Courtesean Gown: The Petticoat Bodies

A good example of the mystery of the shoulder straps -- how are they staying put?

The lining from the side...

... and the front ...

... and the back.

Closeup of the shoulder boning channels.

From the top, you can see the go all the way over the shoulder.

Only two lines of cording in, but already the strap resists when tugged on, and springs back into place when released!

Pulling the cording with loops of ribbon - much more cleverer!

You have to sort of wiggle the fabric over the cord sometimes.

The front, turned but not stretched.

Ditto on the back - *yuck*! :(

The bodies, finished and appropriately stretched, don't look so bad... Except for that terrible seam!

The side -- I swear, the pattern should have closed evenly.

Finished bodies from the back - again, the seam. :(

The pleats, pinned in the back....

...and the front -- I've pinned the pleats flat to the edge of the bodies.

More pinned pleats, from the side. I just can't get enough of my new camera, what can I say?

Trimming the pleats to a reasonable level in back....

...and, more dramatically, in front.

All raw edges neatly bound.

The petticoat attached to the bodies in front...

... from the side ...

... and in back.

Here's a better view of the pleating in back.

I'm not kidding -- he really sticks his head in there while the machine is running! At least he's right-side-up this time!

A veritable gus-load of banding for the skirts.

Applying the banding to finish the hem -- the band is sewn inside the skirt, then folded over and sewn down to finish the edge.

hey! Missa! You're sewing your banding on upside-down! Er, no....

The banding is folded over to hide it's seam allowance, the sewn down.

Finally - All done!

The pleats don't hang like they used to, but it's not bad....

04.23.02 - I'm trying to put dates in this time.... I started the pattern for the bodies on the 24th. I had been toying with how I would eventually make it before this. I want the bodies to have a fully corded lining, so that I don't have to wear the with a separate corset (because it's supposed to b bloody hot this year). I prefer to run boning for the front of a corset (or whatever the boning is in) on the diagonal, because it buckles less. This is not demonstrably period. (Then again, using pasteboard to keep a bodice absolutely stiff *is* period, but it would just wilt in the conditions at faire. Sometimes, "period" and "workable in your environment" are not the same thing.) It's not a problem to do with a front closing garment, but since this pair of bodies and it's associated petticoat are going under a gown that is open over a light mock chemise in from (dear gods, I just realized that I'm about to make an italien ren dickey... I have to go kill myself now. Excuse me.), it can't close in front. The idea is for this bit to look like it's not even there, and most women do not actually lace up the front, frankenstein's bride excepted. Actually, most men don't either. Huh. Anyway, the point of that is that this pair of bodies has to close on the sides. But in order for me to be able to get the cording into the front on an angle, there has to be seam at the center front. So I made the lining as four pieces - left and right for both front and back, and cut the outer fabric as a single front and a single back. It should work. (And hey, it really is a "pair of bodies" that will not have two pieces when finished! After reading (and trying to make sense of) too many wardrobe warrants, this sort of thing gets really exciting.) I'm also trying to work out another thing I've never understood: how is it that all those italien ladies can keep their shoulder straps right on the edges of their shoulders, without them falling off????? Bloody impossible, in my experience.

What I decided to try, since I'm cording the whole lining anyway, was making cording channels that go completely over the shoulder. Making them was easy. Getting the cording through them, as it turns out, is another thing entirely. It's about a 30" run to pull cord through, and, t make matters worse, there's a curve to the strap! (I drape all my patterns, and sometimes, draping a pattern gives you a piece that just doesn't make so much sense. The straps that look like they go straight over the shoulder actually have a curve to them. This is why draping is more accurate than flat drafting -- if you think about these things, you tend to do them wrong. :) Draping relieves you of all that tedious thinking.) 04.24.02 - I finished all the cording channels in the bodies lining, and pinned the pieces on to janey just to make sure they hadn't shrunk or something. They hadn't. I contemplated pulling more of the shoulder cording. I decided I didn't hate myself that much. Tonight, I have no choice -- I have to get the cording in before I can go further.

04.27.02While my dye bath was simmering happily away, I was busy making mistakes in the name of progress. *snort* I did finish getting all of the blasted channels corded, and I finally came up with the relatively brilliant idea of using my crochet hook to pull a loop of ribbon through my boning cases, then using the loop of ribbon to pull the cord, which works *much*better* than just using the hook -- far less wear and tear on the hands. That took a few hours, but it was basically ok. When I was ready to put the velvet onto the corded lining, I was in for a few surprises. Notable, the fact that the velvet and the lining were two completely different sizes! Yipes! What happened? I cursed the fabric. The fabric prolly didn't do it, but it made me feel better. Careful comparison with my pattern piece made a couple things clear. Firstly, I cut the bodice wrong. It's not necessary to add a seam allowance along a *fold*. I can't believe I did that. I mean, it sounds like the sort of thing I would do because I just wasn't thinking, but I still can't *believe* I did that. Secondly, the cording took up about an inch on the sides of the lining. It shrunk! Well, ok, it also stretches. Phooey. I felt thwarted. So I made a seam in the center of the front and back pieces of the velvet (where I *didn't* want a blasted seam), and then I pinned the lining onto janey, stretching it as best as I could to get it roughly back to it's original size. And then I started hand basting the blasted velvet onto it, while the whole thing was on janey (that's awkward, btw). I eventually decided it would work, and I was sick of the whole thing, so I stopped, unpinned everything, hauled it over to the sewing machine, and did the while thing via the stretch-n-sew-n-hope method. Sometimes, brute force is the only graceful solution. *grumble* Now, when lying flat, it looks a mess with a ton of wrinkles in the velvet. But when it's stretched they all go away. I'm abut a quarter done with finishing the neckline (done mostly on the 28th) -- it's slow going, since I have to stretch the lining while working. I guess I've finally managed to make a sewing exercise routine....

04.29.02-05.04.02I sewed the eyelets in the bodies. There were 30 of them, all told. Why does it take me nearly a week to bind 30 eyelets? Because I hate doing it, that's why. Ugh. Such a pain!

05.06.02-05.08.02Once the razzafrazzan eyelets were finally all done, I laced the bodies onto janey to find out of they would actually *fit*, and if the velvet would be flat once they did. The answers, in order, are "close e-damn-nough" and "yes, except where I can see the cords. Le Sigh. I'll have to come up with something to do about that. But after all those bloody eyelets, I was a little sick of doing things about the bodies, and decided to make the skirts instead. The skirts are made out of three panels of blue gross grain. (Yes, the same blue gross grain that I keep using in random projects. I have a *lot* of it. Long story. very cheap. Good color, too.) I wasn't sure if I should use 2 panels or three, so I made a mockup by pinning two panels, and I wasn't getting nearly enough fabric to do nice pleats with. So, three it was, with one covering the front and two in the back. The panels are each 60" wide or thereabouts. They are french seamed together (because I was feeling overzealous). Making skirts is boring, really. Now, pleating and hemming skirts can be exciting in ways that aren't fun, but the actual process of making up the skirt is pretty boring. This skirt isn't even going to be lined (summer petticoats, as it turns out, weren't always), so it was even less exciting to make up than normal. Then the fun started. I started pinning the pleats in with the skirt on janey, until I got a look I was happy with. (For the front, I pinned the pleats once at the waist level, then once at the bottom of the bodies, so I could see the pleats as they'd actually appear when finished.). I got all the pleats pinned. They were glorious. I used a series of stacked knife pleats, all pointing towards the center back. The pleats are stacked upwards, instead of downwards (in other words, the large flat box pleats is on the bottom of the pile), which gives a wonderfully sumptuous set of folds falling in back. So, now I have all these perfect pleats pinned directly onto a dummy, through the bodies. If you're wondering, at this point, how those pleats get from dummy to finished skirt, don't feel bad. I was too. Actually, I think my exact thought was, 'good job, missa, how the *hell* are you gonna get yourself out of this one without loosing the pleats?' That was vexing. Since there are, I'm told, very few problems that don't look better after a good night's rest, I went to sleep. I got up. It hadn't solved itself. *sigh* They never do, do they?

I finally settled on something that, I'm pleased to say, was not the most wrong way to do it. Not exactly a glowing review of the method, but here it is anyway: I moved all the pins down to right below the level of the bodies. I trimmed all of the skirt that stuck up to about a half inch. Then, slowly, carefully, painstakingly, and with much cursing and nursing of damaged fingers, I took the pins that were straight into the dummy and made them do the normal pin pleat holding thing. (You know, where they're just in and out through the fabric? Is there a name for that? If there is, I don't remember it. Maybe I don't actually know it. I'm a little fuzzy on which right now. For reasons entirely unrelated to sewing, it's been a hell of a week. I could really use a week's vacation somewhere with a) the perfect sewing room and b) a masseur. Preferable a Keith Hamilton Cobb look alike. If you're gonna dream, you might as well be specific, right?) Aaaannnyway, after the part where I tried to get the now boobytrapped.. er, pinned... skirt off janey, I sewed the pleats across the top, trimmed the seam allowance to within a quarter inch of it's life, then bound it with single fold bias tape. (Which I had, in matching blue. This is only because it won't show. If I had needed it for something that would show, I would only have had puce or something silly.) Then I pinned it back on janey to make sure I had done this right. Oddly, it didn't fit. That's becoming a theme with this project. The skirt had become too long. I decided to try the whole, 'things always look better in the morning' thing again. It failed. Again. However it was that originated this 'it will all be better in the morning' myth was clearly a) not a seamstress, and b) more of a morning person than I am. Fortunately, due to the miracle that is rent, I have a day job, so I don't actually have to worry about working on anything important (like my sewing) in the morning 5 days out of 7. *snort* I spent the evenings early this week working on sewing the skirt to the bodies. This was accomplished with much cursing and moaning, lots of little stitches through lining (slipping stitches through the lining of a corded bodice is, in fact, a miserable new experience), lots more little stitches to hold the skirts absolutely to the very edge of the bodies, and a lot of cats sleeping on me while I was sewing. Somewhere in there, I can home one day to find out that a cat and peed on the skirt while it was in janey, which is a new low for the little buggers. Normally, they hold off until I'm *done* sewing to do that. This is going to cut down on the number of trained gowns I make. *grumble* Now I just have to hem the skirts, and possibly put velvet banding on them. Yay!

05.18.02-05.19.02I decided, friday night, that I was going to finish the petticoat bodies. Honestly. Meant it this time. Well, almost... Basically all that was left to do was the hemming and the banding. So I cut the skirt to ground length plus an inch or two, then made banding out of velvet. The banding is made from strips of velvet (Um, maybe 5" wide? I don't know, I didn't measure. Really, as long as they all come out the same width, it's not important.) that are folded over, right sides out, then sewn together with a scant seam allowance. I thought about sewing the banding right sides together then turning it so that the seam would be hidden, but really, that's an awful lot of work and velvet does *not* turn. Sew, finally, armed with a heaping pile of velvet and covered with little velvet fuzzies from head to toe, I set after the skirt. I made the hem by sewing a row of the banding inside the skirt, seam allowance down. Then I folded the velvet over to the right side, which neatly encased both the seam allowance of the banding and the messy bit of the hem, and sewed the band down with a zig zag stitch. Then I added two rows of banding. Now, I'm a big fan of not measuring any more than I need to, so instead of measuring and marking where the banding should go, I used the previous line of banding to determine the spacing of the banding. Basically, instead of pinning a row down , I sewed it facing the wrong way, flush against the previous line of band, then turned it over and sewed the other edge down, so it was a) self marking, and b) it hit the seam allowance. Now, this is what we call cheating, and it's highly recommended. :) So, there it was, hemmed, banded, and ready to go! I was so excited, I ran upstairs to try it on. Now, I should know by now that I should never, ever try on anything with a corset when I have gas bloating. (Sharing? What, me?) It's just a bad idea. So after some puffing and panting, I had determined two things: 1) I should know better than to try anything with a corset on while bloating, and 2) getting yourself into a side lacing corset is an experience. I must get longer ribbons. It does look very nice, and since the gown is not, technically designed to close at the front I don't suppose it matters much, but I was a little annoyed. I vented and lamented at the costume gods in general, and vowed to keep working out. Er, start working out. Again. Phooey. The costume gods, with their usual sense of generosity and irony, must have heard me -- I promptly developed a stomach flu. I must learn to be more specific while talking to any form of diety.....