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.

 

Here be Oranges (and a Lappet Cap)

 

I took my new linen English gown for a spin, and accessorized it with a basket of oranges and my new Good Wives Linens lappet cap.

 

 

Oranges make a great photo prop - they don't shatter, crumple, wilt, bend or break - and you can take them home afterwards and make orange juice.

 

Short summary (because costuming takes a village):  

Lappet Cap pattern by Good Wives Linens, Basket woven locally and oranges sourced in the Terminal Agropecuario de Iquique.   Gown draped on me by Brooke Welborn and sewn from striped linen from Burnley and Trowbridge.  

Yes, I need to take the cuffs off and re-stitch them an inch lower on my elbow, but that is for another day. Today is for orange juice.

 

 

A Very Serious Lappet Cap

It is absolutely no secret that I love the cap patterns from Good Wives Linens.
They are well drafted, meticulously researched, easy to put together, and her pattern releases always seem to synchronize with the cap I'm personally wanting!

For example - I wanted a mid-18th century lappet cap, and Good Wives Linens released the Mrs Sandby cap.  Perfect synchronicity of purpose.

 

Caps are good late-evening sewing projects.  They don't have to be fitted, you hem all the bits individually, and do the whipping of gathers and assembly afterwards - proof against all fools but the ones who don't just sew at night, but do their measuring late at night as well. 

 

(That fool would be me, in case I'm being too subtle for you here. At least piecing is period, and "whack it off with scissors" solves everything.)

 

 

 Hemming (eventually, with pit stops for repairs) done, I whipped the ruffle to the band - 

 

 

and the band to the caul.

 

And then I had a cap.

 

 

And what a cap!

 

 

I look like I’ve been tossed, dressed and served up on a starched linen platter for the ecclesiastically discerning, but i am very VERY serious about it indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

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 New Year Necklace

A simple stash-busting project for a bit of New Year Bling: 

 

 

16 inches of faux pearls, pear shaped crystals and matching mountings, a handful of jump rings, and a bean clasp.

 

For real elegance against the stones the pearls should be smaller, but no Napoleonic lady worth her pearls would ever quibble the SIZE of them - she’d grab those honkers, string on some amethysts and sail out into the ballroom, angling towards the candlelight as she went!

 

 

 

 

 

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!