#Confy 0.9.1 is out.

It's a small bugfix release which change the error handling logic when re-opening a conference. If you ever found yourself having a bad network connection while opening Confy on your way to the venue, this bug fix is for you 😄

Posted on July 27, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear

The recurring joke is that because of some health issues, in summer I dress like a Victorian Vampire.

But how would an actual Late Victorian Vampire dress? Picture her, she would look like some kind of eccentric gentlewoman, as vampires usually do, probably with a style that is a bit conservative, rather than following the latest fashions.

Now, she wouldn’t probably wear men’s shirts. But what if she was a lesbian¹ vampire? Wouldn’t she need a fancy, frilly shirt to go with her tailored cycling suit when she’s out seducing the more active ladies in the neighbourhood?

Or maybe not. It’s not making a lot of sense, is it? But I do have a lot of shirt fabric in my stash², and I could use a few more shirts that were practical and comfortable, but also somewhat over the top.

For the practical and comfortable I went to my trusted 1880s shirt, while for the over the top part I looked at inspiration from the earlier 18th century frilly shirts, and their later imitations.

I decided to use some nice cotton batiste I had bought quite a few years ago to make one of my first historically inspired shirtwaists: I may have a tendency to buy a bit more fabric than actually needed by the pattern, but that’s what everybody does, right?

For the ruffles I decided to use a lighter weight cotton voile, also from the stash.

At the front, I wanted the ruffle to be inserted in the yoke, but I was also whipstitching the gathers to it to make them neater, so I started bu attaching the yoke lining to the gathered front, then I whipstitched the ruffle to the front, catching each gather, and finally I whipstitched the other yoke on the ruffle and the rest of the gathered front.

And then after sewing the collar, I realized that this way the slit would have remained open in the front (or the collar too narrow), so I had to unpick the front part of the yoke, and sew it again, this time leaving an excess of fabric as wide as half the placket width from the pattern, to be sewn directly in the collar band.

From then, things progressed smoothly, with some interruptions, until I got to the first sleeve, which I failed to insert twice, as one does.

On the third attempt, with a different method, I succeeded, I tried the shirt on, and it already felt extra.

But it could be even more extra. With some ruffles also at the collar.

The shirt had been made with a simple collar band, and I could have just added the ruffle to it, but I also wanted to be able to wear it with other detachable collars, so I decided to make another collar band with ruffles, to wear on top.

And that was mostly it, except for the reinforcement patches at the side seams and cuffs: I love having them, because they make the seam end neater and stronger, but they are a bit of a hassle to make, so they got postponed a few days.

But finally, the shirt was done.

And I tried it on, and it was good.

But now I really need a pair of cycling breeches, don’t I?

1. ok, maybe straight passing bi? anyway.↩︎
2. I have no idea how they got there.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…

Posted on July 10, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, FreeSoftWear, craft:sewing

Earlier this year, I made myself a new hat (it will be blogged), and I wanted to put a nice cockade on it. So, I looked for suitable ribbons, and couldn’t find any. I found some ribbon that looked passable, but the colours I wanted weren’t available, so I set up the website to notify me, and kept working on the hat.

Eventually the hat was done, the ribbon was still not available, so I decorated the hat with fake flowers from my stash, and started wearing it.

And that’s when I got notified that the ribbon was back in stock.

By the time the ribbon arrived, I had decided that the hat looked better with the flowers, and project cockade was put on hold, possibly for a future hat.

And then June came, and what could be a better time than that for a project based on flag colours?

As I feared, the ribbon I got wasn’t the best: it was a bit too stiff and plasticy, and not really usable for many other things. It did however work well enough for a cockade, and I decided it was a good chance to try different methods and designs, and then make another one to take pictures and publish step-by-step instructions.

And that’s the perfect recipe to find oneself surrounded by a somewhat unreasonable number of very similar cockades, I guess.

I looked around for instructions, and the ones that gave a result that was closer to my mental idea of a cockade were the ones by American Duchess, so on my first attempt I tried to follow those.

I didn’t have a cork board with a hole, so it was a bit fiddly, and the result was passable, but could have been better. Meanwhile I saw a forum post commenting on the above tutorialand that gave me ideas for a procedure more suitable to the tools I had.

The second cockade I made was indeed more satisfactory, and I also started to experiment with making a center piece with ribbons, to cut down on the types of materials needed.

On this one I also tried to add a pin backing, so that I could write instructions on how to do it in what I believe is a more stable way than simply adding it to the felt backing at the end.

I’m not sure whether the other ones will be tacked to a hat, and thus won’t require pins at all, or if I’ll just put them on some dress with pins hidden under the ribbon layers.

And then I was ready to make a third cockade, taking step by step pictures for my website, and I planned to start on it the next morning.

Trenord had different ideas.

Thanks to the combination of independent but complete disruptions ontwo nearby train lines, I spent the morning driving a couple of people to the nearest station that was still being served by trains, and then back home less than 10 minutes before I had to start working, which if you ask¹ me was pretty homophobic of the train company.

There was way less traffic than I expected, and I did enjoy the drive², but for various reasons it meant a significant delay for this post.

Anyway, less than a week later than I had planned, halfway in June I managed to publish step by step instructions on my website, but I wasn’t done with the project yet.

Beside the fact that I still needed to finish sewing the backing felt to the cockades I had done, I also had a few ideas for more centrepieces made of ribbon I wanted to try.

And this means that I moved on to another project that was already in progress (this one will also be blogged).

After I’ve finished that one, at the very end of June I quickly made the last two centrepieces, taking pictures for the instructions, and in the next few days I also finished the cockades.

This time, instead of plain pleats I tried to use box pleats, and I quite like the look they give, so if in the future I’ll have a need for more cockades I may use again this pleating pattern.

For the last cockade I wanted to try two things: putting a pin in the middle as a centrepiece, and gathering the ribbons.

For the pin, I found that the only one I had that had a colour scheme compatible with the ribbons I had was one with the penguin from linux.it, which had a black background, so I put black ribbon on the outside and white next to it for contrast.

And gathering was done with a whipped gather with ribbons that were one and a half times the outer circumference of their slot, and looks decent enough, but I think I prefer the look of pleated cockades a lot. Maybe it would look better with a softer ribbon.

Anyway, I think this is plenty of cockades for the time being, unless I get tempted by buying more colours of ribbon to make different ones. But I’m not making an online purchase just for those. I am not.

1. you probably shouldn’t.↩︎
2. also thanks to my partner who, on entering the destination town, told me to stop on the big, straight, two-way road with plenty of roundabouts to turn around, and went through the maze of one-way streets to the station by foot.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…