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?

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. 

 

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.)