Fashions and Furbelows

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18016, 29 November 1926, Page 12

Fashions and Furbelows

NOTES BY SPECIAL CONTRIBUTORS.

SOME DECORATIVE NOTES.

Dress fastenings offer a certain variety; the high-necked models affording abundant scope for all manner of smart and pretty conceits in jabots, bows, and chic little straight collars held by two decorative buttons. Pour changer, here are the frocks that open to a V shaped over a plastron or waistcoat. There is a craze, considerably on the increase, for square-set jewels. The lastword designs in ear rings (worn wtih a long pendant necklace en suite) are in solid cubes of jet alternataing with strings of small coloured pearls. And lest there should be any misunderstanding, let it be explained that “jet” once inseparably associated with the sable hue of mourning—is now somewhat. of a misnomer. “Jet” in these days is a brilLant-hued novelty worked up into highly decorative ornaments in all manner of colours and an infinite variety of designs. AU that it has in common with the black edition is its gleaming surface. The vogue for “laid-on” skirt hems—very pronounced in Paris—is influencing the footwear designers, who are turning out shoes to match such hems, whether fashioned of silk, or velvet, or fine leather.

TEN-MINUTE TREATMENTS.

RAGS TO THE RESCUE. In addition to your regular toilet, make a habit of devoting five or ten minutes daily to any weak beauty pointy changing the treatment from time to time as a particular trouble vanishes. Regularity and persistence can achieve wonders. Perhaps your hair has a faint, curly tendency, winch hot iron waving would soon destroy. Yet the mild lcink isn’t enough to make your side pieces look pretty. Bright idea! The old-fashioned curl rags, costing nothing, which we

moderns seem to have entirely forgotten, will do the trick. While still nightly-clad in the morning, brush out your hair and twist it up into rags torn from clean old linen. Wear a rubber cap to your bath. When completely dressed, remove the rags and you’ll have curled side pieces which a wet day can’t spoil, since they weren’t put in by dry heat. If you’re going dancing at night, curl-rag 3 r our hair again while dressing. Even quite straight tresses will take a rag curl, if the locks are damped with water or a curling fluid before being twisted up, and the rags are left in rather longer.

SHINGLES AND CRINOLINES,

AN INSPIRATION FOR MAKING A LARGE HAT FIT. If j'ou are one of the “late shinglers ’ and have been shingled recently, you are probably lamenting that vour really expensive crinoline hat is now unwearable, because it is so enormous in the head. There is no need to despair, because it can easily be made smaller, so that no one will notice that it has been touched. Unpick the crown from the brim and soften a patch at the back of the Latter with methylated spirit. So many of the new hats have a turned up back, with a kind of pleat in the tum-up, that I almost suspect the makers of hats to have made them smaller in exactly the same way that I am about to describe. Having got the crinoline soft with the spirit, take a tuck in the back of the brim and turn it up at the back at the same time. Do not let tho pleat run straight up the back; it must run slightly diagonally to finish up the crease which runs round the crown- But of thata later. Stitch the back into the shape you want and leave it to harden before you take out the stitches again. Now for the crown. You will notice hats have something in the nature of a crease or pleat running from the side of the front to the side of the back to give a very modified tam-o’-shanter look to the crown. Soften the crinoline where this crease ends towards the back, and carry on the crease diagonally to the base of the crown. You can here take in as much as you need, but carry the crease on to join up with the pleat in the brim, so that the whole pleat has a certain raison d’etre, which saves it from that home-made look. Sew the crease in the crown until it has also hardened; then rejoin crown and brim, and, voila; a new, up-to-date and fitting hat.