Fabric Shopping in the 1790s

My original plan for 2022 was to make a little 1790s capsule wardrobe - one pattern and three gowns that would take me through any sort of event.

Let’s see how THAT worked out.

 

For Gown #1 , I had a gorgeous greenish blue peacock taffeta from Burnley and Trowbridge. Unfortunately, when laid it out for cutting, i found that i was 1.5 yards of taffeta short of a gown, no matter how i pieced.  

 

Which was dispiriting - BUT - a capsule wardrobe can always use an open robe, yes?

 

In which case - moving on to Gown #2, I had a length of striped white Burnley and Trowbridge muslin for the basic white frock, but when i laid it out, I was, again,  that exact same more-than-a-yard short.

 

Clearly, when i did my original fabric calculations, i was an idiot.  

 

Fortunately, the fabric is still in stock at B&T, so i ordered more, and while it was coming, moved on to Gown #3 -

 

Fabric #3 was a soft blue and white striped silk-cotton that I’d picked up at The Fabric Store in Brisbane. Yardage would NOT be a problem - I had MASSES of the stuff. Almost enough for two gowns, if I fancied it that way.

 

Rather triumphantly I laid it out - and six hours later, I stood up again without having made a single cut.  I’d forgotten just how wicked slithery silk-cotton can be.  In all of those six hours, i hadn’t even managed to mark a straight line. Even with the stripes to guide me - I’d measured and marked and pinned and weighed it down with books, pots, furniture and even a solid metal bar I’d found in the garage, and I still had not managed to mark a simple straight reference line across the width.

The solution was straightforward but arduous - I needed to go buy a few bottles of spray starch and turn that slithery stuff into cardboard. And when i say arduous - based on my prior experience with silk cotton and spray starch and given the yardage I needed, I was looking at a couple of afternoons with a steamer and a starch bottle - 

 

And after all the time i’d spent building a pattern block, I wanted to sew now!!

("And anyway", said Mr Tabubil, and i could hear his eyes rolling.  "If you’re going for multiples, maybe you want to start with a wearable mockup anyway? Hmm?")

 

So. Knee-deep in beautiful fabric I couldn’t use, I went shopping.

 

I happened to be in Reno, Nevada, at the time, which was exciting - because THE place in Reno for fabric is Mill End Fabrics. Mill End is an interesting shop. They acquire the bulk of their stock from stores that are going belly-up or going online-only, which means that the stock is a) irregular and b) there’s never EVER another bolt in the back.  What you see is what you get, and what you usually get isn’t enough for what you need it for.

 

Mill End had a lot of cotton fabric in the right sort of weight, but almost all of it was end-of-bolt-"Is 2 yards enough for you, sweetie?" situations.

 

After a lot of digging, I did find something - a bolt with 6 yards of cotton voile in the most enchanting shade of emerald green, and it was only $3.50/meter, which is a very reasonable price, and I bought the lot.

 

I really should have wondered a bit more at the price. After I got it home, I saw that the selvage had been slashed into with scissors - about half an inch deep, all the way along, like this:

 

Okay, I thought. I could cut the panels a bit narrower. I’d have to fell the seams between skirt panels, but that will work, no worries -

 

So i popped it in a hot wash and a high spin cycle, and then I started to iron it dry.

 

And look what I found:

 

A bleached-out line, RIGHT down the middle of the whole piece. More or less.

Sometimes more, sometimes less.

The line wanders.

 

Right down all six bloody yards of it.

 

The White Lace Dress - Vogue 7350

Several years ago now, I bought a roll of doll-scale vintage lace in an antique shop in New Harmony, Indiana.  New Harmony Indiana is mostly antique shops. Antique shops, book shops and cornfields on the edge of the wide, slow, Wabash river. It's summertime heaven on a slow Sunday afternoon. A year or so later, I sewed Vogue 7350 with some very fine swiss cotton voile that has been in Mum's stash for years and years and years.
This pattern certainly got me over my fear of sewing with lace - the hours picking scraps of tissue paper out of thread seams on thread lace as I stitched the yoke panels left me with no mysteries and no terrors. Lace is now very firmly do-able, thank you.

Yummy dress details:

And because I love making wired ribbon flowers, she needed a sash with a big bow on it.  Just something simple:

The purse is the sort of thing that happens on Saturday afternoons when you have nothing scheduled to do and you can do exactly whatever you want to do. I had a scrap of white silk, a meter of beaded fringe and a bag of lace remnants from my mother's wedding gown - I cut out roses from the wedding lace and appliquéd them onto the silk, and across the body of the purse I scattered clusters of embroidered petals and beads stripped from the fringing.
More beads made the purse handle and I stitched it all together by hand.
I adore it. It's fabulous.

And so, Once More with Feeling:

Fire and Ice: Part 5 - The Dress!!

I woke up on Saturday morning, took the bustle skirt off of Sally's shoulders and sighed hugely - the tapes were way too short and the apron attachment to cover the zipper at the central back looked absurd - it was far too small to be rucked up with tapes of its own.
            So I unpicked the tapes in the apron and lengthened everything by 100 percent.  It works.

The Dress looking Splendid:

Straight on:

Lots of sideways yumminess:

The dress has a couple of technical issues - the bodice tends to ride up and wrinkle- I thought about putting some heavy duty press-studs on the waistband but it became very puckery - a better solution would be a piece of fabric to go between my legs-  leotard style, but I didn't have time or appropriate materials, so I sewed myself into the dress and sailed grandly out of the house toward my ball.
            I'd bought face paints and found a lovely design that I planned to base my own on - but had an allergic reaction to the paints.  I began painting on the yellow undercoat and without any fanfare or preliminary itching, my eyes puffed up until I was squinting through bloodshot slits, and they began to weep - it was like Niagara. I jumped back into the shower and washed everything off, then proceeded to redo my face - conventionally.  With as much gold as I could convince to stay there.  It doesn't much show in the photos, but I was most impressively gilded.
            The bustle isn't perfect - the upper apron is too long and the whole bustle tends to slide sideways. I was mystified till I took the dress off after the party and found several pins still tucked into the lowest tier and tugging the whole assemblage off balance.
            On the whole, however, for the amount of fabric I had to play with - I'm very happy with how this gown has come out!
            In fact, my only genuine issues with the over-skirt stem from too much fabric - the little apron attachment needs shortening and the over-skirt is far too wide -it doesn't hold the gold underskirt tight enough and the whole assemblage blooms too wide. I need to unpick a few seams and lap the back apron further over the front so that it sits more neatly.

Here is an example of how the skirt is too wide, in contrast to how it should be:

I found my jewelry in a little store on Bloor street in Toronto a few years ago - the necklace was sold strung on a cord instead of a chain, and the earrings had long chains reaching up from the top of the flower and ending in little hooks that could be strung into your hair. A few days ago I replaced the cord with a chain, removed the chains from the earrings, and attached the tikka to the clasp of the necklace, so that it could dangle down between my shoulder blades. Very elegant!

I love the shoulder ruffle on my bodice - I wired the edges of the upper and lower sticky-out-y bits so that they'd stand up sharply. Unfortunately, this ruffled piece is NOT detachable from the dress - although I wised up when I got to the feathers. And after that, the waist ruffle that disguises where I took in the waistband. THAT little bit of yummy scrap-flower-craziness can be removed if I need to wash the skirt!

Shoulder ruffle:

Frost and fire!

Fire and Ice: Part 4 - Almost Done!

Ahem: The bodice is sewn, the underskirt is sewn, the overskirt is sewn - and only the underskirt still fits on Sally.

Sewing tapes into the skirt:

The finished over-skirt sitting on TOP of Sally:

 All I have left is a few fastenings - press studs and hooks and eyes and buttons.  And possibly something amusing for my hair.  Yesterday I went back to Spotlight for face paint and feathers, but the selection was non-existent - even by Spotlight standards.  A very sweet lady in a store uniform explained that the St Johns Ambulance was  holding a masquerade party that night- which explains why it looked as if the millinery section had been ravaged!  She kindly tracked down a carnival mask with a nice set of red feather biots glued to the top so that I could cannibalize it-

Let's see how it looks in the morning. 

Fire and Ice: Part 3. You learn something everyday…

And what I learned today is that two layers of Spotlight's most delicate white netting under a skirt and a) you get one nasty scratchy rash around your mid-section from the horrible plastic weave and b) you look pouffy enough for an Elizabethan faire. 

            Yikes.
            So - This is a blurry photo of me looking cranky after I discovered exactly how ridiculously large the skirt was. My sister says it looks as if my knees are eight and a half months pregnant.

 

 

 

 

Here's another photograph of the overblown skirt on Sally.

 

 

 

 

Therefore, ergo and quod erat demostratum, the skirt will be worn sans-petticoat.

Here is a really horrible blurry-mirror photo of the late 1930s look I'm going for.  My camera really doesn't like low-light situations, does it?  And it seems to be incredibly liberal about how it interprets low-light… sigh.

 

 

 

 

Fortunately, the lining of the skirt gives it enough body to hold up to the apron front.  The lame is too flimsy to stand up on its own, so I went to Spotlight and found some ice-white polyester duponi, which, while being a fabric of spectacularly nasty hand and shininess, looks positively classy in comparison to gold foil lame.  While the counter-lady was cutting my yardage she gave me a series of squinty looks and muttered dubiously about what an awful fabric it was.
Hharrumph.  Don't look at ME, lady.  This is the best your lovely shop had to offer.

Yesterday Mr Tabubil pinned the darts on the bodice while I was wearing it, and contrary to his worst expectations, he did NOT stab me and I did not bleed out through the fabric!  He doesn't believe it, but he's actually very good at this sort of thing.

The bodice is now finished, but because Incontinent Sally (my mannequin) is still a work in progress and does not yet match the measurements of my upper torso, you won't see any more photos of the bodice until I'm wearing it at the party.

Fire and Ice: Part 2

Yesterday's work, starting small:  here is the finished apron for the front - you can see how prettily the back apron will cover it at the sides.  (needs red velvet ribbon down that side seam.... Maybe after the party!)

Also the back "hide the center zipper" piece is done and trial -pinned.

I really love this purple sash -particularly the way the tasseled drapes hang down the back of the dress!  Pity about the color.  If only it were red.  Perhaps I can find some scarlet satin at some point.   I love the way the back of the skirt looks with the sash twisted like that!

Fire And Ice - Part I

Yesterday evening I was handed an invitation to a birthday party with a theme: Fire and Ice.

There's not much that's gold or white in my red-desert wardrobe, and I'm not one to dance all night dressed up in a pasteboard sun or a ski suit, and I'm up to my ears sewing presents for new babies of good friends, so I reckoned that I'd go to spotlight, pick up some shimmery white bits of fabric and a white wig and tart up a pair of jeans and a shirt to look like I was covered in frost.

            But THEN - I remembered the BALLGOWN.

            About a year ago, I ducked into the local thrift store looking for brass buttons and had an unexpected WOW moment - a very tall and very plump person had made herself an A-line ballgown skirt and scoop-necked blouse out of scarlet silk duponi - and donated it to the thrift store, who had priced it $5.

            I love this shop. I have an unexpected WOW moment there at least once a month.

So I pulled it out of the stash and cut it up and started draping it on Sally and - I think that this is it.

It's very Schiaparelli, isn't it? With the bustle and the pouter-pigeon front?

The flowery bits are the leftover scraps of silk roughly ruffled into flowers - I'll interleave them with gold scraps - all shreddy on the edges. 

            There's only one little hitch - the party is on SATURDAY.

            But I think I can pull it off.

It took half an hour to cut up the skirt and an hour to drape the dress. And it's DOABLE, If I don't care too much about the inside finishes, which I don't.

 

Schedule:

 

Tuesday - finish the damn elephants and sew up the red apron front.

Wednesday -  have Mr Tabubil help me pin up the bodice - and then sew it.

Thursday - Sew the bustle skirt back, and sew the apron front and the bustle back to the waistband of the original skirt.

Friday - Make the underskirt - which involves all of  one french seam to turn the gold into a cylinder, a rough hem (I wonder if I can leave a train at the back - or will I just rip it to shreds?) and three or four layers of stiff cream-colored net (a la Spotlight!) attached to an elastic waist band.

And maybe a bustle pad - we'll see. I rather like it the way it is, all flat and Schiaparelli 1939.

Then, lastly - use all the silk scraps to make ruffle-roses (predominantly red, with only touches of fraying gold poking out) to hide where I've had to shorten the waistband, and to tart up the rather dull neckline.

Currently the bodice is pinned so that the excess fabric flares out as panels on the outside. Should I seam them out or should I leave them like they are - to add a bit of fun?

Happily, the red silk over-skirt is exactly the same as the one I'd planned for my very-on-hold steampunk outfit, so on THAT, I'm getting back in the game. I started making the steampunk outfit 13 months ago, but tried to fake the 1880s with an A-line Vogue skirt pattern - and screwed up the corded petticoat and blue pinstripe underskirt so thoroughly that Mr Tabubil had a major giggle fit and sent me out to buy an actual pattern, which i did, but I'd sort of used up all my motivation, and the fabric migrated to the bottom of the stash, where it could live forever, I thought.

I may be wrong!

The Great Blue Baroque Dress

This blue rococo-ish-gown is one of the first doll dresses I ever made.

The fabrics come from a wonderful little fabric shop in Boston's Chinatown.  They sold remnants of designer fabrics - not much, just a meter or two of each, but every remnant was a) Spectacular, b) just enough to make one really fabulous doll dress and c) Priced at genuine remnant prices - $5 or so.

One weekend I found this lovely crinkly polyester satin and a embroidered  black net and thought…huzzah!

And dashed off to the trim section of the store to pick up silver laces and trims...

The overskirt was originally intended to be a polonaise, which is why I made it so long.  I basted the net to the satin and cartridge pleated 54 inches of fabric into the waist, and we loved the look of it so completely that we couldn't bear to pull it up into loops.  It had gravitas.  And flow.

The Back:

 

The Front:

We made this dress the same summer The Patriot - Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War movie - came out.  I'd just made the dress so mum and I absolutely HAD to see the movie - I remember hugging her and both of us squee-ing with pleasure when we saw the ribbon necklaces that the ladies wore - they'd clearly based their costumes on MINE!

And I love the stomacher.  I really really love the stomacher.

And the hairpiece - although I don't have a proper photograph of it - it is an ostrich plume with a wired ribbon rosette and white feather tufts - and a vintage marcasite brooch pinned to the front.

The bodice front doesn't quite match up with the stomacher - chalk it up to early sewing experiences.  This dress has aged amazingly well - it's still one of my favorites - if not THE favorite.   It's exuberant!  All bright and colorful and joyful!

Yummy Details:

And once more, just for fun:

Beaded chiffon and purple velveteen!

Yesterday I sat down and beaded  the edges of the orange chiffon scarf that I had hemmed while I was up in Brisbane.

And I bought the yummy elephant pattern for the new baby.

And I have fabrics, too!  B.W from my Wednesday sewing group cleaned out her stash last week and brought me a lovely stack of velveteens and small scale corduroys. I rather like these two for elephants.

Last night I put them through a hot wash, but I cleverly put the whole stack in together.  When I took them out of the machine, I found that a kleenex had slipped into the washing machine, and that between the tissue shreds the green velveteens were purple with purple fuzz and the purple velveteens were green with green fuzz...
            Oddly, the orange and black corduroy came through completely unmarked. 
            The velveteens are going back in the wash this morning.  Individually.  We'll see what happens after that.

Winterhalter Eugenie Gardums!

 Mum and I went to Gardums- a very good Brisbane-based fabric store, on a lace-and-trim trawl. Gardums is a lovely upscale fabric store with three locations across the city - it deals mostly with high-end fabrics and believes in getting good money for the value of it's stuff - the fabrics are lovely but the prices are heartbreaking. No bargains here - not even in the remnant bin - you'll be charged as close to market value for that 20 cm scrap of lace or 40cm of sun-faded silk taffeta as the market will bear!

But the fabrics are exquisite and the laces and trims are the real thing, and once in a while, there's a lovely fabric on sale.

 

 

I bought four meters of this to make myself a dress - Vogue 1102 - one of my favorites. I'm hemming a version of it in black and white linen right now.

I bought yards of gorgeous lace at AG doll scale!!!!  I can stop hoarding my slender supply - at home I have very little and consequently never use it - I'm always save for the next thing!
And in the remnant bin I found a lovely stretch of silk chiffon and some gorgeous apricot-y silk charemeuse and on the trim shelf I found a fabulous ribbon-flower trim -

And naturally one thinks of this painting - Empress Eugenie and her Ladies by Winterhalter:

So…..
Introducing: The Gardums Remnant Ballgown!

The flowered trim will be a wrap - of course - something like this, lined with matching silk satin so that it drapes…

As for the dress - there's enough apricot satin for a skirt and a bodice. An over skirt of chiffon, looped up with ribbons and roses, and a chiffon bertha - pleated or draped -

I'm thinking very classical - something you could have worn from the 1840s until the very end of the 60s - suitable for passing down through a row of children.

(this image from the V&A is from the 1840s, but the look stays remarkably consistent through the period)

Vintage Victorian has a fabulous page with lots of 1860s fashion plates of evening dress.

Inspirations for the skirt:

Love the sleeves and bertha on this one as well!

And the apricot one on the left with the bows and streamers -

Inspirations for the bertha:

I rather like this one, on the blue ballgown - I'm trying to imagine how layered lace sleeves would look underneath it:

But I think that I rather prefer something along these lines:

The sleeves will have to evolve a bit, I think. My original idea called for puff sleeves in the satin layered with tubes of chiffon, but this will be completely lost under the bertha, I think. Longer and larger puffs? Layered with lace, possibly.

Reckon I'll start by hand-hemming the skirt layers and see what bubbles up.