A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

This is my second garment for the VPLL 1912 Projec t, and my first done in normal scale and without any instructions.  For fabric, I used a large piece of $2/yd green checked cotton I'd bought for making a muslin a while back, which happened to match up with what the pattern recommended.  The reasons I picked this pattern are that I want to be more comfortable with blouse sewing, I'd like a 1912 blouse, and I find the emphasis on the shoulders which was very common from about 1906 on, which is present in the blouse, to be very interesting.

Yes, I was steadfast about not showing pictures of the mockup, but that's because it was made out of blue jeans and without quite the attention to detail that it should have had.  But the real version is much more presentable and won't embarrass me.

I'm not posting any pictures of my corset mockup, because it is disgraceful.  But I've taken it in quite a lot around the hips, evened out the bottom edge, and taken an inch off the CB edges.  I think the sizing issue might be that the line I made to indicate the hips on the pattern was actually too high, and the pieces of course kept flaring after that. If you look at the right sidebar, you'll see that I've created pages for current and finished projects, and my collection of extant clothing.  All the pages are very much under construction, but there's some stuff up on them, if you'd like to look. I spent some time today on the New England Museum Association website, and I've found three relatively paid internships that look promising!  One is at Old Sturbridge Village (curatorial), one is at the American Textile History Museum (also curatorial), and one is in the Newport Historical Society (museum studies).  Wish me luck!

This is a big deal for me, normally I put my trust in my calculations and piece in fabric if I need to.  So after taking Owen (younger brother) to his dentist appointment and getting a bagel lunch at Panera, I went home and started cutting out the pieces for the 1911 corset from these large jeans I bought at Salvation Army ages ago.  It looked like I was going to run out of fabric, but I just squeaked by and finished off the jeans as well - always good to get something out of the stash!  Although I kind of want to replace them now just in case I need to do another corset mockup sometime soon.  I haven't quite finished with the mockup yet - I'm going to unpick the back seams from the 1901 corset I made quickly for my Victorian Romance Emma costume a few years ago and use those as the lacing strips, because I only have so many grommets/washers and I also only have so much patience.  Just holding the mockup against me, though, is telling me that a) it definitely...

Not much to report.  I had copied the 1911 corset pattern from C&C and used the Corsetmaking Revolution percentages method to determine the widths of all the pieces, but I wasn't sure it was right (and I knew it wasn't in some areas), so I scaled it up a bit and printed it out again.  Then I measured and multiplied and divided once more, and produced something that made a bit more sense.  I finally drew the pieces out on some newspaper through my own inexplicable scaling-up method, amazed that they came out to be the right size and to fit together. Then I read the post on using the slashing method to widen pattern pieces, which is much simpler.  Well.  Next time.