The Infinitely Ruffled Apron

This apron began all the way back in 2018.  It was my second project out of the American Duchess dressmaking book, and at that point I hadn't much experience with hand rolling hems, and this apron - well, this apron had a lot of rolled hems. There were 3 yards in the apron body, 6 yards up one side of the ruffle  and 6 back down the other side.  Just thinking about it, I needed a fainting couch and a handsome gentleman (yes, Mr Tabubil - that IS you) to sponge my temples. At my slow, painstaking rate of rolled hemmery, 15 yards of hem felt like miles. 

I started with optimism - mostly at night, in front of the television, where I didn't have to think of the miles and miles and MILES of hem (the estimate grew, exponentially, with every stitch) and I worked on it on and off, and on and off,  and on, and on, and ON -
I came to think of it as the Infinite Apron : when I was feeling down and like life had no meaning, I'd pull out this horrible apron and confirm that I was right.

 

Then 2020 happened.  Circumstances saw me stuck outside of Chile for 18 months, where I sewed - and hemmed - other things.  Uncertain, unmoored, waiting for vaccines and badly missing Mr Tabubil, I sewed for my sanity's sake: caps, fichus, mantelets, wrapping gowns, petticoats -  I seamed, I gathered, I whipped, and I hemmed -

Practice brought experience, and eventually expertise, and somewhere in the middle of it all - rolled hemming changed from proof of the dreary infinite to something that was fun.

When I finally made it home to Chile in 2021, I pulled out the horrible infinite apron and found that as a project, it had become benign. It had become something almost small.
So I finished it. I took that heap of half-hemmed voile, I unpicked my laboriously bungled whip-gathers, and then I sat back, cracked an anticipatory grin -
I re-whipped my ruffles. I tacked them down. I stroke-gathered the waist to a band, and then I stopped, and looked for a bit, and I took some vast and serious pleasure in the formal, measured beauty of the strokes. 

 

This apron had become metaphorical as hell.  I felt existential whiplash with every step. 

Until there it was - the American Duchess 1780s ruffled apron. 

 

 I liked it so much, I made another one.

Here's an apron. Take two. I can HEM, you see. I hemmed around the world and back.  Sometimes, looking at those lonely, drifting 18 months, I feel like I hemmed my way home.

 

The Dissipated Grandma Sheep (Another Lappet Cap)

My first Mrs Sandby cap was far too respectable. 

 

I mean, no-one would go wooing a young maiden one morning in may in a cap like that. She might flirt coyly around her lappets, but her virtue is clearly linen-clad - and that is like iron-clad and only slightly more elastic. 

No-one, if you follow my meaning, would be stealing this milk-maid’s cheese. No indeed - lappet caps are inherently silly, and I have made that my hill on which to gather.

So I did. I recut the Mrs Sandby cap in white cotton voile, and then I gathered, and then I added lace, and then I gathered MORE, and only when it looked like a lacy nightmare in a boudoir, did i stop.

 

The tight u-bend around the lappet point took a few goes to get right.  Adding the lace to the edge of the ruffle extended its depth juuust enough that the regular gathering ration wasn’t quite enough - the ruffle spread out and turned inward like a concave cup.

I ended up sacrificing the gathers in the flat butt of the lappet, but in the end i got the u-bend to lie flat. JUST.

 

And I gathered and I gathered, 

 

until suddenly, well, golly gee - here’s an exuberant lappet cap hanging up to dry after the marking pen has been washed out!  Gosh it looks pretty like that.

 

And at last - may I present- the milkmaid's nightmare:

 

There is no universe in which this look has any dignity.

I look like a hydrangea bush.

I look like a pram in a paper-mâchié pantomime.

I look like a dissipated grandma sheep.

It is PERFECT.

 

Here be Oranges (and a Lappet Cap)

 

I took my new linen English gown for a spin, and accessorized it with a basket of oranges and my new Good Wives Linens lappet cap.

 

 

Oranges make a great photo prop - they don't shatter, crumple, wilt, bend or break - and you can take them home afterwards and make orange juice.

 

Short summary (because costuming takes a village):  

Lappet Cap pattern by Good Wives Linens, Basket woven locally and oranges sourced in the Terminal Agropecuario de Iquique.   Gown draped on me by Brooke Welborn and sewn from striped linen from Burnley and Trowbridge.  

Yes, I need to take the cuffs off and re-stitch them an inch lower on my elbow, but that is for another day. Today is for orange juice.

 

 

A Very Serious Lappet Cap

It is absolutely no secret that I love the cap patterns from Good Wives Linens.
They are well drafted, meticulously researched, easy to put together, and her pattern releases always seem to synchronize with the cap I'm personally wanting!

For example - I wanted a mid-18th century lappet cap, and Good Wives Linens released the Mrs Sandby cap.  Perfect synchronicity of purpose.

 

Caps are good late-evening sewing projects.  They don't have to be fitted, you hem all the bits individually, and do the whipping of gathers and assembly afterwards - proof against all fools but the ones who don't just sew at night, but do their measuring late at night as well. 

 

(That fool would be me, in case I'm being too subtle for you here. At least piecing is period, and "whack it off with scissors" solves everything.)

 

 

 Hemming (eventually, with pit stops for repairs) done, I whipped the ruffle to the band - 

 

 

and the band to the caul.

 

And then I had a cap.

 

 

And what a cap!

 

 

I look like I’ve been tossed, dressed and served up on a starched linen platter for the ecclesiastically discerning, but i am very VERY serious about it indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

The Mitts of Discontent Part 2: Construction

Several days later, after I had recuperated from the gastro, and unpicked the mitts fabric from my pyjamas, I chastely and sedately finished embroidering the second pair. 

I also sewed that pair to my pyjamas, three times, but that is entirely incidental to this story and has no bearing on my sewing competence. At all.

And then I cut.  Linen is wicked slippery, even when starched, and I hate cutting it. Possibly that is why I chose to make a second pair of mitts, so that I would enjoy cutting at least ONE pair of 'em.

 

The linen napkins were slightly too small for the pattern, so I ended up piecing the corners. 

 

Entropy House has a very good description of pieced mitts - make sure you keep your seam allowances and your grain directions, and everything will be fine!

The pieced pieces were stitched and felled, 

 

then the side seams were stitched and felled, the points were sewn, the thumb pieces were finished - 

 

And the thumbs were attached, following the instructions on the B&T mitts sew-along video. 

 

 

I hemmed the bottoms of the mitts, and then I tried my mitts on.

 

Clever readers will already have noticed what I had managed to completely miss until the mitts were already sewn and on my hands. I had seriously mis-positioned my mitt points. 

 

 

Mitt points are supposed to be balanced over the flat of the back of the knuckles, but mine were wandering off sideways into my palm.  And they were too small. And too pointy.  I hated them.

I re-cut them to try and recenter the point, but it made them even pointier, and I only hated them worse.

 

 Looking back now at the photos of the new points, they were perfectly respectable and okay, but in one of those late-night really clever sewing moments, I cut them off.

 

And I liked the mitts like that - pointless.

They were elegant and clean - but as I was reminded, only really appropriate that way for the mid 1790s onward, which is WHY one doesn't make late night decisions with scissors. However, with a clean slate, I was now able to draft the points I really wanted -  nice happy rounded summer points.  I stitched them and I sewed them on, and I felled the seams, and I had MITTS.

Happy, lightweight summer mitts.

And

 

Rich, saturated Christmas mitts.

 

I felt mildly contented about it!

The Linen Mitts of Discontent

 

 I am a genius!  And it only took 10 iterations to get there.

 

 Some time ago I was gifted a pair of large purple linen napkins. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them, but it took me several years to get around to it - until I was living in a coastal city in the driest desert in the world, where the summer sun is FIERCE. I have the sort of skin that blisters and peels and goes straight back to blistering again, so up here in Iquique, a pair of light linen mitts was, at last, exactly what I needed.

There are some excellent kits and patterns for 18th Century Mitts available with a quick google search, but i wanted to draft my own.  Happily, there are equally excellent resources on the google for drafting your own mitt pattern - notably the excellent tutorial by Sew-Loud.

I found that drafting the base shape went quite quickly, and then the pattering came down to a long process of fine-tuning - small iterative changes to the thumb and point placement.

 

 

Once I had my final mitt design, I unpicked and pressed the fabric, and traced it onto paper - making sure that I had proper seam allowances not only on the side seam where my mockups were stitched, but on the top and bottom edges as well. It is surprisingly easy to forget that. 

 

And then I traced!
 

Somewhere along the way,  I had dug up some red kona cotton and decided I needed a pair of bright Christmas mitts as well as light linen ones.  

 
(Gratuitous historical note: While there are documented examples of unlined cotton mitts out there, the extant ones of which I am personally aware are all pale, neutral colors.  I don’t know of any dark cotton mitts, but cotton was what I had - so that's what I sewed. Regardless, the "red-green-gold means Christmas" scheme only became the default later on during the 19th Century, so 'Christmas' mitts were already a big helping of happy what-the-heck.   Hurrah!)

Tracing done, it was time to embroider. I very sensibly (I thought) decided to embroider the mitts before I cut, so that I could keep the fabric taut in an embroidery hoop.

When it comes to embroidering mitts, there are no limits. From a simple tambour hem to full-body polychrome embroidery, the sky's only where it STARTS.  I was in a hurry to get these done, so I chose a very simple motfi:  - three lines of chain stitch down the back of the hand - a common design  that would embroider up very quickly so that I could get on with the work of sewing the mitts up.

HA.

 

  Oh yes, I did.  I really really did.

 

And then I did it again.

The same evening I set down to embroider my mitts, I came down with an attack of gastroenteritis. When you're busy leaping up and down off the sofa all evening, embroidering a pair of mitts is definitely EXACTLY what you should be doing.

I'll take my wobbly chain stitch for 100, Alex…

The gastro won.  I quit.

A New Year Necklace

A simple stash-busting project for a bit of New Year Bling: 

 

 

16 inches of faux pearls, pear shaped crystals and matching mountings, a handful of jump rings, and a bean clasp.

 

For real elegance against the stones the pearls should be smaller, but no Napoleonic lady worth her pearls would ever quibble the SIZE of them - she’d grab those honkers, string on some amethysts and sail out into the ballroom, angling towards the candlelight as she went!

 

 

 

 

 

Two Christmas Bergere Hats

Can I make a pair of bergere hats out of Christmas placemats and decorations from the dollar store?

I've wanted to try making an 18th Century bergere from a placemat for a while now, and when I saw a selection of silly Christmas mats in the local Jumbo supermarket, it felt like the right time to try.

I bought some Christmas- colored ribbons in a cordoneria downtown, and made a trip to the Best Mart dollar store to see what sort of Christmas froof I could find for decorations, came home and dug out my spool of millinery wire - and I was ready to go.

The placemats are VERY floppy, so I started by sewing two circles of millinery wire onto each placemat - one circle about an inch in from the edge, to give structure to the brim, and another circle about 2.25 inches in radius around the center, to stiffen the "crown" of the hat.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE: When sewing millinery wire by machine, you need to be wearing proper eye protection.  Millinery wire is solid metal, sewing machine needles move swiftly and safety goggles are cheap in any hardware store.  Even sewing slowly and deliberately, the needle can snap - and when it does it will happen faster than you think.

 

I set the sewing machine to a zig-zag stitch, of about medium width and about medium stitch length, and I stitched at a slow and deliberate pace - I wanted a zig-zag that would be short and narrow enough to hold the wire securely, but also wide enough that I didn't have to risk the needle hitting the wire on every stitch.
When I came to the end of my circle I kept going and overlapped the wire by about 2 inches to keep the circle circular - and then I cut the wire free with a pair of wire cutters.

I trimmed the hats with my ribbon, using the pleating to hide the wires. 

The red ribbon was pleated in a box pleat, which sprang up in lovely puffs.

The gold ribbon I pleated in wide knife pleats.

I didn't worry about measuring the pleats, I just eyeballed them to keep them relatively even, and let the small variations between the pleats give a happy organic feel to the hat.

 

Once I had the ribbons sewn down, I tacked on dollar store Christmas-y corsages and other wintery floral bits until the hats looked pleasantly tasteless and festive. 

 

Lastly, I cut ribbon ties about 24 inches long and hemmed the ends so that they didn't unravel.  Then I flipped the hats over and sewed on ribbon ties. On these crown-less hats, you need to sew the ties about 2 inches out from the crown line, or you risk looking like a festive pageant pancake.
(See warning photo below)

The red hat is suitable for the 1750s and early 1760s when a single sprig of ornamentation, discreetly placed, was VERY chic

The gold hat is suitable for the 1770s and 1780s, when they wore the entire kitchen sink.

Bold, Brassy, Cool and Classy -  two fabulous Christmas Bergere Hats!