They seek it here, they seek it there - they seek really good dotted Swiss cotton everywhere!
Last time I was in Australia, I was let loose on my birthday in Alla Moda Fabrics in Fortitude Valley, where I picked out a beautiful dotted Swiss cotton. White, sheer, spotted, and crisp with body for DAYS - here was only one reasonable thing to do with a fabric like that - make a honking great ruffled fichu.
I was thinking
something rather like this one in the met - a fluffy, froofy, hold your chin
high or drown in flounces sort of fichu.
French Robe à l'Anglaise and fichu via the Metropolitan Museum of Art |
I started on it
almost immediately, but almost immediately after I started, I went home to
Chile and accidentally packed the unfinished work in my sea freight instead of
my suitcase. And almost as soon as my little sea shipment arrived (on a slow
boat that saw most of the major ports in the Asia-Pacific region before it slid
into the Chilean Port of Valparaiso) we packed everything up again and moved
north to Iquique.
It took several more months, but at very long last and a very long time later,
the fichu was finally unpacked, and I was able to finish it
up.
The styling of this
fichu sits squarely in the later 1780s - a half-circle with a whip-gathered
ruffle along the curved edge. It is one of those garments where the
construction is very simple and the effect comes down to the quality of the
fabric and the needlework - in this case, the extra-ordinary cotton did more
than half the work for me, and the rolled hems just sort of happened all by
themselves while I watched.
Technical Details
for those who want a giant white neck caterpillar of their very own:
The base of the fichu is a half-circle with a 26 inch radius.
I wanted a ruffle that looked BIG on my 5'7", broad-shouldered frame. After some playing around, I concluded that the ruffle should be between 3.5" and 4.5" total FINISHED width - with the gathering line running at 1/3 of the way in from the edge.
That range will take
you from restrained to Ding-DONG, without looking clownish. I wanted a full on
ding-dong honker, so I cut mine for
4.5".
I finished the edges of the kerchief and the ruffle with a rolled hem, and whip
gathered the ruffle (along that 1/3 line) to a 2:1 ratio, and tacked it down.
Does everyone else
find the sewing itself as beautiful as the finished piece?
And here you have it - a finished fichu.
This fichu has a real element of “Off-Broadway does 1776” about it, but it gives me the Scarlet Pimpernel vibes - and what else are we in this hobby for?
No comments:
Post a Comment