"Dressmaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... floor at Emma's feet there was knotted into a contortionistic attitude a small, wiry, impolite person named Smalley. Miss Smalley was an artist in draping and knew it. She was the least fashionable person in all that smart dressmaking establishment. She refused to notice the corset-coiffure-and-charmeuse edict that governed all other employees in the shop. In her shabby little dress, her steel-rimmed spectacles, her black-sateen apron, Smalley might have passed for a Bird Center home dressmaker. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... peace in store for him. When he had finished with this late lunch, Lady Adela begged him to excuse them if they left him to shift for himself; they were busy dressmaking, she said. Would she send for one of the keepers, who would show him one or two of the nearest pools, so that he might try for a salmon? The gentlemen had all gone down the strath, to test some new rifle, she thought; this ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... work at a given signal and the hostess allows a certain length of time for the dressmaking. There is much merriment, as it is nearly as awkward for the ladies to sew without a thimble as it is for the ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... wealth of her father and husband, and has never done a useful thing since she was born—Why, a woman was telling me the other day—I got caught in a block in the subway and she was next me—awfully interesting, she was. She sewed in one of these fashionable dressmaking establishments—and the things she told me about what those women spend on their clothes—underclothes and furs and everything. Now there must be something wrong with a woman who can spend money on those things when she knows the agony of poverty right around ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... important," he said. "I must have the exact position of the four feet of that screen. Let's see ... some chalk ... of course.... You do some dressmaking, ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... It's our dressmaking-shop. We lay down the design on the floor, and mark out every piece of the ship in exact size, and then make templates of wood to match—those are the patterns. It's something like making ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... duties. She showed marvellous skill with her needle; such skill, indeed, that Gracie Dennis said more than once: "I'll tell you, Flossy, what to do with her: put her in a good establishment, and let her learn the dressmaking trade. She could make her fortune in time." And Mrs. Roberts smiled, and assented to the statement, but not to the proposition. There was no dressmaking establishment known to her where she was willing to place so young and pretty and ignorant ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... for decorating your home and tells you how to do it at the lowest cost. An interesting and instructive cooking-article appears each month. In short, NEEDLECRAFT is a magazine that every woman wants and needs, and is one of the most practical home-dressmaking and ...
— Handbook of Wool Knitting and Crochet • Anonymous
... an age of good ready made clothes and it is also an age of clever amateur dressmaking. With excellent patterns which may be easily handled there is no reason why the woman who can sew should not make her own clothes, and have smart clothes at a reasonable price—that is, provided she has the time ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... sabots and begin to milk her. Bless me! I came near being caught at it! My oldest sister was out at service with the Mayor of Lenclos, and she sent home her wages—twenty-four francs—it was always as much as that. The second worked at dressmaking in bourgeois families; but they didn't pay the prices then that they do to-day; she worked from six in the morning till dark for eight sous. Out of that she wanted to put some by for a dress for the fete on Saint-Remi's day.—Ah! that's the way it is with us: there ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the home is the most haphazard institution we have. Everything is done there. (I am speaking now of the homes in the country.) In each of the homes there is a little bit of washing done, a little dressmaking, a little butter-making, a little baking, a little ironing going on, and it is all by hand-power, which is the most expensive power known. It is also being done largely by amateurs, and that adds to the amount ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... eyes turning on Prudence's bent head, "I really think some one should be helping the mother. This is baking day." Prudence looked up with an expression of contrition. "No—no, not you, child. You stay here and get on with your fandangles and dressmaking. I'll go and ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... process is complete. To put it bluntly, it requires at least as much mental application to roast a fowl as to cut a bodice; but it does not strike the average Englishwoman in this way, for she will spend hours in thinking and talking about dressmaking (which is generally as ill done as her cooking), while she will be reluctant to give ten minutes to the consideration as to how a luncheon or supper dish shall be prepared. The English middle classes are most ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... month and board round. He hesitated, he could not leave his sister alone. 'Take the offer,' she eagerly cried, 'I will go to the settlement with you.' 'What would you do there?' 'You forget, Archie, I learned dressmaking. I will cut and fit and add a little to our savings.' The second week in November the school was opened, this time under better conditions, for a storekeeper had brought books and slates, and Archie fetched with him a ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... cotton picking was fun, believe me! As I was saying, Mammy she spin and she wears the cloth, and she cut it out and she make our clothes. That's where I git my taste to sew, I reckon. When I first come to Baltimore, I done dressmaking, 'deed I did. I sewed for the best fam'lies in this yere town. I sewed for the Howards and the Slingluffs and the Jenkinses. Jest the other day, I met Miss C'milla down town and she say. 'Alice, ain' this you? and I say, 'Law me, Miss C'milla', ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Maryland Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... corridor. At the far end of it were two rooms sacred to Sonia, the Russian maid. The first room she slept in; the second was a large airy chamber lined with cupboards. In this she worked. She was a very clever needlewoman, expert in the mysteries of dressmaking. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... been such an appeal to the reading public, or such a study of its tastes, or supposed tastes, wants, likes and dislikes, coupled also with the same shrewd anxiety to ascertain a future demand that governs the purveyors of spring and fall styles in millinery and dressmaking. Not only the contents of the books and periodicals, but the covers, must be made to catch the fleeting fancy. Will the public next season wear its ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... are always obliged to marry those French girls when they are nothing but chits, I've been told—those of them, least-ways, that don't live with men without being married. That would make her about forty, and then he found her out and left her, and she went back to Paris and learned dressmaking." ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... VI. Dressmaking.—Substantial dress, of standard material and kind, strong shoes, and stout bedding, to be manufactured for the poor, so as to render it unnecessary for them, unless by extremity of improvidence, to wear cast clothes, or be without sufficiency ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... vote. That is exactly what is doing a vast deal of mischief the world over. If they are not allowed to vote, and express their opinions upon the laws by which they are to be governed, and if they are not to have opened to them all proper fields of labor, they will turn their attention to dressmaking, and to millinery, and to all the other hot-beds of our fast modern life. It is doing great harm; and that is one reason I earnestly plead in their behalf for the ballot. Men say women shall not have the ballot. They must petition and beg for it. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of me? Ethel, dear, it was the most awful experience. You never can imagine such a life, and such women. They were dressed for a walk at six o'clock; they had breakfast at half-past seven. They went to the village and inspected cottages, and gave lessons in housekeeping or dressmaking or some other drudgery till noon. They walked back to the Castle for lunch. They attended to their own improvement from half-past one until four, had lessons in drawing and chemistry, and, I believe, electricity. ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... "The fall dressmaking and cleaning will be coming on then," said grandmother, "and thee will be busy with school again. So if Hetty takes her vacation now, she will be here to help the dear ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... hated the huissier, a vulgar man who thought of nothing but the good things that the Veuve Figasso could put into his stomach, and as her besotted mother starved them both in order to fulfil the huissier's demands, and as she derived no compensating joy from her dressmaking, she had found, thanks to a friend, a positron as figurante in a Marseilles Revue, and, voila—there she was free, independent, and, since she had talent and application, was now earning her six ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... sweep and dust the rooms;" and the girl glanced regretfully at her own hands, which, though fat and well-shaped, were brown, and showed signs of the dusting and dish-washing required of her by her mother, whose means were very limited, and whose dressmaking did not warrant luxury ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... and "Dressmaking and Millinery"—Edna Bryner; teacher in grades, high school, and state normal college; eugenic research worker New Jersey State Hospital; statistical expert in United States Bureau of Labor Investigation of women ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... when she appealed to their hospitality. Many a village gossip, many a virtuous farmer's wife who had pursed her lips and kept her skirts from degrading contact with the notorious Mag Henderson, found herself pledged to employ the Madam's protegee for her next dressmaking. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... me,—and which one would you have picked to go wrong like this? I guess, from the looks of things, most folks would have thought it would be the Lorenz girl. They'd have picked Harriet Kennedy for the hospital, and me for the dressmaking, and it would have been Sidney Page that got married and had an automobile. Well, ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... blacksmithing, printing, wheelwrighting harnessmaking, painting, machinery, founding, shoemaking, brickmasonry and brickmaking, plastering, sawmilling, tinsmithing, tailoring, mechanical and architectural drawing, electrical and steam engineering, canning, sewing, dressmaking, millinery, cooking, laundering, housekeeping, mattress making, basketry, nursing, agriculture, dairying and stock ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... a very important institution. The clothing, tailoring, dressmaking and millinery departments, have proved surprisingly successful; with a constantly increasing demand for the goods turned out. This opens a wide field of remunerative labor, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... little boy chiefly the thing meant that Cousin Bill J. would stay close at hand, to be a joy forever in his sight and lend importance to the town of Edom. For his hero was to go and live in the neat rooms of Miss Alvira over her millinery and dressmaking shop, and never return to the scenes ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... already planned to remain in Overton during the summer and work at dressmaking, smiled in rapture as she heard her father plan a long sight-seeing trip through the west which would last until time for her return to college in the fall. They drove with Grace to Wayne Hall, promising to return to the station in time to meet her friends ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... too fast, Mademoiselle Abby; you are always chattering. I say that without me Mademoiselle Melanie would never have attained her present elevated position; without me this establishment would never have been what it now is,—a very California of dressmaking. And, in a little more than four years, what a fortune Mademoiselle Melanie has accumulated! That brings me back to the point from which I started. Does any one know what is to happen shortly?" she inquired, with an air of elation at being the only ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... opened; Mr. Moore entered, very wet and cold. Caroline half turned from her dressmaking occupation, but renewed it for a moment, as if to gain a minute's time for some purpose. Bent over the dress, her face was hidden; there was an attempt to settle her features and veil their expression, which failed. When she at last met ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... But how are you going to get ready? If you sit up all night you cannot get through with the packing. You said only yesterday that your summer dressmaking was shamefully behind. My dear, next week is the earliest possible ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... dollars a year, Nett, you know; and I've been dressmaking—they say I've got taste," she ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... my embarrassment. She looked about her with the naive curiosity I remembered so well. 'You are quite comfortable here, aren't you? I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim. I'm in business for myself. I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street. I've ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... most French drygoods-stores have. He was precise, accurate, had a fair education, and always wore a white cravat. In the millinery department of this store was employed, among many others, a Swiss girl who had come up to Paris on her own account to get a knowledge of millinery and dressmaking. When this was gained she intended to go back to Switzerland, the land of liberty and Swiss cheese, and there live out her life in her native village making finery for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... after a time, in Gerald's tone and features, that she was making a tedious fool of herself. And she adroitly shifted her criticism from the taste to the WORK—she put a strong accent on the word— and pronounced that to be miraculous beyond description. She reckoned that she knew what dressmaking and millinery were, and her little fund of expert knowledge caused her to picture a whole necessary cityful of girls stitching, stitching, and stitching day and night. She had wondered, during the few odd days that they had spent in Paris, between visits to Chantilly and other places, at the massed ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... All dressmaking establishments give precedence to mourning orders and will fill a commission within twenty-four hours. These first things are made invariably without bothering the wearer with fitting. Alterations, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... high schools were established in Baltimore in 1884, Philadelphia in 1885, and Omaha in 1886. The shop-work, based for long on the "Russian system," included wood-turning, joinery, pattern-making, forging, foundry and machine work. The first high school to provide sewing, cooking, dressmaking, and millinery for girls was the one at Toledo, established in 1886, though private classes had been organized earlier in a number ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... My uncle declined to make the advance I asked for, saying that many years before he had given my father two hundred dollars which had never been repaid. I was thus compelled, for the time at least, to give up my plan for opening a dressmaking establishment, even on the smallest scale, and was obliged to take a situation similar to that which I hold here. In three years I was able to save the two hundred dollars, which I sent to my uncle, and promised to remit the interest if he would tell me the age of the debt. He replied giving ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... dissent, made up of bits so various in hue and texture that the managers must have been as much puzzled to arrange them in any kind of harmonious pattern as the thrifty housewife in planning her coverlet out of the parings of twenty years' dressmaking. All the odds and ends of personal discontent, every shred of private grudge, every resentful rag snipped off by official shears, scraps of Rebel gray and leavings of Union blue,—all had been gathered, as if for the tailoring ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... much about dressmaking," Mona frankly replied, although she ignored the reference to her youthfulness; "but I can do plain sewing very nicely, and, indeed, almost anything that is planned for me. I distinctly stated at the office that I could neither ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... newspapers, the church, large retailing, brokerage, manufacture, are rated at a different social value from salesmanship, superintendence, expert technical work, nursing, school teaching, shop keeping; and those, in turn, are rated as differently from plumbing, being a chauffeur, dressmaking, subcontracting, or stenography, as these are from being a butler, lady's maid, a moving picture operator, or a locomotive engineer. And yet the financial return does not necessarily ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... feminine attraction for others, Wilbur had chosen to regard the maiden of his faith as too serious a spirit to condescend to such vanities; and from a similar vein of appreciation he was prone to think of her as unadorned, or rather untarnished, by the gewgaws of fashionable dressmaking and millinery. His first sight of Selma had made him conscious that here was a face not unlike what he had hoped to encounter some day, and he had instinctively felt her to be sympathetic. He was even conscious ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... concatenation of facts justifies the old bachelor in consulting a friendly policeman (Mr. GERALD DU MAURIER). Bond Street turns out to be a mean street, Celeste et Cie the name under which Cinderella trades, dealing in medical treatment, shaves, friendly counsel or dressmaking all at a penny fee. Also she keeps in a Wendyish sort of way a creche for orphan babes in boxes evidently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... Christine! (Listens.) Hush! there's Torvald come home. Do you mind going in to the children for the present? Torvald can't bear to see dressmaking going ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... and a quicker walk home, chilled and happy and hungry, to a riotous Christmas breakfast, and a littered breakfast table. The new year came, with a dance and revel, and the Pagets took one of their long tramps through the snowy afternoon, and came back hungry for a big dinner. Then there was dressmaking,—Mrs. Schmidt in command, Mrs. Paget tireless at the machine, Julie all eager interest. Margaret, patiently standing to be fitted, conscious of the icy, wet touch of Mrs. Schmidt's red fingers on her bare arms, dreamily acquiescent as to buttons ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... "I've thought once or twice I'd like to do something—have a business like other fellows. But somehow dressmaking never occurred to me. Don't you think the expression of this right pant is good? And shall I make this gore bias ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "'Take dressmaking,' I said to him. 'I suppose you call that woman's work. Then how about Worth, and those other big ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... head nurse has organised a little dressmaking class, the wife of a former president, Sir B. McMahon, having given her L10 with which to buy the necessary materials. The results will be divided equally among those who did the work, but as most of the women have plenty of money they ...
— Turkish Prisoners in Egypt - A Report By The Delegates Of The International Committee - Of The Red Cross • Various
... those parts pretty well terrorized. I never could quite figure it out, but there seems to be something about a fish that makes even a cold-water deacon see double. I reckon it must be that while Eve was learning the first principles of dressmaking from the snake, Adam was off bass fishing and keeping his end up by learning how ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... and dress and care for two or three children, to mend their clothes, tell them stories, make them playthings, take them out walking or driving; and rather than this, to wear out the whole livelong day, extending often deep into the night, in endless sewing, in a close room of a dressmaking establishment! Is it any less drudgery to stand all day behind a counter, serving customers, than to tend a door-bell and wait on a table? For my part," said my wife, "I have often thought the matter over, and concluded, that, if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... speak, but when it was over and they were lifted into beds provided for them doctors were called and recovery was pronounced possible. After months of suffering both recovered. August Mueller is still living in the city. A lady by the name of McClellan, who had a dressmaking establishment in the building, was burned to death and it was several days before her body ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... work you ought to have an audience to admire and applaud," he said, "and I shall tell them we want them particularly. They were asking how your dressmaking was getting on the other day, so I am sure they will be glad to accept. You won't want an answer, I suppose, Mistress Housekeeper? They can return with me or not, as ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... principles and led to right practices. Unless the life of the woman is reached and saved, there can be no true religion, family life, or social status. Hence our industrial and boarding schools for the training of girls in domestic work, in the trades of dressmaking and such like, in the art of cooking, the cultivation of small fruits and flowers, so that the sacred influences of Christianity shall circle around the thousand firesides where now everything is coarse, and ignorant, and senseless. With our large corps of lady teachers, the ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various
... portion of the community which knows its own mind accurately, and which always demands the impossible, is determined that the college girl shall betake herself to practical pursuits, that she shall wedge into her four years of work, courses in domestic science, the chemistry of food, nursing, dressmaking, house sanitation, pedagogy, and that blight of the nursery,—child-study. These are the things, we are often told, which it behooves a woman to know, and by the mastery of which she is able, so says a censorious writer in the "Educational Review," "to repay in some measure her debt ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier |
