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. 

 

A Winterhalter Princess Dress for an American Girl Doll

 

I'm a sucker for big bows on little dresses. Just as an example, for instance, the shoulder-bows on the fluffy white dresses on the Princesses in the 1846 Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria and her family have always been EXACTLY what floats my small dress boat.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter, The Royal Family in 1846 via wikimedia commons

When a scrap of white striped cotton floated up in my stash, I decided that it was time to do something about it. I found some yellow French wired ribbons for the shoulders, and I ordered some orange-to-yellow mokuba ribbon on ebay, and while I waited for the ribbon to arrive, I drafted up a party dress for an early-Victorian Princess.

I wanted the bodice to be gathered, not pleated, and I wanted the gathers to run STRAIGHT DOWN, not sun-raying away from the neckline, so I ran multiple parallel lines of gathering stitches, basted (excessively) the gathered fabric to a flat cotton base, and cut a wide almost off the shoulder neckline.

The sleeves were done similarly - a gathered puff sewn top and bottom to a smaller cotton base, and then a ruffle added onto the bottom of the sleeve.

 

When the mokuba ribbon arrived, I sewed it onto the skirt in an oversized Greek key pattern, tacking it down with knots of cotton embroidery floss.

 

I ran a double row of ribbon around the waist, again punctuating with orange floss. To balance all the yellow I ran a row of large orange knots around the neckline, and as a final splash of color I made a very large bow indeed from the striped cotton, edged it with the mokuba ribbon, and sewed it onto the back waist!

Addy was quite pleased.

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.

 

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!