaf and flower sections from the painting in a collage effect to cover the remaining card (back and sides). This collage work took several hours to complete - once again she was meticulous in trying to get it as close to the painting image as she could so it would look natural. The glue stick ran out so she bought a cheap alternative then discovered how rubbish that was, so I got the proper stuff in a quick trip to a local shop.

She painted the base board thick card with acrylic paints, mixing the colours to get the mottled path right, and painted on some fallen leaves, also extending the shadows from the background section of the painting, she said it was good to do some artistic painting again, the last time she did was about 5 years ago for GCSE art.

The Dress a Sasha rules requested entrants use as much in the way of recycled materials as possible, however she purchased some strands of small scale imitation ivy and some plastic flowers from a local shop, as making these would not have been feasible in the time available. We found some blocks of green oasis left over from a craft workshop I had run 6 years ago and she cut out some of the foreground plants and flowers from the enlarged print of the painting, then cut around them to get the shapes right. These were pinned or pushed into the oasis blocks, then arranged on the base board to build up the foreground planting. 

It seemed to make sense to display the description card with a picture of the painting on a miniature easel, as the original was a painting. The description card was glued onto a piece of thick card. The description says:

Fair Rosamund by Arthur Hughes (1854)

Legend tells how Rosamund Clifford was given a hidden garden beyond a maze at Woodstock Palace, Oxfordshire by King Henry II but his jealous wife Eleanor of Aquitaine discovered the entrance and poisoned Fair Rosamund. The iris and foxglove flowers in this painting of her garden predict her death by poison, with the Queen in the background. Historical accounts indicate that when her affair with the king ended, Rosamund went to Godstow Abbey and died there aged 40 in 1176, so was not poisoned by the Queen. This pre-Raphaelite painting is now in Australia: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/4069/

Fair Rosamund 'Dress a Sasha' set up at home

Fair Rosamund in her hidden English garden

Bodice and waistband

Close up of the embroidered waistband and fine lacing on the bodice

Fair Rosamund 

The plants in the foreground of Fair Rosamund's garden

The information card about the Fair Rosamund 'Dress a Sasha' 

Fair Rosamund 'Dress a Sasha' all ready for the festival

Towards the end of making her Dress a Sasha, my daughter said she would soon need another creative project to work on, as she had enjoyed this one so much.