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Dressmaking   /drˈɛsmˌeɪkɪŋ/   Listen
Dressmaking

noun
1.
The craft of making dresses.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Dressmaking" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... obliged to assert herself. The third evening after Starbuck's arrival she was going over to the cabin of Aunt Chloe, who not only did the washing for Buena Vista, but assisted Polly in dressmaking. It was not far, and the night was moonlit. As she crossed the garden she saw Starbuck moving in the manzanita bushes beyond; a mischievous light came into her eyes; she had not EXPECTED to meet him, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... said Mary pertly, for she remembered that the very morning before, when on her way to her dressmaking work, she had met Mr. Harry Carson, who had sighed, and sworn and protested all manner of tender vows. Mr. Harry Carson was the son and the idol of old Mr. Carson, the wealthy mill-owner. Jem Wilson, her old playmate, and the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... Barton had a specialty for the prophet Zephaniah, and had been several times shocked because Lucy could not help him out with his quotations from that source. His daughter, a little pinched asthmatic creature, in a dress whereof every gore and seam was an affront to the art of dressmaking, was certainly thirty, probably more. And between thirty and the Psalmist's limit of existence, there is the very smallest appreciable difference, in the opinion of seventeen. What could she have to say to Emmy Barton? Lucy asked ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... friend was very simply attired, infinitely more simply than Nettie herself. Nettie had told him that her friend was 'off and on'(a vague and rather obscure qualification of the statement) in the same line as herself—namely, Court and high-class dressmaking. Yet there was a difference between Nettie and ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope

... clothes." You observe her submissive, law-abiding spirit. The possibility of evading the law never even suggests itself. There is many a feeble mother of grown and growing "Sissys" to whom the spring or fall dressmaking appears like an avalanche coming to overwhelm her, or a Juggernaut coming to roll over her. She asks not, "How shall I escape?" but, "How shall I endure?" Let her console herself. These semi-annual experiences are all "mission." All sewing ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... agricultural studies with his books. First he plants a small garden and tends it. Then he is taught to raise chickens. Next he learns swine husbandry and then dairying and the handling of horses. The girls learn poultry-raising, butter-making, gardening, cooking, dressmaking and millinery. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... With regard to dress, however, Cynthia soon showed that she was her mother's own daughter in the manner in which she could use her deft and nimble fingers. She was a capital workwoman; and, unlike Molly, who excelled in plain sewing, but had no notion of dressmaking or millinery, she could repeat the fashions she had only seen in passing along the streets of Boulogne, with one or two pretty rapid movements of her hands, as she turned and twisted the ribbons and gauze her mother furnished her with. So she refurbished ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... very 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, don't ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson

... to settle on a business, hard to get a footing in one. Edward convinced that the dressmaking was their best card, searched that mine of various knowledge, the 'Tiser, for an opening: but none came. At last one of those great miscellaneous houses in the City advertised for a lady to cut cloaks. He proposed to his ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... industries are taught the young men and women. These are: Agriculture; Basketry; Blacksmithing; Bee-keeping; Brickmasonry; Plastering; Brick-making; Carpentry; Carriage Trimming; Cooking; Dairying; Architectural, Freehand, and Mechanical Drawing; Dressmaking; Electrical and Steam Engineering; Founding; Harness-making; Housekeeping; Horticulture; Canning; Plain Sewing; Laundering; Machinery; Mattress-making; Millinery; Nurse Training; Painting; Sawmilling; Shoemaking; Printing; Stock-raising; Tailoring; ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various

... example, was a maiden lady who did dressmaking in a small way; she fell ill, and although attended by all the physicians in the neighborhood, was sinking slowly into a decline when her cousin Cyrus asked her to come and keep house for him in Lewiston. She went, ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... little softened, either by his niece's beauty or her distress (stretch a point, and say the latter). 'You must try it, and if the life is too hard, perhaps dressmaking or tambour-work will come lighter. Have YOU ever done anything, sir?' (turning ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... my diversion, and she would have Bridget make me as pretty as she could. I dare say I did look as though I played at work, for I caught sight of myself in the Venetian mirror on the wall of my grandmother's boudoir as she turned me round about, her maid, Bridget Connor, who learnt dressmaking in Paris, pinching ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan

... fine sewing on the ruffles for her father's shirts, and had always made her own and her child's dresses. This talent, which proved exceedingly useful at various times in her life, now served her in good stead. She secured a situation as fitter in a dressmaking establishment, where, on account of her foreign looks, she was ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... their own housekeeping, the members of each household performing various duties in rotation. The school was to continue in session the year round, so that flower—and kitchen—gardening might take rank with dressmaking, cooking, fruit culture, poultry raising, and other branches which Mrs. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... 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

... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... 'I don't want dressmaking going on in the house,' contentedly Vida told off her maid's negative qualifications, 'and I hate having anybody do my hair for me. Wark packs quite beautifully, and then I do like some one about me—that ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... knowledge of that beauty and has not exact measurements she will never be able to make the dress. But for humanity at large—and, as far as that goes, for the dressmaker herself when she is free of her dressmaking—knowledge of the lady's beauty is the knowledge that really matters. Whether she is twenty-six inches round the waist or only ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... 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 ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... "'Take dressmaking,' I said to him. 'I suppose you call that woman's work. Then how about Worth, and those ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston

... decent lodgings before her sister arrived, and for a difficult year she supported herself by her exquisite embroidery. At the end of that time, she gave up the struggle, the more easily as her young sister, well established in the dressmaking department of a large shop, had begun to ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... changed Fouchette's entire plan of life. She had bravely started for the grand boulevards with the idea of securing employment among the myriad dressmaking establishments of that neighborhood, and thus putting to practical use her industrial knowledge gained at ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... 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 made of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various

... the beautiful bits of truth they have gathered during their years of study. Often when I speak enthusiastically of something in history or in poetry, I receive no response, and I feel that I must change the subject and return to the commonest topics, such as the weather, dressmaking, sports, sickness, "blues" and "worries." To be sure, I take the keenest interest in everything that concerns those who surround me; it is this very interest which makes it so difficult for me to carry on a conversation with some people who will not talk or say what they think, but I should ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... manual-training 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

... at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though the miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes. They were absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worse dressmaking. The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their parents, only went abroad in the flood of golden sunshine, in order to rifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries. Virginia was no longer ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... iridescent bubble of reputation floated out from her modest dressmaking rooms in East Twenty-third Street, Millie Moores, whom youth had rushed past, because she had no leisure for it, felt her heart open like a grateful flower when life brought her more chores to do. ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... 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 and child labor; ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz

... Leopold Cross, 1880; Commander's Cross, Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic, 1880. Born in Bordeaux. She was taught drawing by her father, who, perceiving that she had unusual talent, permitted her to give up dressmaking, to which, much against her will, she had been apprenticed. From 1855 her fame was established; she was greatly appreciated, and her works competed for in England and the United States, as well ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... the Civil War, aside from factory employments, the trades open to women were limited, and the majority of their occupations were still carried on at home, or with but few in numbers, as in dressmaking-establishments, millinery, and the like. With the new conditions brought about at this time, and the vast number of women thrown upon their own resources, came the flocking into trades for which there ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... little sister Afy was born. We lived in a pretty cottage in the wood and were happy. But in twelve months more my step-mother died, and an aunt of hers adopted Afy. I lived with my father, going to school, then to learn dressmaking, and finally going out to work to ladies' houses. After many years. Afy came home. Her aunt had died and her income with her, but not the vanity and love of finery that Afy had acquired. She did nothing but dress herself and read novels. My father was angry; he said no good could come of ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her ignorance of dressmaking. That she was frightened and bewildered, and that she was bravely striving to hide it, was quite ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... imbued with right 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 Woman's Bureau, ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various

... Merivale was so quiet and unassuming a personage that she had got into the habit of ignoring her. "Of Clare's new amusement, Miss Merivale," she said, with a laugh. Her laugh, like her voice, was a trifle hard. "It was scientific dressmaking when I was at Woodcote last, you remember, Rose dear. Now it is a ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke

... four hundred dollars a year, Nett, you know; and I've been dressmaking—they say I've got taste," she added, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... ferns; and that the girls from Z—— and Westover made morning picnics there, since Lucilla Waters had grown intimate with Delia Waite and found it out; and that Delia Waite and even Miss Arabel carried their dressmaking down there sometimes in a big white basket, and stayed all day under the trees. They had never used to do this; they had stayed in the old back sitting room with all the litter round, and never thought of it till those girls had come and ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... guess, Dick. A week ago when things looked so dark for us I went to see him about selling our little home. I really believed that it might be necessary for us to leave Riverview and go to the city, where I could find customers who would pay me better for my dressmaking than here, and if necessary you could get a place, for there seemed no chance here. I went to see him and we discussed terms. He was very hard, and offered me much less than I thought the place ought to bring. So I came away determined to try ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster

... married men. We'll be having dress-making establishments in full blast before you know it, and model gowns till you can't rest. I almost hate to spread the news among the women. We won't have a cook, or a laundress, or a school-teacher on the Island if this dressmaking craze gets started. Every hut along this row will have a sign beside the door: 'Dressmaking Done Here.' On the other hand, I doubt very much if we'll be able to get a single tailor-shop going,—and God knows I'll soon need a new ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... favorite nominee. The Convention was a rag-bag of 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 ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... in Slowbridge but one dressmaking establishment. The head of the establishment—Miss Letitia Chickie—designed the costumes of every woman in Slowbridge, from Lady Theobald down. There were legends that she received her patterns from London, ...
— A Fair Barbarian • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... The play's intention was to show a typical Russian working-class family. There were the old father, constantly drunk on vodka, alternately maudlin and scolding; the old mother; two sons, the one a Communist and the other an Anarchist; the wife of the Communist, who did dressmaking; her sister, a prostitute; and a young girl of bourgeois family, also a Communist, involved in a plot with the Communist son, who was of course the hero of ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... 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 ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... 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 ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... at least, from an ethical standpoint. Girls spending their days in the factory and shop were in need of a refining influence, and this the continuation school afforded. Courses were offered in the German language, arithmetic, sewing and dressmaking. The efforts made to give girls this training were not entirely successful. So many objections to Sunday work were brought forward that it was discontinued. The burdens of the day fell so heavily upon the girls that they were not ambitious to attend evening classes. At the ...
— The Condition and Tendencies of Technical Education in Germany • Arthur Henry Chamberlain

... making attractive offers for an engagement where showgirls were the ornamental caryatids which upheld the three tottering unities along Broadway. She also had chances to wear very wonderful model gowns for next season at the Countess of Severn's new dressmaking, drawing-rooms whither all snobdom crowded and shoved to get near the trade-marked coronet, and where bewildering young ladies strolled haughtily about all day long, displaying to agitated Gotham the most startling gowns in ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... customer and I went on to try something else. I forget what came next. I think it was the stage. I travelled for a year with a touring company. That was hard work, too, but I liked it. After that came dressmaking, which was harder and which I hated. And then I had my first stroke of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... Home is done by the girls under the supervision and with the practical assistance of teachers. They are marked and graded in this as in their school work. They are also making creditable progress in general cooking, plain sewing and dressmaking. ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen

... dressmaking and I have helped her. And lately I have been working in a millinery-shop. Any girl ought to know ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... 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, if required, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... take off one of my 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 are ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... on with that dressmaking much longer?" he asked petulantly. "The click of your scissors has an irritating effect on me, and, as you may have noticed, I cannot spread my paper on the table. It cramps one's ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss

... there is a woman's club to study for general improvement and social service; there is a mothers' council meeting every two weeks; there is a literary and dramatic society, meeting every week, composed of members of high-school age, and studying Shakespeare particularly; there is a dressmaking and aid society meeting two evenings a week, to study the cutting of patterns, garment-making, etc.; a food-study and cooking club, also meeting two evenings a week; an inventive and mechanical club, meeting ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield

... attachment, as 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 the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... is twelve or thirteen years old," Lydia said, her voice dull now with grief. "I know, because I used to do dressmaking during the war. And it was during the war that girls wore their hair that way—I did mine in a Psyche knot, but the ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin



Words linked to "Dressmaking" :   couture, craft, trade



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