I can't believe it's only two weeks to go!

14 days to go!!!

It's amazing how time seems to move faster the closer you get to a deadline. I have been hard at work on Victoria's costumes over the last week and unfortunately have let the posts slip a little bit.

Since my last post, we have been in the news....

A brief interview with the Brecon and Radnor express was published last week and can be viewed here. The picture is of me posing with Victoria's completed ballgown. Believe it or not, despite the apparent size difference in the photograph, the dress does actually fit on me!

I have also been working on my demonstration for the festival. This will take place at 3:15pm on Wednesday 24th August at the Hotel Commodore. For anyone attending the festival, this will be a chance to come along and see the costumes in person. I will be demonstrating every layer of an 1840s lady's toilette, from the chemise and bloomers right through to the shoes and bonnets and there will be plenty of opportunities to ask questions and see the costumes up close.

For this purpose, I have spent the last week stitching a chemise to be worn underneath the corset with a neckline that mirrors those of the dresses so that it won't stick out like my other chemises have done on the dress form. This chemise was loosely modelled on an original chemise in the Met Museum and altered to match the dress patterns that I will be wearing in shape.

The original chemise - MET 1978.251.2 1840-59 Linen chemise

I have also made a chemisette, based on an original pattern, which if like a false blouse or "dicky" that fills in the neckline of the dresses for daytime wear.

Example of an 1850s chemisette - MET_1978.314.6_1850s chemisette

Like this chemisette, mine is made of muslin and ties around the waist underneath the dress. Instead of embroidery I have added a lace collar.

Finally, I have been experimenting with dressing Victoria's wig but I will save the results to share in another post. Back to the stitching just now as I have a silk bonnet to finish for Victoria to wear when out and about in town during the festival week.

Wedding Dress Inspiration

27 days to go...

I have spent the last few days working on my evening and ball gown for Queen Victoria.

I decided to base this dress on Victoria's wedding dress and the gown will also be worn during the festival for the Pageant of Queen Victoria's life which will include her wedding.

Queen Victoria's Wedding Dress, 1840(MoL D325 a & b, Royal Collection)

The original dress is made of Spitalfield's silk. It was originally creamy white but has discoloured over time and is now a darker shade of cream. The dress has a pleated skirt and a separate bodice. The bodice has a very pronounced point at the waist and is decorated with Honiton bobbin lace. The skirt was also originally trimmed with a wide Honiton lace flounce.

Close up of Queen Victoria in Sir George Hayter's painting, "The Marriage of Queen Victoria", 1842. The Royal Collections. Image found here

My dress will be made in a creamy coloured moiré fabric. This is darker than the original shade of the dress but is in fact quite close to how the dress appears now. The skirt is pleated like the original wedding dress and I have adapted the bodice pattern I used for my other two dress to feature a deeper point at the front and a double puff sleeve. The gown will be trimmed with lace, although unfortunately nothing quite as extravagant and beautiful as the original Honiton lace.

The dress is not an exact replica but more of a homage to the wedding dress which also reflects some of the other dresses worn by Victoria for famous portraits. Some of these may have in fact been her wedding dress but is interesting to note that many of the paintings which depicted this dress were not true to the actual garment itself. Nevertheless, despite the differences between the paintings and engravings produced and published at the time, I have tried to stay true to the uncluttered line and simplicity of the original which provoked a new fashion for wedding gowns.

In this 1842 portrait by Winterhalter the Queen appears to be wearing her wedding gown - however, the sleeves and the lace frill appear shorter than on the original dress itself and the lace is missing from the cuffs. (Image found here)

What Cinderella left behind

35 days to go...

In the interests of retaining a modicum of sanity I decided to take a few hours off from the dress construction. With time ticking though, I didn't want to abandon the project completely so I made a start on my dance slippers. A few hours relaxing embroidery and I am ready again to tackle the skirts on the silk dress.

During the 1840s, the most common form of women's footwear for dancing and evening wear was a silk or leather slipper. These little shoes are very similar to what we would identify today as a ballet pump.

Shoes worn by Queen Victoria for her wedding - Northampton Museum

Shoes at this period had no right and left foot but were instead made straight. The toe was often stiffened and tended to be much shallower than a modern shoe with a square toe.

Shoes were decorated with ribbons, rosettes and pompoms as well as with intricate embroidery. Women would often embroider shoes as gifts for friends and relatives. However, a dance slipper did not always last a long time. According to some accounts, the fine leather soles could be so thin that a particularly enthusiastic dancer could wear out her shoes by the end of one ball!

Ladies Mid-Nineteenth Century Embroidered Shoe (found here - a brilliant source for a whole range of Victorian footwear styles)

To create my dance shoes I started with an ordinary pair of white leather ballet shoes bought from a dancewear shop. I have worn these previously and they are, unsurprisingly, very easy to dance in! For a more authentic toe shape, dancers' demi-pointe shoes are better as they have a square toe and are stiffened with glue. However, the only pair I have are peach-coloured and leather pumps are more comfortable for dancing.

The shoes - BEFORE

My embroidery design was inspired by these Nineteenth Cenury baby shoes.

To decorate my shoes I used three shades of cotton embroidery floss, tiny green glass seed beads and gold-tone metal sequins which are specifically made to resemble the types of sequin used in historical dress. These are tiny metal discs with a hole pierced in the centre. The edge of the shoe is finished with a gathered strip of fabric to match the ball gown and long ribbons cross over the foot and tie around the ankle.

And ...AFTER...

Other foot to follow very soon!

Bodice Construction - Part II - The sleeves

36 days to go and the sleeves for the silk dress are complete.

Fashions for sleeves changed with amazing rapidity throughout the nineteenth century, veering from one extreme to the other.

At the beginning of the century, gowns tended to feature short, puffed sleeves or long, narrow, fitted sleeves depending on the type of dress.

A fashion plate from 1815 found here

By the 1830s, however, sleeves had achieved quite incredible proportions and were known as "Leg O'Mutton" or "Gigot" sleeves. Indeed they were so large that feather-filled pads were worn around the upper arms to hold out the sleeves! (Click on the image below to find out more about this dress).

Sleeve detail on an 1830s dress in the collections at The Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology)

By the 1840s, with it almost impossible for sleeves to get any bigger, the reaction was for fashion to swing once more in the other direction. Slimmer, more fitted sleeves began to come back into vogue for day dresses. Evening dresses tended to feature very small, straight sleeves or little puff sleeves.

From "The World of Fashion" periodical, 1845 (found here)

The pendulum continued to swing in this way throughout the rest of the century with sleeves expanding and contracting almost with each decade.

For my 1840s silk gown, I have opted to make the sleeves convertible. Victorian etiquette dictated that during the day the arms and throat must be covered. In the evening, however low cut, short-sleeved gowns were considered both proper and fashionable. It was not uncommon for dresses at this period to be made with two bodices so that the same dress could be worn both during the day and for evening wear. There are also examples of wedding dresses with detachable sleeves and a fill-in for the neckline. This meant that the dress, worn for a morning wedding, could be converted and worn later as a ball gown or evening dress.

Inspired by this, I have cut my sleeves so that the lower sleeve is detachable. During the day, the bodice can be worn with the long sleeves and a chemisette (false blouse) to fill in the neckline.

The upper part of the long sleeve is made from lining material and when this sleeve is used it is loosely tacked (stitched) in place by hand temporarily.

The lower sleeve, showing the top portion of lining fabric that is tacked inside the bodice sleeve head

To transform the dress into an evening gown, the lower half of the sleeve is simply removed.

Just like the original gown that the pattern was taken from, the sleeves are decorated with two simple bands of fabric that form cuffs. These also disguise the join when the long sleeves are added.

Sleeve detail

All flounced out!

50 days to go...

Hooray! All of the structural undergarments are complete. To add to the corset and the corded petticoat, a second flounced petticoat adds the final touches to the silhouette.

The petticoat is constructed of a base layer, pleated into the waist, onto which long strips of fabric are gathered to create the three layers of flounces. The petticoat fastens with a tape passed through the waistband channel.

Gathering the first flounce onto the hem of the petticoat

The layered flounces of material help to hold out the skirts to create the bell-shaped silhouette of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Strictly speaking, flounced petticoats were more often seen later in the 1850s when they were worn over the cage crinolines to soften the outline and disguise the steel bones.

This cartoon appeared in Punch magazine in January 1857. The lady on the right is blowing into a tube to inflate her crinoline (inflatable petticoats were a genuine invention). Her skirt demonstrates the kind of flounces that could also be applied to petticoats - "stiff muslin petticoats flounced set out the dress" (Cunningham, p248)

Before this it was the custom to wear multiple single petticoats to support the skirts. According to C. Willett Cunningham, author of " Englishwomen's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century",

"It was usual to wear a number [of petticoats], depending on the season; the undermost was short and of some stiff material...Over this was worn one or more flannel petticoats, in winter, and above them a plain and above that an embroidered petticoat...The outermost petticoat, of cambric, was elaborately embroidered and trimmed and trimmed with embroidery, crochet or lace." (Cunningham, p165-166)

Indeed, some people claim that as many as twelve petticoats were being worn to support increasingly large skirts in the 1850s, prior to the invention of the cage crinoline. Not only this, but the petticoats would have been heavily starched to hold their shape and support the skirts of the dress.

Even at the time it was recognised that such a great deal of underclothing was heavy, hot, restrictive and unhygienic, not to mention the fact that all the layers could add inches to the waist! For the modern re-enactor it therefore makes sense to compromise a little to avoid too much discomfort when in costume. A flounced petticoat adds extra volume to the petticoats using less material and is therefore more cost effective and lighter to wear. Furthermore, the anachronism is only slight. Throughout the 1840s, flounces were a key feature of fashionable skirts. It is therefore not inconceivable that some women may have added flounces to their petticoats.

An 1840s fashion plate from the French magazine "Le Follet" show a skirt with three, tiered flounces like those on my petticoat (Image found here)

 The fact that is practically impossible to find a surviving example of such a petticoat from this period does not necessarily discredit this theory since so few petticoats survive at all, being as they were largely utilitarian and made of fabrics likely to be re-purposed when the garments were no longer fit to wear.

*References:
C. Willett Cunningham, Englishwomen's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1937, reprinted by Dover, 1990)

When home sewing becomes DIY

60 days to go and time to bone the corset.

In the nineteenth century, corsets could be boned with whalebone (actually the baleen, or teeth of the whale) or, thanks to advances in industrial technology, steel. Whalebone was a particular favourite as this natural material which has a consistency somewhere between hair and horn is light, elastic and flexible. Whalebone could be split into thin strips and still retain all of these features and, if softened in hot water, could be shaped to the form of the corset where it would remain set once dry and cold. However, the great demand for baleen meant that the numbers of these magnificent creatures dwindled as they were constantly hunted. The answer to the scarcity and rising price of whalebone was steel. By the mid century spring  steel had been invented, flexible enough to bend to the shape of the corset.*

An example of baleen on display in Colonial Williamsburg. Picture from The Two Nerdy History Girls. Click here to read their interesting short article on baleen.

This is the material used for corsetry today. Solid steel or spiral steel (tightly coiled and flattened wire) bones provide excellent support for garments such as corsets, but are light and flexible enough to shape to the body. Corsets are also still fastened with steel busks (wide, strong bones with hook and stud closures) and metal lacing eyelets, patented in 1829 and 1828 respectively.

The two halves of the busk are inserted between the corset and facing at the front edges. Spaces in the stitching allow the hooks to poke through the seam and an awl is used to pierce holes for the studs. And in a taste of what is to come, safety goggles are worn when sewing around the busk as sewing machine needles break and fly up in the air very easily if they accidentally hit the steel!

Front fastening buck inserted

 For the next stage even more DIY tools are required. Setting the lacing grommets in the back of the corset involves no sewing whatsoever but a fair amount of hammering. The grommets (or eyelets) come in two parts. The side with the long shaft is inserted through a hole pierced in the right position and the second side, resembling a washer is placed over this. A special tool is then used which, when hit with a hammer, forces the shaft to roll back over the washer to secure the eyelet in position.

An array of tools for setting the grommets

The two halves of an eyelet

The grommet setting tool in action

And a good whack with a hammer!

Finally the bones themselves can be inserted into the channels sewn earlier. I was using continuous spiral steel for this project, so once again raided the tool box for lethal looking items to try to cut the steel (not an easy job) and fix the end caps in position. With the bones cut to the tight length and the ends finished, these were then inserted into the channels ready or the top edges of the corset to be bound.

Scary wire and tools...and the safety goggles again because this stuff springs everywhere!

Close up of the spiral wire

And finally, the result. One corset ready to be finished tomorrow:

Front with busk

The back with eyelets

 * References

Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (Routledge/Theatre Art Books, Oxon, 1954).