A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

My qualifying paper has been accepted!  There are a few additions I need to make to it (patterns), but I am basically finished with grad school now, and someday this summer I will get my DIPLOMA. I have also gotten an internship at the Chapman Museum in Glens Falls for this summer.  It is temporary, so I'll need to start looking for either another internship or a job fairly soon, but for now I am secure and doing all right!

I just wanted to alert everyone to the wonderful news that I have completely finished editing my qualifying paper, and will be mailing it in to the committee as soon as possible.  One project down, two to go for April! (The other two being a paper, I am Now in my Turkish Habit: Orientalism in Eighteenth Century Women's Dress , for an academic journal, and of course my Revolutionary War ensemble.) ETA: Oh gosh, forgot to say - right now I'm at my grandmother's for Easter, and I'm taking a few boxes of antique family photos home to scan.  There are certainly a few that I will be posting here!

I probably would have been at this point several days ago, but I went with the Theory "batiste" from my swatches , and it proved to be more like a tightly-woven percale, and I was having the hardest time getting pins and needles into it.  Let this be a lesson: always test a swatch by pleating it heavily and putting a pin into it.  Since it didn't work, I went to Joann's in Queensbury and got some rather cheap Sew Essentials muslin, which actually seems like a reasonably close approximation for period muslin, to me.  Maybe a little less transparent, but it's very light.  Anyway, I then went ahead with the petticoat of my own design.

For some reason, I sketched out the pink taffeta gown and the interesting corset I examined yesterday.  (I used Patterns of Fashion as a reference for the gown but still managed to make the figure too short in the leg ... not sure how.)  And I thought I'd post the pictures I took of my thesis project pre-ensleeving, in which I look pretty darn happy.  Please ignore my weird arm position, I think it may have been to make sure you could see the silhouette properly?  Couldn't get a good picture of my back, unfortunately, as it's behind me, but you can sort of see it in the middle picture.  I think the pleats might end too high up my back, but that's very easy to fix so I'm not worried.

Hmm ... after going through the Gallery of Fashion, I'm starting to think that those silk open robes were worn with a petticoat.  I had been under the impression that open robes were worn over muslin gowns as a way of dressing them up for the evening - maybe that's a re-enactorism?  I can't think where I've seen it, now that I try to remember, but I guess I'm not doing an open robe as part of my thesis. Hmm.

As my batiste came in the mail a few days ago, I felt that it would be procrastination to continue researching cotton's exact place in society instead of sewing.  Most of the paper is written, apart from the details of my sewing (of course), so I dug out some lightweight linen and worked out a lining based on the dress I saw at the NYSM.  The lining on that gown was mostly detached and unfitted, just something to hide the corset through the outer fabric and sew the pleats to, so it wasn't too hard to replicate.  My dress form is a little smaller than me, kind of tilty and weird-shaped (it has a lot of moving pieces, and they're not all in exactly the right places), and is in a bit of a sway-backed pose, but it's close enough for government work. The first time I tried draping, I didn't really try it - Mom draped muslin on me and I watched.  So this was really my first try.  I wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for the fact that the gown I examined has a si...

Some.  First off, I put the second cup into my thesis stays, and I gathered in the top.  (I also did a row of gathering stitches across the middle, which I probably will bring in a bit.)  I can't tell if I didn't make it wide enough, as the fabric's really not gathered that much, or if more buxom women would have used similarly-sized cups to smaller women and just gathered them less.  I should be able to finish all that up quickly, which means I'm basically done with the stays.  I plan to do some quilting, but that can be whenever.  So I'm going to have to make some appointments with museums to see some extant gowns. D: Scary!  Fun, cool, interesting, educational, but scary. On the more exciting side of things, Mom and I did our first experiment in draping this afternoon.  She was really not into it and wanted to scale up the pieces on newspaper, but I was adamant - last time I tried to make a jacket, it ended up way too small, and it's hard try...

This time, from the Lewis Walpole Library of prints.  They are mostly satires - which are problematic to use as sources, of course, but they do tell you what people thought were the newest and most ridiculous parts of fashion, and the bits that aren't being satired in a specific drawing are usually pretty accurate.  Some images are just linked.

The corset is almost finished - I just have to do the cups.  So there will be good pictures soon, I hope.  But for now, I'm looking at more painting sources, this time from the Victoria & Albert Museum.  (Sorry about the color cards - they're probably there to show scale, since a lot of these are miniatures.)

Those promised pictures!  I would have taken a picture of the petticoat on me but it's dreadfully unflattering without stays, and I didn't feel like taking the time to really get dressed. The pleats from the inside.  I whipped them down to the twill tape with waxed linen thread.  Yes, the fabric has a strangely open weave - the things that happen when you order fabric online. This picture keeps uploading sideways.  Why?  I don't know.  But this is the pleating from the outside.

(get it, do you get it) Wow!  This afternoon I went to my mom's and watched some TV and sewed, and I totally finished all of the eyelets in my stays - the two CB rows, and the eight to hold the straps to the front.  Next step is to finish the channels so I can put the reed in and bind this sucker. Last night, I discovered that Fort Ticonderoga is doing a re-enactor thing on my birthday weekend, "Struggle for Liberty".  I've got a blue petticoat half done (the side seams are finished) and enough of a printed natural linen to make a jacket - I actually mostly made some of it up into the one in Patterns of Fashion I that doesn't have a waist seam, but it turned out too short for even me; my plan is to use those pieces where I can, piece, and use the leftover couple of yards to do one of the jackets that has a waist seam and is therefore easier to mess with if I do it too small as well.  So that will be my birthday present to myself!  Going to my first non-RenF...

First of all, hello to all of my new watchers!  Sorry for the lack of updates.  At least I've made more recent posts here than on my Tumblr? D: I haven't done any sewing lately, apart from finishing the front eyelets ( ooooooooh ).  I think I'm kind of scared that I'm going to do something incredibly stupid to my 1790s stays, but I need to just get over that and put in some more channels.  Yesterday my mother underwent surgery on her foot, and now she's of course laid up - I'm working at the Dance Museum today, but tomorrow I think I'll take my computer and sewing over to her house and watch something period while I backstitch. I'm still having a hard time finding costume collections with garments relative to my thesis at a reasonable distance from here.  The Cornell collection has something from the 1780s and a few Regency dresses; I'm going to contact Sturbridge Village (or explore their site more thoroughly) to find out what they have.  What I...

At last!  I've done all of the channels that go along seams on the right half of the stays.  Next step is to sew the pieces together and check to see if they fit along the underbust, since that's pretty important to making the cups work.  I think quilting is going to be my last step, after I'm sure everything fits - there should be a good amount of it, since period references talk about how omg these shocking French corsets are mostly quilted . However, I have two other projects to take into account - a few months ago I participated in the help_japan auction on Livejournal, and I really need to knit the socks that my high bidder won.  I also said that I would make a dress for one of my bosses/supervisors at the museum where I'm interning/volunteering to wear to a gala.  So I need to get on them.  I feel awful for making my auction recipient wait, but at least there isn't really a deadline there.

Mostly paintings, but I also want to bookmark this .

SUCH PAIN.  On my mother's advice, I made a one-layer mockup of one side of the stays to mess around with, and while it was very useful I now want to punch myself in the face.  I think they're roughly the right size around at this point, and if they're a bit too big it seems slight enough that redoing the channels on the lacing edge should be enough to take care if it.  (Or I could sew the back pieces together and take it in there.) Both of them together - the machine-sewn mockup is on the left, and the real one is on the right.  I basted the seamlines because my stupid stupid washable marker disappeared.  I think I might keep the cup shape of the mockup, or I might go for something in between.  It's very difficult.  I don't think I've seen anyone make transitional, cupped stays that had a lot of bosom to deal with, so I have basically nothing to go off beyond the picture in Underwear Fashion in Detail.  ETA: And as soon as I say that, I find a...

Two paintings from my last post - I have no real conclusions on them, but I find that writing as though I'm talking to someone else sometimes helps me understand things. Mrs. Bryan Cooke , George Romney, 1787-1791

It's so handy, being able to dump a huge thing of pictures here.

- Waist went up to just under the bust in 1794 - First appearance of crossover-front robe in November 1795 - First spencers in May 1796 - Waist goes up higher in the back than in the front in early 1796 - Waists go back down in back in May 1797 - Start seeing less volume in the front in March 1798, volume decreased overall in September 1798, and again in April 1800 - Waist drops a bit in September 1798, a bit more around June 1799 Things I'm Leaning Toward: - "short full sleeves" (short meaning to the elbow, interestingly - they don't seem to be shorter than that unless it's a double-sleeve situation) drawn in with a ribbon, maybe - chain pattern of embroidery around the hem, or this trim:

No pictures this time, just rambling.  So I downloaded the entire run of Gallery of Fashion from the Bunka Gakuen online library (it took about three hours) and have been looking at the plates in a general way, trying to put together a bit of a timeline with regard to waistlines and hem flounces and such.  One thing I'm noticing is that descriptions of the clothes tend to say: round gown chemise robe and petticoat as different types of dresses, I mean.  So I'm trying to figure out the difference between "round gown" and "chemise".  At the moment, I think it could be that a chemise is pulled over the head and a round gown fastens?  I need to go back through and look at the plates again, but that seems plausible. Anyway, what I'm really thinking about is petticoats.  How do you do petticoats for the 1790s?  Bodiced or at least strapped petticoats make sense for the Regency, when the silhouette was slimmer and you only needed one, but the 1790s sil...

The last dozen or so posts have been fairly well organized, but I don't think this one will be.