The Green Blob, a 1790s Gown : Construction

My 1790s wearable mockup gown is a mashup between the American Duchess book, the American Duchess Simplicity pattern, and self-draped finicking of what sort of might probably fit me.

 

I had a lot of excellent initial help from my Mother-in-law fitting the bodice, but after that it was down to me, and fitting a back by yourself without a mannequin take AGES. It involves an awful lot of lacing up your stays, wrestling into your mockup, twisting around sideways in front of the mirror and stabbing at your back with a pencil, then wresting out of your mockup, making optimistic guesses about what your pencil marks mean, discovering your stay laces came undone, and RE-lacing your stays, wrestling into an altered mockup, squinting at yourself sideways in the mirror, stabbing at your back with a pencil -

 

-and doing it OVER and OVER again.

 

Gown construction, a mixture of machine and hand-sewing, was reasonably straightforward. I sewed the back layers separately - fashion fabric and lining, then pressed both, laid them wrong sides together, and stitched both to the front lining at shoulders and side seams.

I intended to cut the front bodice and skirts as one, so setting that fabric aside, I sewed the back skirt to the back bodice.
 

When i sew gathers on a machine, I like to sew three row of gathering stitches:

 

I mark a starting line perpendicular to the edge of the fabric, so that each row starts as close to level with the others as possible, and then I stitch -

One row just INSIDE the stitching line, a second row about half-way between the first line and the edge of the fabric, and a third row the same distance OUTSIDE the first gathering row.

 

This technique keeps the gathers tight and parallel as you sew, and on fine, tight fabric like this voile, it can give a pretty good machine-sewn facsimile of stroked gathers!

 

Back skirts attached, I moved on to the fronts.

It’s not that the bodice was so very small - it’s that the fabric was so very large.  Which was a good thing - the nasty stripes of bleach were able to vanish into seams and tucks and where they twisted sideways onto open fabric, be lost in the great green mass of gathering that was this very silly gown.

To cut the front - I laid the bodice lining pattern over the fabric, and extended the front neckline out to the edge of the fashion fabric panel. 
After cutting, I sewed a 1/4 inch tuck for the a drawstring channel.

 

I left the machine threads unknotted at Center Front so that I could hem the front opening later on. For my next gown I'll hem the center front BEFORE I sew the tuck, but at the time I still hadn't settled my final neckline, and I was feeling iffy about hemming anything in that region.

After I'd sewn the channel, I sewed the front of the gown to the back.
This is where things got a bit iffy and not-quite-well-thought out.  I folded the seam allowances of the front at the side bodice and the shoulders, and whipped them down from the outside.
Then, I lined up the skirt fronts against the skirt back and machine stitched them.  This involved a certain amount of fiddling and hand-picking in the last inch or so below the point where the skirts met the bodice, but it worked out and from the outside, looks very neat and clean.

One thing that did NOT work out was the shoulder seam. The bodice lining was cut on the bias, but the fashion fabric was cut on the straight. Bias stretches, straight does not, and when I lined the two up, there was a gap where the fashion fabric did not come up high enough. 

Fortunately, piecing is period - and a wedge of green voile (remembering to  keep the fabric grains consistent!) filled in the gap nicely!

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.