A little something new

I have just finished university, no more lectures, no more essay, time to start real life. But before that we had the graduation ball, so of course a new little dress was required.

I’m not great when it comes to sewing stuff for myself, I get impatient when I know its only me wearing stuff, the number of short and skirts I have held together with safety pins because I couldn’t bothered with that last little button.

I made a bit more of an effort with this though, even bought matching thread and zip, and sewed on the hook and eye. I’m sure I would still have put more effort in if it had been for someone else, but it served its purpose.

And it was a challenge, there were several new factors to work with. The fabric, it being one shoulder, the draping. I was making it up as I went along, so its not perfect, but I’m pretty pleased with it.

I drafted the pattern from my measurements, and I think the fabric is georgette with cotton lining. I must learn to ask the market sellers what I’m buying, my knowledge of fabric names needs some work.

Remember the right underwear.

 

Here is the nearly finished spencer, sewing the velvet was not actually as bad as I expected it to be, the walking foot on the sewing machine saved my life. If you don’t have a walking foot I would strongly advise it, it pretty much eliminates layers of fabric sliding in the wrong direction.

I forgot to put the corset on underneath for the fitting, and Hanna had a padded bra on, this is the reason for the pulling across the front. I need to remember the correct foundations next time.

Just the buttons left to do.

Starting work on the dress.

I finally started work on the actual dress, I wanted to get the footman out of the way first because I was less confident about that one.

I cut out the pieces the other day and set to it yesterday. The outside is embroidered silk, the inside is brown cotton. I was going to just stitch it together, no embellishment, but it looked a bit plain, so I thought I’d add some piping.

I’ve done a little bit of piping before at work, but not much. I used the brown cotton of the liner to make it.

It was definitely the right decision, the edge is a lot smoother.

The puff sleeves look really cute, they keep their shape better than the toile because I puffed the lining as well.

Though I did get a bit carried away stitching the liner, so I have to hand sew round the cuff edge rather than the shoulder seam.

The Vanishing two Inches

Well the toile fitted, I know it fitted, I have photographic evidence that it fitted. So I kept the pattern exactly as it was, and made the real thing. And…tah-dah, 2” magically disappear somewhere, I can’t even close it! How it happened I just can’t work out, the seam allowances are right, it matches the pattern. Lee said he’d had a big lunch, but you don’t store food in your chest? It’s a puzzle I can’t solve, so I moved on, and made another one, with added inches.

Much better, this one closes; and he can breath, always a bonus.

3rd times a charm…

I’ve had an absolute mare with the footman jacket. I’ve ben working on it for the past two weeks, drawing the pattern, making toiles, failing, repeating. I did this loads and no matter how much I measured it kept coming out too small. Maybe its lack of sleep or I’m just the ultimate scatter brain, but it took about a week for me to work out what was going wrong. I was using Hanna’s (my female model) measurements, not Lee’s (my male model, above), not sure how I managed to make such an obvious mistake for so long. Anyway, its fixed now, and so I finally have a toile that fits well enough I can bare to show it to the internet world.

It needed a bit of adjustment, but mostly it fitted okay. Though Lee did complain it was very tight under the arms. I’m not sure how much bigger to make them, I don’t want him to be uncomfortable, but historically the arm holes were a lot tighter than we wear them.

In this image the left hand side has been taken in and the right hand side hasn’t. It definitely hangs better.

This is an option for the buttons, its either these or fabric covered…I still have to decide.

Starting the Footman

I started work on the footman’s jacket today, I was going to finish the ladies outfit in its entirety first, but I still haven’t settled on a fabric for it, so i thought I would make a start on this. It’s quite daunting, I’ve never worked on male clothing before (other than tunics). I found a full size version of the pattern above, but my model is a little on the small side, and the pattern was for a person over 6 foot. So I thought I would do better to work straight from the book. I had to completely ignore the scaling it gave, it would again have been way too big.

The process involved lots of grid drawing and took a couple of hours. I have decided a pattern master is an absolutely amazing piece of kit that I definitely need to own.

I very carefully made sure all the different bits matched the measurements, checked, and rechecked, then cut and stitched. Took time over tracing it out and ironing the side pleats.

After all that (well, an hour or so) I slipped it on…

How on earth did I not spot it before? The back was about 10cm too narrow! I knew I was having a particularly scatter-brained day, but I remember looking a the back pattern piece and thinking it looked narrow. How come I didn’t measure it? I astound myself sometimes, never mind though, this is what toiles are for.

Wollaton Corset Toile

So four hours, one vanilla yogurt, and several pin-pricks later, here is the first fitting of the toile. I’m pretty pleased with it as a first go considering all the alterations I made. I don’t have the right busk yet, at the moment all I have in there are two together which are too short and too thin, so not the best guide.

The only major alteration was that the straps needed shortening, I’d predicted this because it was the only area of the pattern I didn’t alter. From the research I have done, the corsets were almost entirely single spiral laced, I’ve never done that before, but it was a pleasure to only have to do half the number of eyelets.

It is bagging out around the waist, I’m not sure quite how to solve this. The real thing will be made of stronger fabric than calico, so maybe that will help. But I might try shaping the waist a bit more.

It did not feel like making a corset at all to do this, what with the sleeves and the lack of bones, only four in the entire thing.

I’m hoping the wrinkling here at the front will be solved with the right busk, also I need to remember to do fittings with a braless model, I’m sure there was a sneaky bit of padding going on here.

Making a physical start

For my Wollaton Hall project I am starting with the ladies outfit, I have much more experience with female clothing than male, so I thought I would get this out of the way before tackling the footman costume.

I’m working from the base up, so corset is the first port of call. I can’t find the book I made this sketch from, but this is what I’m aiming for. My model is naturally slim, so she doesn’t need much in the way of support.

I borrowed this pattern (the short corset in the middle oval) as a starting point. I had to change it quite a lot, my corset is to open at the back not the front, come down to hip level not under-bust, and include a front busk. Also this pattern does not go smaller than a UK size 14, and my model is an 8.

Here is my version part way through, since this I split piece 5 into two with most of the angling for the hip going between the two new pieces, the angle on the far right in this version looked far too harsh.

Corset Time

Seen as I have already made corsets, I left this part until the end because I knew roughly how lng it would take. I did allow a little extra time however, because there were bust gores and feather embroideries to do.

I wanted the feathers to be peeping out from the edges of the gores.

I used calico for the liner, aesthetically its not the best, but it had to be done for time and monetary purposes.

I decided to bone both sides of the panel seams, I really like the stitch lines.

I bias-bound the inner edges at the back and hand-stitched it down.

I made a slight mistake with the bias-binding around the bottom, machine stitched it to the inside rather than the outside. Never mind though, a little bit of unpicking solved that.

Just some flossing at the base of the gores to be done, I tried very hard to stop it from fraying, but the silk was just too delicate.

Painting and Finishing the Armour

Time to paint the armour. I mixed gold acrylic with latex paint.

After coat one.

After coat 4. I had to wait longer than normal between coats of paint because the studio I work in was averaging at what felt at about -20degrees. As you can tell by the need for my oh so fashionable woolly hat below.

After all the layers of paint, it was time to airbrush. This was by far the most nerve racking part of the entire process. Something about having to keep the airbrush nozzle at least 3" away from my work, and pull a trigger where a few millimetres variation was the difference between a light mist and a dark brown splodge.

To make the detail stand out I used a dark brown in all the crevices and shadows. Most of it went well, there were a few hiccups that stand out terribly to me. I'm hoping its just because I know where they are.

Finally I varnished it all with this, great stuff. Just a 5 second spray and its done., wonderful.

Next stage of skirt

Hand sewing the panels together took a total of about 10 hours, here is the first (and easiest one) done, before I tackled the scalloping at the bottom.

When all that was done, I traced the pattern out again onto the lining fabric, a very soft cotton, and then sewed them together right sides facing and added the graded wadding. This part took a lot longer than I thought it would, there was a lot of smoothing out to be done.

When I'd turned it right way out, it was time to pin. I started by following the ones I had traced out (very faintly) on the liner, but for some reason it wasn't really working. So after all the time I had spent working out the feather patterns, I pretty much scrapped it all. The version I ended up with was just made from careful pinning and re-pinning until it looked right.

After I had quilted it (which was a fairly quick process compared to the rest of it, due to the wide spacing of the feathers) I added on the waistband, the very last little bit. I had a battle with what fabric to use, the plan was to use the darkest skirt silk, but when I ironed it onto the waistband interfacing it changed the colour to an icky grey. So in the end I used the pale grey silk of the corset. I pleated the wings in with small pleats and hand stitched the waistband...twice. Either I measured wrong or the fabric shuffled as I sewed, because waistband attempt one ended up 4" too large.

Waddy-waddy

I really wanted the quilted skirt to be padded, to give it depth and a sense of 3D, but I couldn't pad it evenly all the way through because that would make the top too thick, or the bottom too thin. Luckily I discovered that the wadding is made in layers, and you can effectively grade it just by tearing off layers to different points.

I traced the pattern of feathers I drew on the calico onto pattern paper, with a few little neatenings along the way, then traced it all back onto more calico for the toile.

To create the different layers of feathers was a bit of a puzzle. I didn't have enough of any one of the (very kindly donated) silks to cover the entire wing expanse, so I am using slightly different ones for each of the 3 layers, they are like 3 complicated patchwork pieces. I think the slightly varying tones will give it a nice effect as well.

As it was only the toile I tried out about 6 different ways of attaching the pieces together, find out how to do it, see which one looked best, and how long each would take.

Surprise, surprise, it was the by far the most time consuming had sewing that looked by far the best. But never mind, I enjoy hand sewing (luckily). After that I put the now complete pieces right sides together, sewed round the edges, and tacked the carefully cut and graded wadding onto one side.

Then it was just a question of turning the whole thing inside out, quilting on the feather shapes, and gathering the waist onto the stand. The above is what was produced from all this, with some sari fabric underneath to show where the netting train will sit.

I was pleased with the overall shape of the wing, and the way the wadding worked. But I was unhappy with the feather shapes, they were just too pointy and made me think of fire breathing dragons rather than elegant swans. So I did some cutting, pinning and tacking of extra bits into place to see how curves would look. I definitely prefer the outer edge, and the inner one is slightly better, but now its a bit too flattened. I think the best one will be somewhere between the two, so like the pointed ends, but with a rounded tip.