Tag: Victorian

Velvet coat – almost finished…

Butterick 5266

Not the greatest photo ever – the combination of black velvet and a dark Shed is not the best – but I think you can see the progress on this coat! It has a body now, which is a big improvement on last week’s cape and sleeves. It’s still not quite finished – the hem needs, well, hemming, and it needs front fastenings of some kind. It also needs overlocking around the sleeves, and a jolly good pressing around the collar.

(Before anybody says anything, yes, I know the purple lining doesn’t go with the red outfit underneath. I wasn’t about to go out and buy another five metres of lining when I already had this purple in the stash.)

The saving grace of this project has been its simplicity. If it had been more complicated, there would probably be a lot more swear words in this post. As it is, I simply left out most of the tricky parts to make my life easier. The sleeves will be overlocked to the body instead of slip stitched. The fronts and neck and sleeve hems are topstitched rather than understitched. Where the lining came out a quarter of an inch bigger than the coat (at the sleeve heads and the hem, don’t ask me why!), I simply chopped off the difference and stopped worrying about it. I haven’t bothered with the fourteen metres of braided trim, or the openings in the front panels. Oh, and I left out the side seam vents too. Simple!

Having moaned on about the frustrating parts, I will concede that the sleeve heads eased into place beautifully, as did the collar. I’m now deciding how I want the front to fasten, and whether I’m going to add any kind of trimmings at all. I think I might need at least a little bit of detail on the ends of the collar, to make them stand out against the front a bit more. Paul’s suggested black frog fasteners and sequin trims, and I think he might be right.

Oh, and the poster in the frame, behind the dressform? That’s a little idea we had, that we’re hoping to turn into a reality!

Pinstriped velvet coat and cape

The tidy side

Remember when I bought this fantastic Ikea unit for the Shed, and tidied everything into neat little cubby holes?

Today I had every intention of making a hat. I had everything I needed laid out on the sewing table. Instructions, fabric, buckram, wire, lining, curved sewing needles… but no pattern. I knew it was in the Shed somewhere – most likely in the ever increasing pile of stuff I haven’t put away yet.

THE PILE

This is my (technically Paul’s) big comfy chair – where I can sit to do hand sewing. Except I can’t, because on the chair lives THE PILE. Anything that doesn’t have a tidy home yet, or anything that I’m going to “put away in a minute” tends to be dumped in the pile. I knew the hat pattern was in there somewhere, and I found it almost at the bottom – alongside the missing pattern for my niece’s dress. The last time I’d looked at either of those patterns was May. Eight months ago. Oops.

What you can also see overflowing from THE PILE is a mountain of pinstriped fabric. That’s about ten metres of cotton velvet, which I bought way back in the mists of time when I worked in a fabric shop. Scrunched up underneath it was the pattern for Butterick 5266, a pattern for a Victorian-ish coat with a cape. (Now out of print.) In my infinite wisdom, I decided that the best way to tidy this fabric and get it out of the Shed was to finally sew the dratted coat.

Cape and sleeves

So, I now have the cape part, and a pair of sleeves. Unfortunately I have also remembered how much I absolutely loathe sewing with cotton velvet. And the pinstripes aren’t helping either. They look great, but they’re printed onto the fabric rather than woven in, and they’re not printed on the straight grain. Which means that I have to choose either to follow the pinstripes or follow the grain. Not an ideal situation, particularly with velvet.

Pinstriped velvet

Isn’t this lovely though? That glorious moment when the pinstripes actually match at the seams as though I meant it, makes up for a lot. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make up for the frustrating way that velvet moves around when you sew it, even with the usually fantastic differential feed on my machine. So the pinstripes only match beautifully on one of the sleeves, and of course that’s the one where the fabric kept slipping as I was sewing in the lining, because the velvet was off the grain. And the sleeve that isn’t puckered around the cuff? The pinstripes don’t match up at all. Of course.

And that’s the easy bit.

The front and back panels are so big that they each have to be cut twice from a single layer of fabric. And then lined. I think from now on I’m going to ignore the instructions, and just leave out all the fiddly bits that could go wrong. No braid trimming, no side vents, no slits to put your hands through (what are they for anyway? the thing has sleeves!), no loops for the buttons – nothing. I’ll bag out the lining so it can’t slip around, and I’ll sew on enormous poppers with buttons over the top. Or buy frog fasteners.

It’ll be a few days before I can get back in the Shed to finish this off (my Real Job calls), but hopefully I can get this finished very soon. Then I can gleefully THROW AWAY* whatever’s left of the velvet, and rejoice in my decision to NEVER SEW WITH IT AGAIN.

 

*No, of course I won’t actually throw it away. I’ll give it to a charity shop, or donate it to anyone daft enough to take it off my hands after they’ve read this.

[edit] Well, Lisa of Off With Her Head has admitted to being daft enough – so when I’ve finished the cape, I’ll be sending her a big parcel. Look out for pinstriped velvet millinery, coming soon!

Vaguely Victorian: Part Two

Victorian-ish outfit

Here you go – for those who were wondering, this is what the vaguely Victorian outfit looked like at the end of a long day, in a lovely Victorian staircase hall.

Contrary to a few people’s concerns, I did not boil to death with so many layers of clothes on. The skirt was quite heavy, but the bustle was so comfortable I kept forgetting I was wearing it and trying to squeeze through spaces that were impossible to negotiate with such an enormous bottom!

At the end of the day I also learned that it is possible to run for the bus in a corset and bustle – although I wouldn’t recommend it! In fact it’s not the ideal outfit for bus travel generally. You can’t get upstairs, for a start, and I was a bit worried that the driver would ask me to buy two tickets for taking up so much room!

I must admit that, without the complicated underpinnings, I’d actually quite happily wear this outfit (or something very similar) to work on any old not-particularly-Victorian day.

Vaguely Victorian

I’ve been asked to work an extra day this week to help out with a school visit, for which I may have heard myself ask my boss “would you like me to come in dressed as a Victorian?”. The session goes with the Victorian part of our building, Palmer House, which was designed by Waterhouse (of Natural History Museum and Reading Town Hall fame) and built in 1880-82.

Paul, bless him, has managed to rein me in from “I NEED TO MAKE A COMPLETE PERIOD-CORRECT VICTORIAN OUTFIT BY TUESDAY” to “please can we have a look in your wardrobe first”.

Victorian-ish outfit

However, I may have used “dressing up as a Victorian for work” as an excuse to buy a corset. I chose a black brocade one which was on the “corset of the day” offer for £25. It ended up costing me almost £40 by the time I’d paid vat and extra for super-fast shipping, but I still call that a bargain. It’s not expertly made, but it’s no worse than any Vollers corset I’ve owned in the past, and it gives a “Victorian enough” shape under all those layers, so I’m happy with that.

The website was a bit weird – I kept finding other people’s things added to my shopping cart and at one point it kept telling me that I was logged in as somebody else, which made me very nervous about giving them my credit card details. But I placed my order at five to three on Friday, 3pm being the cut off for next day delivery, expecting it to arrive on Monday. The postman knocked on the door at 9:30 on Saturday morning, with my corset! So that was extremely impressive. (He also brought my lingerie-sewing book which I thought had got lost in the trans-atlantic post, so hooray for that too!)

Victorian-ish outfit

I posted on Facebook about making a Victorian outfit in a hurry, and Chris from Progress Theatre offered to lend me a bustle pad from their wardrobe. I replaced the worn-out elastic with cotton tape, and I think it’ll make quite an acceptable late-Victorian silhouette.

Victorian-ish outfit

Next I added my lilac petticoat, for volume, and a plain white vest to cover up the black dress and corset. I went for black foundation layers because I’d originally intended to wear a black blouse, but the two I thought might be suitable turned out to have inappropriate sleeves.

Victorian-ish outfit

Here’s a side view with the bustle. Is my bum going to look big in this? 😉

Victorian-ish outfit

Next layer: the ivory lawn pintucked blouse that I usually wear for being a rural Edwardian when I’m out with the clog dancers.

Victorian-ish outfit

I spent all day making this skirt, but unfortunately velvet doesn’t photograph at all well in poor light so I can’t show it to you properly. It’s Simplicity 2207, the same as my red and black stripy one.

Victorian-ish outfit

And for the finishing touches: a black wool man’s dress waistcoat, a length of black ribbon, and a marcasite brooch in the shape of an owl. I wear this waistcoat to work quite often, usually with the owl on the lapel.

Victorian-ish outfit

I must admit that I’m not completely convinced by the bustle, even though it’s much smaller with the weight of the velvet skirt on the top. I was looking at photographs of Victorian teachers and the more I see the less I’m convinced that a bustle, even a small one, was worn underneath everyday workwear.

I’ll try the whole outfit on together, and hopefully I’ll be able to get some better photos while I’m at work tomorrow. I can’t do much about my extremely un-Victorian hair and glasses, sadly, but I think this is not too bad, considering I had almost all of it lurking in my wardrobe already!

Paintball with a musket.

Replacing the flint

Last weekend we went to Reigate Fort with my sister and brother-in-law. We had a lovely walk through Gatton Park, and ate a picnic in the drizzle whilst watching a slightly disappointing historical re-enactment. I don’t think we could have had a more typically English summer day out if we’d tried!

(Well, we could have gone to the seaside and eaten sandwiches in the car whilst sheltering from the pouring rain, I suppose.)

There were three periods of military history being demonstrated – Napoleonic, Victorian and First World War. The slightly disappointing part of the demonstration was because the WW1 machine guns kept getting jammed and refusing to fire. There were lots of small boys who absolutely loved the Napoleonic cannons, which were much more reliable!

There was also a section (ostensibly for children) where you could have a go at firing a cannon, mortar or musket. The picture above shows a new flint being fitted to one of the muskets, which I took while Paul was in the queue, waiting for his turn.

Paul firing a musket

Here’s Paul, firing a bright orange paintball towards a small plywood Napoleonic soldier.

Paul firing a musket

He’d been told to aim just below the webbing – and his shot was right on target!

The sun came out as we were walking back through the park, so we were able to enjoy some fabulous views all the way across Surrey. We didn’t see any of the highland cattle that wander around Gatton Park (although there was plenty of evidence that they’d been there!), but we sat on a bench at the top of the hill and ate muffins in the sunshine.

Lovely.