Serena Dyer is a historian of material culture, consumption and fashion. She is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University, UK, an Associate Fellow of the University of Warwick and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre. She was previously Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, London, UK.

Contributes to material culture, consumption and women's history syllabi, as its structure can be accessed as individual case studies or cited as an interdisciplinary methodological model

List of IllustrationsList of Charts and TablesAcknowledgementsList of Abbreviations1. Introduction: Making Material LivesMaterial Life WritingThe Consumer Culture of MakingFour Material Lives2. Material Accounting: A Sartorial Account BookBarbara Johnson (1738-1825)Educating Barbara JohnsonAccounting for HerselfMaterial LiteracyA Chronicle of Fashion3. Dress of the Year: WatercoloursAnn Frankland Lewis (1757-1842)Sartorial Timekeeping and the Fashion PlateAccomplishment and Creative PracticeSociety and Fashionable DisplaySelfhood, Emotion and the Mourning Watercolours4. Adorned in Silk: Dressed PrintsSabine Winn (1734-1798)Paper Textiles, Dress and the Dressed PrintSabine Winn's Dressed PrintsPrint and Making at Nostell5. Fashions in Miniature: DollsLaetitia Powell (1741-1801)The Powell DollsMimetic Dolls and Miniature SelvesDolls as Sartorial Social Narrators6. Conclusion: Material AfterlivesGlossaryBibliographyIndex

Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives.Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.