Introducing Lady Hamilton in Malta

 

I took off that bloody petticoat!!!  And now this voile 1790s gown MOVES!

There is no bustle pad at the back, as the bustle pad had been sewn to the under-petticoat, but that’s a small loss when I'm looking like a Greek goddess on a spring picnic instead of like her laundry hamper.

 

And the purple silk sash against the green in the strong Mediterranean sunshine is just…(chef’s kiss).

 

Lady Hamilton is very fashion forward with her stylish sandaled feet, but she is also sentimental, and she is wearing a necklace that her husband (Sir William Hamilton) bought for his first wife before she died (in 1792).

And she didn’t have time to style her wig before she got on the airplane to Malta, so she slapped it onto her head, tied a scarf around it and hoped for the best.

 

Which she got, of course. Emma, Lady Hamilton makes her own chic.

 

 

I do declare - Emma, Lady Hamilton, is something of a vamp.

 

 

(Historically accurate photograph of a merveilleuse wrangling her acres of silly skirt.)

The Green Blob Goes Forth!

About 3/4 of the way into the construction of the Green Blob, I went on holidays!

Vaxxed, double-boosted, and in the heightened immunity window of having recently recovered from the C myself, I flew off to Europe.  Knowing I was heading to places with  far more scope for neoclassical backdrops than can be found in Iquique (known neoclassical building count: zero), I bundled the Green Blob into my suitcase and brought it along.

 

I put the last stitches into the Green Blob on Malta, and very early one morning,

 

 

before the heat rose up

 

We drove over the hill to the parish church of Mellieha, and brought her out to show her off. 

 

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 Tropical-weight Christmas Ensemble

Late December in summer, in the tropics, in the worlds driest desert, is not really the sort of time or place where one wants to put on stays and stockings and chemises and petticoats. A swimsuit feels more appropriate.

But I pulled out my linen-iest 1750s ensemble, and put on my Christmas mitts and my Christmas hat and went down to the beach!

A placemat is a good budget option for a bergere, but doesn't have any crown. It isn't going to sit on the head like a hat with a crown, and for these earlier decades of the 18th century, where there weren't masses of hair to cushion one's headwear, the difference will be noticeable.

 

But if you're wanting a quick and easy seasonal hat that looks brilliant from 100 paces and still pretty all-right up close, a a placemat is FUN!