Regency underpinnings

When I first made a regency dress I wore it over the chemise and short stays from the Sense & Sensibility pattern. I found this to be a very bulky combination, especially under the finer fabric of my ball gown, which showed all the bumps from the garment underneath.  When I made a second chemise I made the body pieces thinner so as to have less gathering but this still didn’t solve the problem.

So I set about making a ‘bodiced petticoat’ – basically an underdress that is fitted and supportive. This would mean wearing only one layer beneath the dress and that layer wouldn’t be all gathered.  

In my research I found several bodiced petticoats that had been made from dress patterns (instructions are available on the site) but I didn’t like that idea as I wanted the support of stays. I also wanted my petticoat to do up in the front which the dress-style ones didn’t seem suited for.

I found this extant garment online and I think I found others at the time, which were more like what I was going for:

source

I ended up making a set of short stays and adding a skirt. I have found the bodiced petticoat to be greatly preferable to a chemise and stays. 

Regency outerwear

I made a spencer and bonnet to go with my autumn toned Regency day dress. The bonnet was begun in a class at Jane Austen Festival Australia and is made from a straw hat.

The spencer is based on my adapted Sense & Sensibility pattern that I used for the dress. I found it worked a lot better for the spencer. It is comfortable and fits nicely, in terms of me and of the dress. The bodice of the spencer is lined. It does up with a frog and has a drawstring tie around the waist to ensure it is properly fitting.

The spencer and dress are made from quilting cotton, which I haven’t found to be a great fabric for these clothes. It is a bit stiff which means it doesn’t drape nicely and isn’t so comfortable to wear, and it gets very wrinkly in the wash. What quilting cotton does have going for it is the variety of prints available in it; prints being popular during the regency era.

The back. I rag-curled my hair which was recovering from being dyed blue.

I was very happy with how the spencer turned out and I think it turns a plain dress into an attractive ensemble.

Regency day dress

This is the first regency dress that I made. I made it to wear to the Jane Austen Festival Australia (JAFA). I used a Sense & Sensibility pattern but I made some changes. Although, looking back, the changes I remember making don’t quite seem to fit the S&S patterns I can find (the one I used was borrowed, and I can’t remember which one it was), so who knows what actually happened.

In accordance with costumer tradition, I sewed on the buttons on the morning of the event. The buttons are clear plastic and should probably be replaced with something more historical.

I was very pleased with the piping of the neckline.

After wearing the dress, I thought it was awful. The bodice didn’t fit right, the sleeves looked silly, the skirt billowed weirdly (more than usual for regency skirts) and the train kept getting stepped on in dances. So for the next JAFA I took it apart and remade it.

At JAFA I had learnt about the cord that runs along the front of the waistline in regency dresses. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE DRESS.

This cord ties around the waist and holds the waistline in place, stopping it from rising over the bust. I also re-gathered the bodice into the skirt, gathering it in the centre rather than all across the front. I took the puff out of the sleeves (mostly by guesswork) and reshaped the bodice. I haven’t taken the train off, because train, but it usually lives pinned up out of the way.

I have made a bonnet and spencer to go with this outfit and it is worn over underpinnings from the Sense & Sensibility pattern.

I still don’t *like* this dress, but it’s because of more superficial things. The colour palette isn’t really ‘me’ and there’s no getting away from the fact that I don’t care for regency clothes in general; especially plain, daywear regency - my blog isn’t called Extravagance is Everything for nothing! This dress is boring and practical and I am bored with it. But on account of the practical it gets a lot of use; and at least it’s comfortable now.

Replay Memory

Time for an update on the Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood costume. I've made a huge, and very visible (yay!), amount of progress.

I've finished the hood. That's 22 pieces there.

Mission: Spiral sleeve

Full synchronisation: no puckering; correct length

I've done the spiral sleeves. The first one went together perfectly (shock! horror! a perfect sleeve). The second one though, ugh, I had to unpick it and redo it I think 5 times. The undersleeve puckered, the twisting ended up with a sleeve that was too long, and the twists didn't align next to each other properly. But eventually it all went together right. The trick was to align the white layer just a little bit further round on the underlayer and pin very carefully, with many pins. The aligning and pinning all had to be done by feel, because, of course, using the same measurements and alignments for supposedly identical pieces can’t be guaranteed to work.

Mission: Trim collar
Full synchronisation: accurate trim

The collar/back pieces also needed a lot of redoing. Some of this was not surprising because I worked on this garment in January, then put it aside to work on some other things. I thought I had labelled and recorded everything I needed to know (and I did pretty well) but I failed to note a few things – like where to put the thin lace I had bought; and there is still one pattern piece I don’t know what to do with.

Anyway, I was looking at my main reference pictures and saw that the back pieces had a central brocade patch and a brocade edging next to the binding. So I got some brocade trim and binding and hand-sewed them all together. (Working out what order to sew everything to ensure they fitted together properly was a bit mind-twisty and involved a bit of unpicking.)

Done. (x3)

But then, when I was looking through my reference file for something else, I noticed another picture:

That's the place for the thin lace that I was wondering about!

I looked at it. I thought about it. The lace looks better. I have the lace. It would mean a lot of unpicking. A lot of hand sewing. A lot of re-doing of hand sewing I'd already done. The binding and some of the seams would have to be redone as well. I'd already made the decision in January - leaving it the way it was would be undermining past!me. I slept on it. The next morning the lace still looked better. So I unpicked.
I didn't speak to anyone else about it (still haven't - Hi Dad) because they might try to talk me out of it, sympathise too much, or say “lace is girly”.

Ta-da! – The lace looks so much better.

I'm glad I made that decision – I would have been terribly disappointed with the finished product being inaccurate in a way I could have easily fixed and had originally planned for.

Mission: Attach collar

Full synchronisation: align shoulder seams; align centre front; have all the pieces fit together

Riddle me this: How is sewing like computer programming?

Answer: Sometimes you do everything right - the numbers have been double- and triple-checked but it still doesn’t work (and then you do the exact same thing again and it does work!?!)

Once I had finally finished trimming the collar panels I started sewing them together. I carefully lined them up according to the seam allowance, decided they were too finicky to sew by machine, and hand-sewed them together. 

Then I went to add the third layer. It didn't line up. It was about half an inch short at each centre front. Further testing showed that the first layer was half an inch shorter than the body at the centre front. I still have my muslin kicking around, so I measured it. The numbers from the muslin and the final were both the same but one fit together and one didn't. What I did notice was that all the shoulder seams were supposed to match up. 

Time for a new approach. I decided the best way to deal with this was to pin the shoulder panels onto the back piece 'in shape' rather than flat. I padded out the dress form with wadding to roughly match my father’s shape. 

New experience...

I lined up the side seems, the centre fronts and the centre back. Then I forced the rest of the pieces to fit; and they did! There's a bit of puckering and a bit of seam allowance abuse but now everything goes together properly.

Mission: Skirt panels

These worked! The topstitched panels look pretty cool.  I got enough usable fabric for everything I needed from the damaged brocade offcut I bought. I’ve sewn these together onto the jerkin and it’s looking good. Seeing it hanging on the dressform whenever I went in the sewing room was a great encouragement in the face of all the things above having gone wrong.

Jerkin and hood as modelled by Mum, who's threatening to steal the outfit from Dad.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

A week is a long time in medieval dressmaking

I completed my cousins’ outfits a week before we left to see them and all go to the Abbey Medieval Tournament together. So I had time to make a new outfit for myself as well. I’d had a few ideas floating around the back of my mind and of them I decided on a Viking outfit, as it seemed the most achievable (at last! a sensible decision).

I had been accumulating information on Viking clothing over the last six months or so and I spent Saturday morning sorting through this to choose my design and pattern.  Thankfully, I found perfect fabrics in the stash which saved me a trip out to Spotlight. I spent the afternoon mocking up the apron dress.

On Sunday I finished my cousin’s shirt – because I hadn’t actually finished everything, but I knew I was going to, and that’s the important thing.

On Monday and Tuesday I cut my fabric and did all the machine sewing. I did some of the hand-hemming after work on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was dedicated to packing.  We left on Saturday and during the evenings of the next week (while we were travelling and staying with family) I finished the hemming, attached the straps and did the row of decorative embroidery.

On the first day of the festival, I wore my Venetian gown again. From one of the stalls I bought the beads and mjolnir which I attached to my apron dress in the evening. It was finished and ready to wear on Sunday.

Eagles make an excellent accessory for any outfit.

The Details

My underdress, or kyrtill, is made using this design (on the 1st page).  The fabric I used is some sort of gabardine and was lovely to work with.  The resulting dress is very comfortable.

My apron dress is made from some blue I-don’t-know-if-it’s-linen-but-it-looks-like-it fabric. And going by the Viking population at Abbey, dark blue is the colour for apron dresses. Of the many apron dress patterns floating around the internet I chose this one for two reasons: I could figure out how it worked (but not how to explain it, so you’re on your own), and it didn’t waste any fabric – which is an important feature of a lot of early garment construction.  The shape of the pattern essentially comes from four rectangles and draping.

Apron dress or hangerock.

I decorated the hem with double herringbone stitch (or possibly a novice’s re-interpretation of herringbone stitch – I’d never done it before and it didn’t turn out quite the way I expected). I was going to look at getting or doing some tablet weaving for the top edge, but now that the outfit is done I think I prefer it as it is.

Both these dresses are put on over my head without any closures. This outfit is actually not too different from what I wear everyday so it seems a bit weird to have it categorised as a costume.

For my brooches I used two medallions that started life as serviette holders from the Vasa museum in Sweden. The medallion design is probably 16th century; a bit too late for Vikings, but they come from the right part of the world.  I plan to replace them at some point, or at least not leave them on the dress, because I like to wear one as a pendant.

I also plan to redo the bead strings. I was able to talk to one of the early-Scandinavia re-enactors at the festival and she said that the beads should be more random as items would only be bought (or found) one at a time and would often have personal significance. At the moment my bead strings have a lot of repeat beads which would be unusual. While this was necessary to get the outfit ready in time to wear on the Sunday, I now plan to collect bits and pieces so I can redo it for the next wearing. 

I did my hair in this style, as found on the Elling woman bog body. 

Requiescat in pace

I have sent the first assassin outfit off to its new home.

Some of the decorative features I have documented already but since my last post I still had some trimming to do.

The lace on the back and front lace I sewed on by machine but the sleeve and sleevehole braids were attached by hand.

It was tricky sewing the trim onto the sleeve because the sleeve was already sewn up and attached to the garment. I ended up doing the stitching on the ‘right side’ of the sleeve with my left hand and the stitching on the 'wrong side' with my right hand.  The braid has a seperate cord running along each side and I connected the cords as I attached the braid, one side at a time.

There are many rows of straight string trim on the skirts which were all done by machine with a zigzag stitch. I used an invisible zipper foot to guide the string. The scrolling and other fancy bits had to be sewn by hand.

Once all the trimming was done the outfit went together fairly quickly.

I decided to have the doublet and jerkin do up with ties and the front flap closes with clips, which are less historically appropriate.

The hood is lined, which I have never done before but I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out.  I gave the lining some anchoring stitches to the outer fabric at the peak of the hood to stop the layers separating.

To make the sash I sewed three widths of red cotton together with flat felled seams. I hemmed the long sides (by machine, because I had an attack of sanity). The short edge is finished with satin stitch a bit in from the edge, and I frayed the fabric down to the satin stitch to create the fringe.

I was so excited to finish this. While I was making it there were many moments of panic when I became convinced it wouldn’t fit or would look awful but when I finally put them all together it worked. It was a big job and I think it turned out pretty well.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

Blue dress

One of my cousins chose for her present a traditional fantasy style dress. To my shock and delight, I found a pattern that matched exactly the designs she had shown me.

Anastasia medieval dress pattern from Laura Marsh designs.

The pattern went together easily, but I would recommend checking the length first as while the pattern ‘as is’ fitted my cousin it was too short on me, although we both wear the same size. I can’t comment on the instructions because I never look at the things.

I found a lovely thick knit (called scuba knit) for the main fabric but the print was harder to find. I wanted a design that would look not out of place on a faux-medieval dress and I needed a fabric that would go with the blue I already had. The fabric I ended up using has a lovely print but it is printed slightly askew to the weave and the fabric was also a lot thinner than my main fabric. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any other remotely appropriate prints, so I went with the less-than-perfect fabric which does look very nice.  I cut the panel very carefully, not on the fold to better manage the slight skew, and it ended up not causing much of a problem. 

The pattern said to face the neckline, and while I usually eschew facings I thought maybe it would be different for knit fabrics. It wasn’t; the facing didn’t sit right and the lovely thick fabric showed all the stitches needed to hold the facing in place. I expect that will be the last neckline facing I ever do, unless there is a very good reason.When the dress was worn, the centre panel gaped a bit at the neckline. This was fixed by putting a box pleat in the centre of the neckline, which had the happy side effect of forcing the wonky facing to sit right. So in the end, all was well. The lightness of the patterned fabric also proved useful for lining the sleeves, which would have been very heavy if lined with the blue fabric.

I made the each lacing loop separately and hand stitched them into position before sewing the seam to ensure that they stayed in place. They were all placed according to the pattern, but I think if I made this again I would move the back ones upwards a place or two.