Green Cape and Muff(s)!!!

I'm supposed to be working on my circa.Civil war projects, but everyone in the costume blogsphere has been having such FUN at the Costume Accessories Symposium at Williamsburg  that I just - couldn't. I needed an off-day.
            And 'Clear out the stash' projects are intrinsically virtuous, right?
            And I'd been meaning to make a muff for AGES.
            And then after the blog Time Traveling in Costume went and posted that AMAZING description of the muff-making workshop, things just sort of felt as if they were MEANT.
            And if you're making a muff, you need a matching cape, right?
            Something like this?

I pulled out trusty Vogue 7923 and cut it down a little to match the dimensions of my fabric remnant - and sewed the cape out of my new green cotton velveteen -with all the wretched purple piling stripped off- with Spotlight's best gold polyester crepe for the lining (I had to go and buy that.  And then go and buy it again when the first lot seized up into matte plastic immobility when I steamed it.  Sometimes I really don't appreciate living so far from a decent fabric store!)
            For the muff - white muslin and fibrefill.
            And for the muff covering - a strip of gold silk, some 3mm silk ribbons, a few roccoco-ish pieces of trim and -

C'est voila, n'est c' pas, como no? Que piensas?

One muff wasn't nearly enough so I made another -
I really loved the one that the Time Traveler made for herself with all that rococo braid, but patterns that look lovely at full scale just don't translate to a doll 18 inches high.

So I threw out my preconceptions, dug out the silk ribbons and made this instead.

And it feels very swish indeed!

From the Archives: Grey Silk Cape

The summer before Grad School I ran into Vogue 7923 -

-and it was VERY Jane Bennet goes to the Ball. Don’t you know.  Sort of.  Close Enough

And lo - in the stash I just happened to have a meter of silver silk duponi, and just enough pink silk for the ruffle and just enough gold to bind the edges - it was all sort of higgledy piggledy pastels that only mostly matched, but Jane Bennet would have liked that sort of thing.  (Well, she would have! Take another look at the video clip.)

When you cut on the grain, silk duponi frays like you can't imagine until you've tried it yourself.  Naturally, when I cut the ruffles I didn't leave any extra seam allowance to lose in the gathering process, and just as naturally I didn't serge or zigzag or fray check the edges or do anything else even vaguely sensible.

            Accordingly, Mum and I spent a tooth-clenching, nail biting day gathering meters and meters of half-inch ruffles very carefully and very VERY slowly. Actually, Mum, a veteran of more sewing stories than I've had breakfasts, gathered ruffles with calm and tranquility -  I did the teeth clenching and nail biting for both of us.

            At the end of that long  day I stitched the ruffles to the cloak, bound the raw edges with gold silk  and went over the whole perimeter of the cape with a pair of nail scissors hunting for stray threads - and managed to put the scissors right through the grey silk - an ugly jagged v-shaped tear.

            There might have been tears.

            And THAT foolish 'why didn't I leave it till tomorrow?' moment  is why there is a lovely embroidered flower on the edge of the hood, and only the tiniest HINT of fusible interfacing on the inside.  It's a couture touch.  Thank you VERY much, Mum. I owe you!!!!

From the Archives - A hat for AG Felicity's Meet Outfit

Here's the other half of the straw purse used to make Bella's lovely ribbon-wreathed hat!
            I know that the ribbons aren't supposed to cross over the top of the hat, but they look so sweet...

I am sewing, see?

Beaded chiffon and purple velveteen!

Yesterday I sat down and beaded  the edges of the orange chiffon scarf that I had hemmed while I was up in Brisbane.

And I bought the yummy elephant pattern for the new baby.

And I have fabrics, too!  B.W from my Wednesday sewing group cleaned out her stash last week and brought me a lovely stack of velveteens and small scale corduroys. I rather like these two for elephants.

Last night I put them through a hot wash, but I cleverly put the whole stack in together.  When I took them out of the machine, I found that a kleenex had slipped into the washing machine, and that between the tissue shreds the green velveteens were purple with purple fuzz and the purple velveteens were green with green fuzz...
            Oddly, the orange and black corduroy came through completely unmarked. 
            The velveteens are going back in the wash this morning.  Individually.  We'll see what happens after that.

Rain Trumps Hats

I was hoping to have photographs of a freshly cleaned felt hat today. Unfortunately, it has been raining solidly for three days straight now, and the general suspicion is that 100 percent enthusiastic humidity is NOT the sort of weather in which to cover a felt hat body with flour or baking soda or cornmeal and leave it to sit for a day.

You might not have a hat at the end of it.

So instead - here's a picture of a stuffed pig.

The Butterick Bonnet - that ALMOST was.

Last year I used Butterick Pattern #4210 to make an American Girl scale 1860s bonnet.
Mr Tabubil scanned the pattern pieces at work, and I imported them into autocad and traced and scaled them down to AG doll size.

I wish to go on record as saying that I loathe this pattern; several of the pieces didn't fit and had to be totally re-drafted.  That's ridiculous.
I sewed it from buckram, mulled it with flannel and covered it with pink silk duponi and white silk satin.  I don't like using glue (as per the pattern instructions) so I sewed it completely by hand - and something about the way this pattern held together - or didn't hold together - has made it take FOREVER to assemble.
And worse, all those hours down the track, I found that I'd forgotten to account for the mulling or the lining  - and the darned hat, at the end of all, doesn't actually fit the doll.

It was intended to be worn with Bella, but I can't seem to summon the enthusiasm to finish it.

Bah.

The Upon Discussion, Utimately Late Victorian Accessory Set: Capelet, Hat and Purse

This rather idiosyncratic ensemble was intended as a prototype for some eighteenth century accessories - a proof of concept exercise, if you like. What came out of it wasn't  particularly successful with regard to period or, arguably, aesthetics, but as proof of concept for pattern and construction, it worked exactly as ordered.
I suppose that's damning with faint praise, but it's all I've got!

Material Details:

The fabric was a remnant of stiff salmon-colored upholstery silk.   The trim is a rococo trim from Spotlight (a bit coarse, but the colors were right) with a green variegated 7mm silk ribbon twisted around it.  Beads and feathers were from my stash.

Hat:
The hat was based on the delicious and altogether edible millinery confections from the film Marie Antoinette - like this one:

My Version:

For the hat base I used a buckram wreath form left over from a wired ribbon workshop I took 15 years ago.  (Never throw ANYTHING out.  It all comes around in the end!) The wreath form is not a perfect circle and the center hole is off center and the buckram is not very strong - even reinforced with millinery wire around the brim.  I didn't mull the hat after I wired it, so you can see the outline of the bias binding I used to wrap the edge if you look at the underside ….

            I do like the trimming.   The cockade is made of more of the silk ribbon, a few feathers and a bunch of gold-tipped stamens from my stash. (Click on the image to see larger.)

            I tea-dyed the marabou feathers  - that was fun!  I'd never tea-dyed before and had read that vinegar and salt both work to fix the dye - I decided to add both to the water - for redundancy - and my pretty ecru-colored feathers turned a spectacular neon yellow orange.

I rinsed the color out and re-dyed them, using only salt this time, and it worked beautifully.

            Unfortunately, it's a leetle too small on the doll head for the eighteenth century, but it works CHARMINGLY as a non-period-specific  accent worn on the front of the head at a fetching angle. (blurry photo warning):

Mantelet:
The mantelet was drafted from the instructions at La Couturiere Parisienne.  It was supposed to look sort of like this (a la the small girl in blue):

It came out sort of like this:

Um.  The PATTERN worked lovely.  The muslin draped very nicely, as well.  If I'd been in my right mind I might have used a fabric for the final version that draped instead of using stiff upholstery silk, and I might not have used two layers of it (what on EARTH was I thinking?), as well as adding a nice stiff taffeta lining.

            And I might have used a lace that was scale appropriate and less Edwardian.  And if I had done THAT, I might not have gotten desperate and started doing COMPLETELY misguided rococo-ish figures of eight on the back of the mantelet to distract from the trim -

            As it was, I spent a whole evening twisting and couching that ruddy trim and at the end of it all I sat back and looked at it and said - "Um…"

            Mr Tabubil had HIS face pre-set into an expression of proud approval, but he took one look and cracked.  

        "Tabubilgirl" he said gravely "what you have here is a American Girl scale Christmas Tree Skirt."

Yeah.  That figure of eight is coming right off.  I plan to redo this mantelet in blue wool - lined with white silk satin, and it will drape BEAUTIFULLY.  And I won't trim it at all.

 

Purse:

I AM unambiguously proud of the purse - I used a scrap of the leftover silk and trimmed it with green embroidery floss - couching it with small seed beads, and twisting it into cord (6 strand cord for the profile and 4 strand cord for the handle.)

            It's not rococo - it's not true anything except what felt right at the time but - embroidery floss couched with beads!  Who needs an excuse for that?!

            This set languished in the closet until mum visited a few months ago.  Despairing lightly, I brought it out to show her.  She had a good look at it and pointed out that it wasn't that bad an ensemble - I had just confused myself by thinking it was mid-eighteenth century.  If I pushed the date forward one hundred years or so - I would work just fine!

            So here are my 1870s-ish accessories.  If my AG doll was a vaguely tarty sort who worked in a saloon in Denver where Doc Holiday came in nights to play the piano and she flirted her bustle at him and sat on his lap and kissed him around a shot glass full of raw moonshine whiskey.

Wheat: Gold on Gold

Thought I'd try monochromatic for a change.
Put the last tack stitch in the last leaf this morning!

I really REALLY like the golden wheat ears.  They came out beautifully!

The Straw Basket Bonnet: Version Two

A couple of years ago I split a small straw craft-store hat in half, lined it in cotton, and covered it with some wired gift-ribbon left over from Christmas celebrations, and tacked a row of pleated orange ribbon to the edge of the brim.  And did nothing else with it whatsoever except stick it in the back of my parents closet.

After the fiasco of the Halloween hat, this bonnet came to mind as a suitable vehicle for my orange roses - they're made of the same orange ribbon as the trim on this bonnet.
At Christmas I collected the bonnet from my parents place and last week, I buckled down and finished trimming it.

I had no more of the ribbon I'd used to cover the base, so to make the curtain - or whatever the technical term is for the fiddly bit at the back of the bonnet that kept Victorian ladies' necks modest - I went to Sckafs Fabrics in Indroopilly and found something that more or less matched.

I spent a little time playing and thinking up a design for the flowered trim:

To coordinate with my new bonnet, I dug into the stash and pulled out a much-loved and never-used remnant of sunset-colored rayon chiffon, and while I was still in my happy hemming place, hand rolled a hem around the edges for a matching shawl.

This is a historical piece and we're just going to pretend that synthetic dye technology was a few decades in advance of reality, okay?

I added a pair of orange ribbon ties:

And - voila! One entirely passable 1860's bonnet!  In technicolor.

Rococo Fichu

One  antique lace-trimmed handkerchief, sliced in two,  one hand rolled hem and- voila!  One dolly fichu!

(I'm declaring it eighteenth century.  Yup.)

Winterhalter Eugenie Gardums!

 Mum and I went to Gardums- a very good Brisbane-based fabric store, on a lace-and-trim trawl. Gardums is a lovely upscale fabric store with three locations across the city - it deals mostly with high-end fabrics and believes in getting good money for the value of it's stuff - the fabrics are lovely but the prices are heartbreaking. No bargains here - not even in the remnant bin - you'll be charged as close to market value for that 20 cm scrap of lace or 40cm of sun-faded silk taffeta as the market will bear!

But the fabrics are exquisite and the laces and trims are the real thing, and once in a while, there's a lovely fabric on sale.

 

 

I bought four meters of this to make myself a dress - Vogue 1102 - one of my favorites. I'm hemming a version of it in black and white linen right now.

I bought yards of gorgeous lace at AG doll scale!!!!  I can stop hoarding my slender supply - at home I have very little and consequently never use it - I'm always save for the next thing!
And in the remnant bin I found a lovely stretch of silk chiffon and some gorgeous apricot-y silk charemeuse and on the trim shelf I found a fabulous ribbon-flower trim -

And naturally one thinks of this painting - Empress Eugenie and her Ladies by Winterhalter:

So…..
Introducing: The Gardums Remnant Ballgown!

The flowered trim will be a wrap - of course - something like this, lined with matching silk satin so that it drapes…

As for the dress - there's enough apricot satin for a skirt and a bodice. An over skirt of chiffon, looped up with ribbons and roses, and a chiffon bertha - pleated or draped -

I'm thinking very classical - something you could have worn from the 1840s until the very end of the 60s - suitable for passing down through a row of children.

(this image from the V&A is from the 1840s, but the look stays remarkably consistent through the period)

Vintage Victorian has a fabulous page with lots of 1860s fashion plates of evening dress.

Inspirations for the skirt:

Love the sleeves and bertha on this one as well!

And the apricot one on the left with the bows and streamers -

Inspirations for the bertha:

I rather like this one, on the blue ballgown - I'm trying to imagine how layered lace sleeves would look underneath it:

But I think that I rather prefer something along these lines:

The sleeves will have to evolve a bit, I think. My original idea called for puff sleeves in the satin layered with tubes of chiffon, but this will be completely lost under the bertha, I think. Longer and larger puffs? Layered with lace, possibly.

Reckon I'll start by hand-hemming the skirt layers and see what bubbles up.