Woohoo! My article goes public!

The reason I started this blog was to document the creation of my competition costume for Costume-Con 2013.
Then I decided to wait until after the competition for my tell all story.
Then I was asked to write an article on its creation for Virtual Costumer e-zine, so I put it on hold here once again.

Now you can read the whole thing!
The older versions of Virtual Costumer are available to the public when a new version comes out for the guild members. So my article is now available for your viewing pleasure.

http://www.siwcostumers.org/newsletterarchive/VirtCostV11-I3-2013.pdf

Engageantes? What are those?

I started backwards on the dress…

I didn’t jump in to the dress construction right away.  I started with the accessories. Huh?

“Why?” you may ask.

Well, thank you for asking.

I was kind of putting off doing the stays, which intimidated me. And I couldn’t do the dress until I made the stays.

So I started with the accessories.

First up:

Engageantes (or sleeve ruffles)

(Close up of a painting from the MET)

These sleeve ruffles were made of lace like this one from the MET:

or fine embroidered cotton like these from LACMA:

They were basted to the end of the sleeve and were removed for cleaning or switching to a new dress.

They are cut in a wavy pattern and the ends are stitched together. Then the top is gathered and basted to the end of the sleeve. The skinny part fits in the crook of the elbow. The long part hangs down in the back.

Most of the ones that I’ve seen on the museum web sites appear to be around 39-44” long and around 8-9 inches wide at the widest part. By the 1770s they had multiple layers, 2 or 3. I decided to make mine with 2 layers. A 9” wide one and a smaller one about 6-7” wide. 

I thought about getting a pre-embroidered cotton and making the ruffles out of that. But I *really* wanted lace. Such beautiful silk taffeta deserves it, but I figured that I’d never find a good enough lace for a price I could afford. The lace had to be at least 9” wide. And it had to be soft and drapey. Most lace today is stiff and scratchy. And I needed about 4-5 yards.

Then I decided to try searching for cotton lace on etsy and I found this:

Hmmm….

Looks soft enough to gather.

Seller says it’s soft. Seller says it’s cotton (probably with a synthetic background, though). The pattern is a little heavier than most 18^th century examples I’ve seen, but not outrageously so. I honestly know next to nothing about lace, but it looks good to me.

And it was only $12 for 2.5 yards.

So I took a chance and ordered 5 yards.

I waited for the shipping from China, tracking it all the way.

Then it finally came!

Wait…”that package is too small for that much lace” was my first thought.

But it wasn’t. The lace was just THAT soft and drapey that it was folded up into a very small envelope.

You just can’t believe how soft and flowy this stuff is!

Here's what it looked like finished.

The lace may not be exactly period, but aren’t they yummy?

 

The Fabulous Fabric

Okay, now that Costume Con is over, I can start posting all of the entries that I wrote way back when I started this blog. You remember --- that's why I started this whole thing?

When I talked about it, I put up the intro and talked about the pattern (which I ended up not using actually).

Now on to the things I wrote back then:

Got the fabric! Yay!!!!!

Beautiful, smooth, shiny, crisp ….

So many adjectives, so little time.

The color isn’t as peach as the picture appeared on the web site. It’s more of a beautiful cross between peach and baby pink. “Pinch” or “Peak”, maybe? (grin)

And it’s nice and tightly woven, too. Just like a good taffeta should be. No raveling at the ends at all. I showed it to some costumers here and one of them said that it looked almost plastic because it was so smooth and reflective. No slubs on this silk!

The Hips Don't Lie

So I'm finally able to get back to where I started with this blog - my competition costume for Costume-Con 31! I started to blog about the whole process, but then thought that I shouldn't reveal everything before the convention.

Now the convention is over, so here it is:

 

It's all hand-sewn using period techniques. I won best workmanship for the Journeyman category and an honorable mention for my documentation. Nothing for presentation, though. Phooey! (pout)

I guess I know what I have to work on now, huh? Although I did get a couple of really big laughs. I came out and started dancing to harpsichord music. After about 30 seconds, disco lights started flashing and Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" started playing & I boogied down. :-)

That's where the title of this post came from - it was the name of my entry in the competition.

I thought it was appropriate given the hoops. There were 2 other women in the competition with even bigger panniers, though.  Mme de Pompadour's gown was more elegant and Marie Antoinette's was more over-the-top, but I think my dress was prettier. (I even did the "pretty, pretty princess" dance the first time I put it on.)

And, hey.... check out the hair!!!:

 

 It took about 45 minutes to get my hair up in that style. Another lady in the competition (the Marie Antoinette) had a similar style. Hers was a wig, but it was even taller than mine! I was limited by the length of my hair, but I honestly don't think that I could have gotten it any higher by myself. I could have had longer hair, but my arms couldn't have reached any further. (grin)

Over the next several blog posts I'm going to detail the whole process of the costume from start to finish, so I'll talk more about how I did the hair later.

(BTW, the convention had a great photographer so I got a lot of good professional shots of most of the costumes that I took. Check him out at www.donsearlephoto.com.)

The Pattern

Step number 2 on my road to a robe a la francaise - the pattern.

Okay…in the spirit of trying to be historically accurate, I’m planning on using a scaled pattern from Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion 1680-1880. There’s one in there for a robe a la française around the right time. What’s great about that pattern is that there is a detailed description of the same dress in Costume in Detail by Nancy Bradfield. And a photo of it on the National Trust web site.

http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1348709.1



So I’ll have lots of good info on the pattern. (I'll just be trimming it a little differently.)

The stripes on the sleeves are wrong, so I’ll fix that. Both books specifically mention how unusual it is for a dress of this period to have the stripes running vertically on the sleeves. So I'll do it the usual way - with the stripes running horizontal around the arm.

For the construction details, I’m going to try to make them historically accurate also. There’s a great book called Costume Close-Up by Linda Baumgarten that contains very good instructions in how people in the 18^th century sewed and constructed garments. There’s also some good tips in Fitting and Proper by Sharon Ann Burnston.

Plus I found this really great blog by a grad student who was studying 18^th century construction and decided to make some items for an exhibition. Check it out at Rockin’ the Rococo (http://brocadegoddess.wordpress.com).

And Koshka (Catherine) over at The Fashionable Past has lots and lots of pics of how she draped hers. (http://koshka-the-cat.blogspot.com/search/label/chocolate%20francaise).

I like pictures!!

Hers is a little earlier period than mine, so mine will have a seam at the waist. But it definitely gives some good tips.

Intro and a peach saque dress

All right, so I’m starting my very first dress diary/blog. So bear with me! I should probably introduce myself – I am a 45 year old librarian with an interest in just about every aspect of body adornment. I do henna and face and body painting in addition to making jewelry, clothing and costumes.

This dress diary is going to focus on my creation of an early-to-mid 1770s robe a la française (or sack-back gown or saque). I’ve never made anything from this century before, so I’m starting completely from scratch and immersing myself in every book and blog that I can find.

Why am I doing this, you might ask? I’ll be attending Costume-Con in Denver next year (2013) and I want to enter the historical masquerade competition. I’ve only entered one competition before at the novice level. Since I won my category, I have to compete at the journeyman level this time. Steppin’ up the pressure now! The convention is in May, so that means I have about 9 months to get ready. Since I’m going to *try* to sew everything by hand, it may be a tight fit. (Note the emphasis on TRY.) :)

My inspiration is this lovely 1775 number from the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a very similar one also:

And here’s my fabric:

I bought 15 yards of this fabulous silk taffeta because I was paranoid about not having enough fabric. It started out as 10, then I decided on 12 and finally ended up with 15. Can you tell that I tend to go a little overboard? I purchased it from a great seller on ebay who spent a lot of time answering my sometimes frantic questions by email. I had to make sure that the stripes ran length-wise especially. And holy cow were they fast! I paid for it on Monday and had the fabric in my hot little hands on Thursday. Silks4less is the seller’s ebay name if you’re interested.

From what I can tell, stripes were gaining in popularity during this era. They were made in many colors (although pastels seemed especially numerous), both simple and with floral accent designs. Here’s a jacket from the Los Angeles County Museum that features very similar fabric to mine, just with smaller white stripes:

Next – Planning the pattern.