The stripey challenge - my approach

hello everybody,

Recently our (historical) meme mom Karolina Zebrowska  introduced the stripey challenge.
Basically it's an invitaion to all historical sewists to recreate a historical garment from any deacde, but it has to striped in black and whited. Why?
Firstly because stripey costumes are awesome, secondly because its always cool to sew with complete strangers worldwide, it gives you this weird motivation.

So obviously I need to join stuff like that too and used the chance to make a black and white evening gown from the decade between 1900 and 1910. First I thought about the iconic Worth gown, but it just wasn´t stripey enough. So I picked a more rarely seen dress worn by the famous opera singer Lina Cavalieri

I really fell in love with the dress, So i searched up information on it, which wasn't as successful as I would have wished, but I found out who has worn it, as noted above and that it was made and worn in 1905 or 1906.The strange thing is that I cannot seem to find a picture from the front in a similar quality. In fact thats the only two pictures I find at all from this dress and they do look like two complete different ones, the front view looks nearly like a painting.But this leaves me a bit of room for interpretation, which isn't the worst either. The dress is rather slim and flares out extremly at the bottom, it has  a train in the back, which is, I have to admit, a bit intimidating for me, since i never made a train or such. The neckline is very wide, which leads me to make a new, more low necked camisole. The neckline seems to be decorated with a satin sash, and some mesh, as well as beaded fringe on the front. It has puffed sleeves, where the details are rarely visible. The embellishment is the most interesting part, but I will do it not as elaborate as it was made on the extant garment. To save the last bit of my sanity.
The orginal seems to have beading all over, but I am not gonna do that. I was thinking that I sew on fabric that has some sheen to it and if I have time and motivation I will do some beading on the edges. So on to the fabrics I bought for this:

The base makes a white, very crisp almost glazed looking cotton fabric, It will be the mock-up fabric and hopefully I can just take it like it is, with some minor alterations. The pattern will just be altered from my existing Titanic costume pattern, because it did fit well over the corset ( I´ll use the same corset and chemise)

Over that will go a black mesh, just like in the reference, it's not as sheer as I would have liked but, it should work. Furthermore it will be the base of the decorative elements, so the vertical lines and flower decoration. 

Speaking of the decorative fabric, I picked this shimmery, striped black taffeta and I will sew the stripes into the seams or over it. The floral pattern will probably be made out of the same fabric, but I have no clue how I will seal the edges yet, at least not in a historical manner. ( If you have any ideas, please let me know)

For the neckline, ruffles and sleeves maybe, I picked a black stain with a subtle sheen, which contains approximately half cotton fiber. 

I also picked a black chiffon for the sleeves, I could also use the mesh for them, but I just wanted to have something to vary. 

I took two trimmings, first a narrow lace in black, which will be on the edge of the ruffles on the train. Secondly I also bought this black and white embroidered lace, which isn´t used in the original dress, but it fitted so well that I just had to take it with me.

 

                                      For the petticoat I bought, a stiff but thin white cotton and some wide lace. I will make a camisole and and bustle pad as well, but I think I have all the material for that at home. As soon as I get my current project done, I will start on this.                   Thank you all for reading, I hope you share a little bit of my excitement



 

40s french knickers

Hello everybody,

Thanks for visiting, in todays post I am gonna show the process of making so callled french knickers, popular in the 1940s.
Mine are made from a pink cotton, some cotton trimming and closes with buttons and handsewn buttonholes.

As always I started with the research and came across this patterns, as underwear was often home made back then. 

So my research showed that the patten differs extremly from modern made shorts, the have this litte piece inserted where the crotch seam is supposed to start.

So I started out with a regular shorts aka pants pattern and dried to draft them this way, made a mock-uo and redrawn the pattern. With this one I cut the pieces from the cotton, which looked like this

Then the first thing I was going to sew was the crotch seam, I pressed it to one side and overstitched 1 mm away  from the edge.

I made this two times then I have sewn the two parts togehter at the side. Note: 1 cm away from the edge, which will later be attached to the main part is left open, so you can easily sew this later on. 

Then one side of the crotch piece gets sewn to the outside of the knickers, which is tricky because its pointy. I made little cut in the fabric where the middle of the point is with a depth of 1 cm.

This turned out more complicted than intened so on the other side is just made the cut into the crotch piece, and cut the other side when I reached there with the seam. Then i sewed the other side. 

After that I overstitched all the seams i just made for more stability, again with 1 mm away from the seam. 

Then i stitched up the side seams, but made sure that I leave open a few cm on the botton to form a slit. On the left side I additonally left the part, where the fly for the closure goes, open.

 This fly as cut on both sides but was trimmed away on the right side, since i just need one closure. Obviously I could have made two for design purposes, but considering the time period, people made sure to save material where they could.

The seams got finished by felling them in place with a slip stitch, it's barely visible from the outside, and is one of the suggested methods used in one of my tailoring books ( published in 1961 but i suppose home sewing hasn't changed that much in 15 years.)

Then I made the facing, the lower edge was sewn inward by half a cm and then pressed as suggested in this book: https://archive.org/details/hallsimplifiedhomesewing1943/page/n7

The facing was sewn on the edge with one 1cm seam allowance, as I cut it. All the away around, also on the bottom edge of the fly. ( I made a cut where the fly starts beforehand, and felled the seam just to the cut)

I trimmed the seam allowance way to about the half of it and gut the edges of the fly away, but it depends on your fabric and how much it frays. The seam allowance gets pressed open and flipped over to the other side, where the lower edge is stitched down with slip stiches again.

Then I hemmed the shorts, by turning it inward and felling it down again by hand. Then I gave it another good press. 

The inner part of the crotch piece was still unsewn, which I made now, I basically just turned it inward and felled it down so the stitching of the outer part is hidden. 

And I forgot to take pictures of both...obviousy...

But the next thing I made was securing the fly and the slits just with multiple stiches at the same spot. contrasting in this case. 

The hem got decorated with some trimming I also used on the matching bra, it was stitched on by machine close to the edge, the ends were tucked in when i reached there. 

Lastly I made the closure, which meant buttons. The buttonholes are handsewn as I would hae been in that time. I quickly stitched on a fabric scrap, where the holes were placed, since it was number one rule in my tailoring book, to always! have two layers of fabric, when making buttonholes. And one can't argue with their grandmothers, right?

And that's it, the knickers are done, sadly I don't have pictures from the making of the bra but here is a picture of that too. 

Now that the undergarments are finished I can move on to the actual dress and apron. 

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1912: A costume from the Titanic

Hello everyone,

It´s been a very long time since I posted something, but wanna get in to it again. I figured a good way to start would be presenting the most recent costume I made.

It was inspired by a trip to Barcelona I made with a few friends. It wasn´t planned but we went to a Titanic exhibiton there, in the nautical museum. They showed some dresses from that era and  I completely fell in love with one of it.

So I analyzed it a bit and figured out, that for me its not very typical for a dress from this period, or the year 1912. It was an extinct garment obviously but I did not find a lot of dresses from that period who looked like this.
What I decided to do was to adjust the design a bit, so it looks more typical for this period. And I had to make further changes to reduce price of the materials as well as the time i was willing to put in the dress.
Because this extant dress was made from a very fine mesh with handsewn decorations, that seem to be fine net tubes that were stitched on in a decorative manner. Furthermore the beading appears to be very detailed.

So I changed up the design of the main dress,but before I could get to that i had to make appropriate underwear as I was just starting out with costuming.
Only thing I already owned was a selfmade chemise in pink.

It was made from  a very thin, almost sheer cotton with a pink/salmon print on it, which isn´t accurate, as the chemises were usually white to be washed easily and more roughly. 

Despite it´s inaccuracies I used it for the costume. 

 Next thing was the corset obviously, A very decorative thing at this time. I used a pattern from Norah Waughs "Corset and Crinolines" aka the bible of costumers.

 For fabric I chose a white coutil, which i didn´t had to flat line. Some salmon satin for the binding and decorative bows as well as the elastic suspenders.
I also used a white lace for decoration and some cotton thread for the flossing around the bones edges.














To cover up the corset, a corset cover and petticoat would have been worn. also many late edwardian wore something calles a bust improver. I decided to combine all of this things into a petticoat dress, which were in fashion around this time, also it was more pratical.

It was made from a  plain cotton and decorated with some lace, as well as ruffles around the bust area, to kinda imitate the but improver a bit, which worked surprisingly well.
 The vertical seams were falt felled seams to reduce bulk the best I could. The hem was decorated with tucks and lace. And the whole thing closes with buttons and knotted  or crocheted thread loops and a small hook.

And finally the outer dress. This took way longer than expected but I adore it. 6 different fabrics, 3 laces and many, many bead went into this gown. 

I won´t go in detail with this dress, as it is pretty complex and a far to big mess, to describe it logically. I just tried, tried again, ripped seams out again, inserted panels for more width etc. So all in all its full of errors, but I guess this is what helps me with learning.

But all the flaws of the gown are unseen on the pictures, which is always relieving.

And thats it for now, I will be back with a walkthrough of a silk dress I guess, 

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