1790s Painted Shoe Tutorial: Part I

 

Up in Reno last September, I was lucky enough to score a pair of American Duchess Kensington shoes on Poshmark.  I've always liked the idea of using bright yellow as a neutral shoe color, and this pair seemed a very good opportunity to color myself a pair of bright yellow mid-century shoes.

 

I've never worked with leather before- in any manner- so I did a lot of reading.  Most costumers seem to favor paint, but a few use leather dye.  Both approaches seemed reasonably reasonable, so I took myself off to the Reno Tandy leather store, where dithering over the racks of paints and dyes, I was approached by a fellow most GLORIOUSLY decked out in a leather apron painted in all sorts of swirls and swatches. We had a talk about the merits of dye vs paint and which would wear best - by which I mean I mentioned both options, and he asked if I'd worked with leather before, and on hearing me say "No, but -" stopped me at the "no" and told me in no uncertain terms that as a first timer, I would definitely be going home with the leather paints.

I came home to Chile with bottles of Angelus leather preparer, Angelus leather finisher and Angelus leather paint.  I also came home with a second pair of shoes.  I didn't want to jump straight to my precious Kensingtons, so I went on ebay and bought an inexpensive pair of Sam Edelman leather flats to use as a test bunny for all my new bottles.  With  a little luck, my 1790s Green Blob gown would also end up with a lovely pop of yellow peeping out from below the hem.

Back home, I worked on the two pairs at once -  testing each step on the flats, and then moving onto the Kensingtons.  This post will be warts and all description of what I did and how it did it.  My hope is that my process - mistakes, corrections and the lot - may prove useful for anyone else thinking about a pair of custom colored historical shoes!

Step One: Prepping the Leather.

The first order of business was to remove existing glaze and polish. It was a straightforward operation: I put some Angelus leather Preparer/Deglazer solution on a clean rag, and wiped carefully over the shoes.  I wiped down all 4 shoes, and then I did it again, just to make certain I had caught all the folds and wrinkles in the leather.

 

The stuff works pretty much instantaneously - you can see and you can feel the difference between the polished and the deglazed shoe.
In fact, so powerful is this stuff, that I left the rag sitting on the toe of one of the flat shoes for all of 10 seconds while I put the lid back on the bottle, and it stripped right through the glaze and the leather dye, leaving a large irregular mark that took several extra layers of paint to cover up.

I found this accident quite reassuring. Clearly, if I really screwed up with my paint job, I would have absolutely no problem stripping my work and starting again.

Caveat: Later, when I began painting the Kensingtons, I discovered that I had not removed all of the original glaze.  The paint was skating over patches of leather like watercolor paint over a  wax resist. 

With multiple coats of paint, I was eventually able to cover these areas, but it was an interesting lesson in how shoe polishes and glazes differ from brand to brand. The Sam Edelman flats had stripped very easily, but the AD formula is more tenacious.  When you do your pre-paint stripping with the Angelus Preparer/Deglazer, do your AD shoes again. And possibly a third or fourth time as well, just to be certain.

Step 2: Taping the Heels and Soles

I was thorough about this.  I was VERY thorough about this - cutting and pressing many infinitesimal bits of painters tape onto the curves of the heels on the Kensington shoes, and I  will say up front that this was probably the biggest mistake that I made in the whole exercise:

 

Angelus leather paint is an acrylic paint.  This means that it doesn't sink into the surface of the leather.  It sits on it and makes a film on top of the shoe  - and on top of the tape where I splashed over the edge of the heel, and when I  removed the tape at the end of the paint job, I ripped entire strips of paint away with it.  The way some costumers ended up painting the edges of their shoe soles black at the end of the whole process started making a whole lot more sense.

 

 Step 3: Painting the Shoes

I didn't want to use the yellow color straight out of the Angelus bottle. I wanted a softer, more lemon-y shade.

 

In a lidded plastic tub, I mixed yellow with white, and thinned it out with water.  The tutorials had recommended quite a thin mix - and here, again, I overdid it, and mixed up a lovely thin glaze of color that painted on without streaking or lumping, but when I had reached 10 coats on the flat shoes, I realized I may have gone just a little off the rails, and I left the lid off of the paint tub to evaporate some of the water out.

Tips for Painting: 

DO use thin coats.  It doesn't have to be translucently thin, but it needs to be thin enough to flow cleanly over the shoe without stippling or streaking.  I did find that a smaller brush tended to result in less streaking than a large one.

 

I found that the best results came from letting the paint dry completely between coats. It is quite humid where I live, and I found the best thing was to lay down a coat of paint, seal the lid on the plastic paint tub, and walk away and do something else for 15-30 minutes. Take your time, go gently, and build your color.

When you come back to the next coat, make sure to stir your paint before you apply the next one! The paint pigments have different densities, and if you don't remix your color you're liable to find you have lighter and darker patches across your shoe.

When you have built up the color to a strength that you like, stop, take a moment, and think "Holy HECK. If I scuff these shoes, I am never ever ever going to match this custom color.  I should have used the paint as it came, straight out of the bottle."  

 

 

But it will be too late for regrets by then, so bury your feelings down deep and move on to -

Step 4:  Removing the Painters Tape

As I wrote above, this was where I ran into my first real snag.  Removing the tape around the heel edges, I also removed strips of paint! 

 

At this point I stopped stripping, and went around the entire edge of the heel with a craft knife, digging deep into the join between leather heel and shoe body. And then I removed the rest of the tape. Very carefully.

 

Fortunately, the stripped patches filled in quite easily.  The texture is faintly blobby, but it is hidden in the under-curve of the shoe body, and anyone close enough to see that deserves all the satisfaction they get.

A bigger problem for me was all the paint that had gotten under the tape and onto the heel.

At this point I was thinking some pretty serious thoughts about all the time I'd spent taping the damn things. I tried chipping with a knife, but didn't make much headway. I tried dabbing with the Preparer/Deglazer, but discovered that the dark color of the sole edges was coming off and leaving bleached spots! At this point I decided that I could either paint the heels entirely or leave them as they were, but as I

a) didn't have any brown or black paint 

 

and

 

b) figured I'd just end up splashing back up onto the shoe body if I tried, I decide to move on and let it go. If someone sees it, good luck to them.  Lying down with your nose in the grass to critique a paint splash on the underside of a shoe deserves SOME sort of win.

 

Step 5:  Sealing the Shoes
 

Color applied and holes patched, it was time to seal and varnish the shoes.  The procedure was pretty simple - pour a bit of Angelus satin shoe sealer into a bowl and apply it with a brush.  Again, a smaller brush was more effective than a larger one, and again, I applied several coats, with resting time between each.  In consideration of future difficulties matching a custom color, I had some idea that more coats would provide more protection against scuffs.  I have no idea how effective this will turn out to be.  It will be an interesting experiment.

Using the sealer is where I discovered my second and third mistakes -

Mistake 1: 

 

I strongly suggest that when you seal your shoes, dry the sealer coats with the shoes sitting beneath an overturned plastic tub.  Or else knock up your local high school chemistry department and ask to borrow their fume hood.
Any dust that settles on your shoes will get stuck in that varnish. And if you're not paying particular attention, you may not notice this until the second or third coat, and then that cute little grey curl of dust across the tip of your pretty yellow shoe?
It's there FOREVER.

My third mistake was a GLARING one. In doing my pre-project research, I had seen that a small minority of people were choosing a matte varnish over the satin one, claiming that the satin was just too shiny.  The Tandy leather man had voted for the satin, so I went that way as well, and HOLY HECK - on these shoes, that satin-coat finish was about as satiny as a brand new patent vinyl raincoat. Under a stage-light. You know that very twentieth-century ultra-high-gloss high-beam plastic leather finish?
Yeah, that one.  That's what my shoes looked like.

 

A Bergere Hat with Ribbons On: A Tutorial for a Trimmed Hat.

Here's the short version: 

I fell in love with a painting.
I bought several yards of watered acetate ribbon.
I bought a straw hat blank.
I bled a bit.
And then I fell in love.

 

A bergere hat is a flat-brimmed hat with a shallow crown.  They started to show up in the second quarter of the 18th century, and as the wide flat brims balanced the wide panniered skirts of the 18th century, they stayed popular until skirt widths  began to collapse again in the 1790s.  Earlier hats were decorated quite simply:

 

Hat, British c. 1760 via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

but as fashion styles grew more complex, they literally BALLOONED.

 

Cabinet des Modes ou les Modes Nouvelles, 1 Novembre 1786, pl. III

 

And some of them are simply, quietly, elegantly beautiful.

 

The Nabob's Return by Nathanial Dance c. 1769 via National Gallery of Victoria

Tacking ribbons to a straw hat is not particular difficult. However, I wanted this bergere to be lined, so that the straw blank wouldn't catch on my hair or on the fine, delicate fabric of fine delicate caps.

 

Sewing the Lining:
I began by pinning a piece of silk taffeta into the crown of the hat, and then pinning until the silk was more or less caught more or less neatly against the straw shell of the hat. And then I stitched.  

Note: the photos of the lining being sewn are from a different hat with a covered top.  This is why you're seeing an intimidating number of pins sticking through from the other side. (Yes, there was blood. Just a splash. But it got the job done.)

To cover the underside of the brim, I traced the outline of the hat on another piece of silk taffeta, and cut myself a circle of roughly the same size.  I laid the silk onto the underside of the brim, pinned it into place and stitched down the outer edge.  The stitching line is hidden by a bound ribbon, so you can hand-sew or use a machine -  whichever feels more comfortable.  Once the outer brim is caught, pin it securely about an inch and a half away from the inner edge of the brim and cut through into the open center.  Cut the excess away, leaving an inch or so of seam allowance, and then bit by bit, fold the raw edge under.  Once you have MORE pins in place, stitch down your edge with whip or catch stitches (whichever bleeds less.)

Binding the brim: 

Take your binding ribbon and begin to fold it around the edge of your hat brim, holding it in place with pins or clips.  I personally love quilting clips for this job  - they grip nicely without marking the fabric.  Begin tacking down the ribbon with small stab stitches - if you've balanced the ribbon over the top and bottom edges, you can catch both sides of it at once.  Sew your way slowly around the edge of the hat brim, catching the small gathers in your stitches as you sew around the curve.

And now you can trim your hat!
Work slowly - take your time deciding where you want your ribbon placement - do you want tight puffs? Loose puffs? Large ones? Small ones? One row? Two?  Bows? Do you have a very soft silk ribbon?  A crisper taffeta one?

I trimmed this particular bergere with two rows of ribbon puffs - one stitched down at the base of the crown, and one half an inch or so further up.  Let the ribbon show you how it wants to fall, and you'll find that it is doing more than half the work for you. 

 

 Play with the ribbons, stock up on bandaids, and at the end of it all, you'll have a beautifully lined, beautifully trimmed confection!

The Glamour Beneath the Glitz

 

You forget to pack your stockings. Two pairs of modern thigh-highs doubled up might do it -

So off in a hurry to the big box stores and - ta-dah!

Except the pack you grabbed are NOT one-size fits most. They fall off.

To the rescue, your mother-in-law and her elastic grab bag! A happy ending for everybody!!!

Ah, the glamour beneath dressing up like pretty pretty princesses in big skirts!!!!

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.