Those Frenchies Seek My Ruffles Everywhere: a Swashbuckling Fichu in Dotted Swiss

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.

I enjoyed this little project SO MUCH that I'm finding myself needing to use all-caps when I write about it.  Some fabrics fight you, but others behave like they WANT to be sewn, and just need you to show them the way. Who else gets the happy wriggles from a really good rolled hem?

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?

 

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.

 

Accidental Sewing Renaissance

In the basement of a small hotel in Luxembourg, next to the ice machine and lit by the light from the ladies lav, there was space to set up an ironing board…

Sewing something large on holidays takes determination, a certain amount of creativity, and the ability to iron by feel in low-light conditions. 

 

The Green Blob, a 1790s Gown : First Fitting and Sleeves

First Fitting:

When I drafted the bodice of this gown, I wasn't sure where I wanted the neckline to sit. Accordingly, I cut a very shallow neckline, and once the gown body was assembled, ran a rudimentary drawstring across the top of the neck, gathered up the bulk, and shoved wads of fabric down the front of my stays until I had a level that I liked.

Next step was the hem - I still didn't have an assistant, so I begged 15 minutes from my very busy neighbor and ran across the street in my bustled petticoat and gown to have her put in some pins at the level where she reckoned the gown ought to stop. In her full length mirror, the result was, well -

The gown had a LOT less flow than I had been expecting. 

This right here is a perfect example of the effects of underpinnings on a gown.  This particular under-petticoat was originally built for a later mid-regency silhouette. I'd tacked on a little bustle pad at the level of the 1790s back waist seam and expected all would be good - but over the relatively stiff fabric of the petticoat, the yards of gathered 1790s voile looked less like a classical goddess and more like a bale of bedsheets. There was no DRAPE!

 

Making a mental addendum to ditch the under-petticoat, it was time to take care of the sleeves.

This gown is a mashup between the American Duchess book and the American Duchess Simplicity pattern. I worked from the AD book to draft the bodice, but by myself without a mannequin, draping sleeves were NOT possible.

Accordingly, I bought the AD simplicity pattern and took the sleeves and shoulder head from that - and it was a disaster.

 

I don’t believe I was misreading the marks and notches, but i ended up having to rotate the sleeve seam almost 3 inches up the bodice to get it to fit the armscye, and attempts to formally redraft the rotation went absolutely pear-shaped,  and no matter what I did, I never could get the sleeve to a point where I could lift my arms more than about an inch.

 

Fortunately, by the time i actually needed to attach sleeves to the body of the gown, I had an assistant again, and I took a very simple and direct approach:

i cut a very loose sleeve with an overly large shoulder head and sewed it to the gown, then had my assistant progressively pin out the fullness, making sure that I could still move my arms at every step.

 

When i liked the look, i stopped and transferred the markings to my pattern, and voila -a sleeve.

 

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!