The Green Blob in the Fall: a 1790s gown goes on a progress

 

Last fall I went up to Reno.  I took the Green Blob with me to get some photos with the autumn color. High summer in Malta had required a fairly minimalist approach to 1790s chic, but the cool crisp weather of October was very suitable for a more decked-out formal approach!

 

 

I arrived just as the leaves were beginning to turn.  Every day while I was there, I would say "today?" and my Mother-in-law would say "Wait, wait - "
And then - two days before I flew home, she said "NOW." 
And I dressed, and we went - and there just aren't words.  It was magnificent.

 

 

The Green Blob was glorious! Everything was glorious!  I wasn't limited to traveling light and I brought along some of my carefully collected accessories - antique lace, vintage leather gloves, antique portrait brooch and a celluloid brisé fan. Instead of a large sash, this time I wore a simple tassel cord, tacked into place at the peak of the raised back waist.

 

Honestly, I swanked.

I also debuted my new wig - the classic "80s Boogie Babe,"  available on amazon and quite a lot of party store websites, and REMARKABLY good value for an over the top 1790s look. My mother in law and I did want over the top  - in fact, we were so enthusiastic that we layered two Boogie Babes on top of the other!

 

The result was possibly excessive. I mean, it wasn't excessive if the year was 1985, the genre was hair metal, the venue was Rio de Janeiro and you were Whitesnake,  but for a genteel jaunt through a golden fall in in the year 1797 when they hadn't yet invented hairspray or the ozone layer - possibly it was a little too much. Possibly.

Regretfully, perhaps, we came down on the side of restraint and I only wore one.  I did wind a purple lamé scarf from the actual 80s around my head, so I wasn't entirely bereft of a little rock chic. 

My jewelry was glorious as well - my necklace and my HONKING pearl earrings (honestly, I reckon I could indeed have worn the double-layered hair just to balance out these divine things) are both by Taylor of  Dames a la Mode. She is doing some wonderful 1790s stuff right now - and it is sized to work for both the late Georgian period and 1980s hair metal.

 

So there I was - decked, dressed, and deeply elegant - and the Autumn sun was pouring down and drenching the world in liquid gold -

 

Guess who stomped around like a pretty pretty princess?

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. 

 

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 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!

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.