1580s Doublet

This doublet is based on the pattern for a 1585 woman’s doublet on page 107 in Patterns of Fashion 3. I based the rest of the outfit in the illustration on a picture of a woman in a doublet in the introduction to the book.

In my stash I had a remnant of gold brocade that I had bought at a curtain shop that was closing down. I decided to use the wrong side for the doublet because the right side is quite bright and shiny and I didn’t want my doublet to look so rich. There are two layers of linen as interlining which holds some light boning (linen isn’t so expensive when it’s fluoro orange!). On wearing I didn’t think the boning was enough so I now wear the doublet over my effigy stays.

The fabric I used for lining is completely synthetic but was quite nice to work with. I made this doublet when I was still in school and as I hadn’t made a properly lined garment before I took it to school for help. I wasn’t studying textiles at the time but the textiles teacher was my home group teacher and she very kindly gave me a few lunchtime lessons. 

When I finished the doublet I found that the peplum overlapped in a way I hadn’t expected and I wasn’t completely happy with the collar but I was reassured when I saw an extant doublet at Warwick Castle (when I went to England) that had the same issues.

The camica (or undershirt) is made from muslin and constructed entirely from rectangles. It has a very loose weave. Camicas are usually white and I suspect I made up the idea of having a coloured camica – I certainly can’t find that I have any evidence of coloured camicas being historical. The camica and skirt are both hemmed by machine, which horrified me last time I wore it because I wouldn’t make it that way nowadays. I would guess the skirt fabric is a very fine stretch corduroy but from a distance of more than a foot away it just looks like a heavy velvet. The skirt consists of rectangles cartridge pleated to a waistband.

When I do my hair for this costume I don’t use bobbypins to hold the braid in place, but instead ‘sew’ my plait to my head with a ribbon to form a bun.

 I made a flat cap to go with the outfit from this tutorial.

I can wear evening dresses all day if I want to

As it’s now the season for wearing summer dresses, I thought I would blog about some. I have made a series of dresses from the pattern for a 1929-30 Vionnet evening dress on page 78 in Patterns of Fashion 2. When scaling the pattern I made it slightly more slimline than the original because the original was sheer and worn belted over a petticoat, whereas mine would only be one layer.

It’s a weird dress to make. I’ve found it easiest to describe the skirt as an 8-sided square, although four of the sides are slightly longer than the other four.  The bodice side seams are only about 3.5” long.  This was the first pattern I started hand-hemming, because the satins would look awful otherwise. By the end of it I was very experienced, as each dress has around 10 metres of hem.

I can't decide whether this reminds me more of an octopus or a starfish...

At the beginning it was difficult to work out where all the skirt pieces fitted together and how they fitted onto the bodice. I have now made five versions of this dress.  The first time round I sewed all the skirt pieces together, then made the bodice, and then tried to combine the two. It was a pain to sew all those angles into each other and the resultant seams don’t sit well. In the later versions I started by attaching each skirt piece separately onto its respective bodice piece then sewing the completed dress front to the completed dress back.  This worked much better.

 My first version of this dress was made from a satin fabric with a variegated turquoise and mauve diagonal pattern. I had been looking for a bright print satin but could find  none, so this was a compromise.  I wore it to my friend’s 16th birthday supper.  

The bias-cut bodice is kind of odd to wear – you move your shoulder and the fabric pulls on your opposite hip.

I never quite understood what the pattern intended for the shoulder drapes so I made my own drapes by cutting out spirals of fabric using pinking shears;  I then sewed the spirals on at the shoulders. I also did this for the next two versions of this dress I made. These were gifts for my cousins.  To make their dresses I needed to adjust the original pattern not just for size but also for dimension and body shape. Because the girls live interstate, I made a variety of mock-up bodices that I posted to them so they could each pick the best fit.

My school friends decided to arrange a summer picnic at the end of the year I was making these dresses. The dress code was ‘dresses or button-shirts’.  I could have re-worn the dress from the 16th birthday but, even though it was summer, the Canberra weather was still a bit too cool for that. So, obviously, I needed a new dress.

Spot the camouflaged bolero.

I found some lovely I-have-no-idea-what-it-is fabric at Spotlight. It had a bright and blocky pattern and would be warmer than the satin. On the day before the picnic I made myself a second dress using this pattern and, to go with it, I made a bolero from Style 2302.

Sourced from my mother’s pattern stash.

On the morning of the picnic I machine-hemmed the eight-sided skirt and trimmed a straw hat to match (which has since been untrimmed). I was one of the few at the picnic who had decided to brave the weather in a dress; however I learnt the hard way that this skirt is difficult to control in the wind.

Or, alternatively, that it spins well.

I had wanted a bright print satin for this dress when I had made my first one so I was never entirely happy with the variegated fabric, so when I found some blue and green patterned satin it seemed like a good reason to make another one.  This time I added sleeves.

The sleeves are squares of fabric with the armhole shape cut out diagonally below centre.

All of the dresses have different skirt length and slightly different necklines. When cutting the pattern I initially cut the fabric straight along the shoulder seam line and then chose the neckline afterwards and shaped it while trying it on.

I don’t think I cut this neckline at all.

My first attempt at this dress is now a summer house dress. Because I can wear a satin 1930s Vionnet evening dress around the house during the day if I want to!

1901 reception gown

This dress is a reproduction of a reception gown that was worn in a 1901 production of Sweet and Twenty. I found it in Patterns of Fashion 2 (page 50) shortly after I started costuming. I was not very experienced at this stage but I am a great believer in making something you really want rather than something more achievable just for the sake of it.

Late night ‘It’s Finished!’ photo.

I don’t really care for the pigeon fronted silhouette and styles of the first decade of the 20th Century so I decided to make some slight changes to the design: I reduced the fullness of the bodice and left out some pattern pieces that I couldn’t work out where they went. I also decided not to make underpinnings as I didn’t expect to be returning to this era again.

I bought the satin for the dress on ebay. It has a nice feel and drape, but it frayed terribly and was flawed in some places. I had to use fray-stoppa on many of the seams which made them uncomfortable and stiff and many of the seams have frayed apart anyway.

Much sadness...

I couldn’t find any soft dotted netting so I used a striped chiffon instead. The white netting at the neckline is made from the leftover fabric from my mother’s wedding veil. The cream ribbons for the ribbon embroidery were a more successful ebay purchase – it was much cheaper than if I’d bought it in a shop even though I got way more than I needed, and the leftovers continue to prove useful.

In total there are about 40 metres of ribbon handsewn to the dress. I transferred the design to the fabric by cutting the repeat out of an overhead transparency and then sponging loose powder makeup over it.

The dress is in three pieces: the bodice, a satin underskirt and the sheer overskirt. I was trying to be historical in the construction where I could, but I didn’t know a lot, nor did I have much information to work with, so it was largely made up. 

From patterning to finish took six weeks over the summer holidays when I was 16. I finished it the night before I started college (that’s the last two years of high school in Canberra). I didn’t get an opportunity to wear it until two years later at my year 12 formal. I was appropriately dressed to receive ‘the anachronistic award’.

Photo by Eric Piris.

I did several test runs of Edwardian hairstyles with hairdressers, but they proved most unsuccessful. In the end I got my mum to do it, based on this tutorial from Wildilocks. She did a wonderful job.

With my dad in the father-daughter dance at the graduation dinner.

I entered this dress in the Canberra show and won student champion. I really want to wear it again but it’s a bit too fancy for anywhere I usually go. 

If you put your mind to it, you can turn any assignment into a dress

  I made this dress in 2008 for a presentation to my history class on Victorian fashion.

This is how I covered my history book at the start of the year… I had plans.

The design came from a fashion plate and a partial pattern in the introduction to Patterns of Fashion 2 called ‘The Gainsborough Princess Dress’ and is an 1879 natural form gown. When I have a book full of complete, scaled patterns, I have to use incomplete, unscaled one. Obviously.

So, who read the introduction? (My dress is represented in plates 23 and 24 on page 8.)

The fabrics are all synthetic curtain materials because that made it possible to get the same textured fabric in different colours, but as a result the dress doesn’t breathe very well. I didn’t think a lot about fabric types at the time I made this, which is a shame, because I would wear it more often if the fabric was better. On the plus side, it doesn’t need ironing. I chose the colours based on how I imagined the dress, rather than on research, but I have since come across many fashion plates from the era using the same palette.

This dress actually has the least tenuous connection to the assignment of the other ones I’ve made.

The outfit is worn over a corset and chemise. The chemise is an inelegant combination of cotton rectangles and lace that I made up to be as simple as possible. The corset is made from Truly Victorian pattern TV110, which I found to be an excellent pattern to learn corsetry from. I’ve used its method for all the corsets I have made since.

I used cable ties for bones in the corset.

Almost all Victorian bodices I’ve seen the have been boned and had waist tapes. I would like to include such features and ‘do it properly’ but I have never really had a good enough understanding of how they work. When I first made this dress I wasn’t even sure how to do it up; originally the outer coat closed with an inward facing busk (which was very soon replaced by hooks and eyes).

I made the outfit as a ruched skirt worn with a coat that has a fake waistcoat front. Rereading the instructions on the plate to write this blog, I’m not sure that was how it was supposed to be done, but it worked. The coat has a contrast collar which was my first experience with revere collars and a fold back at the lower edge of the front opening. I also had to learn how to make cuffs.

Most fashion plates from the era show dresses as having a more decorated train, but the pattern didn’t provide any indication or means to do that for this dress, so I left it plain.  After a couple of wears I added a hook and loop so the train could be hitched up out of the way.

 

I found it a bit difficult to work out how to do the skirt ruching from the fashion plate drawing. The pattern for the ruched layer is basically the same as the skirt pattern but twice as long.  The image only has the gathering up the front, but that wasn’t going to be strong enough for this fabric. I turned to 19th Century Fashion in Detail for inspiration.  This dress from the same era had a ruched skirt but with several lines of stitching fixing the gathering. I decided that the drawing was just a drawing and went with the method from extant example.

 

I made this outfit over a two-week holiday. My mum, who taught me to sew, was working that during that time which was actually very useful in fostering my abilities to sew independently.

The hat has a hairpin through the straw under the feathers, to affix it to a hairstyle.

I made a small decorative hat to wear with it, but didn’t have time to make the chemisette from the fashion plate. The hat is probably not very historically accurate, but it served the purpose at the last minute.

The talk I presented in this dress to my history class covered how fashion changed during the 19th Century and the technological changes the affected it. The assignment required me to speak for 15-20 minutes, but I got special dispensation to go for 40 minutes. The talk ended up being on the same day as my presentation on ‘The Tempest’ in my English class, for which I wore my Venetian dress. I took a suitcase to school that day and spent lunchtime changing gowns and redoing my hair for the different eras.

It’s possibly worth mentioning at this point, that I got ‘The Anachronistic Award’ upon graduation.

I have since given this talk again, in costume, at a local church's 'Discovery Group' which hosts educational mornings for its retired members.