ACC: Petticoat Bodies

Just to show that I can in fact take a hint, I finally got motivated to wear my new petticoat bodies to fighter practice and take a few mug shots next to the gym.

Now for me to nitpick everything wrong with it:

 

The petticoat ended too big around the waist so it's sagging a bit, but it only needs a a few extra eyelets to pick up the slack.  Doing all of the eyelets to match the ones on the tabs is looking mighty tempting, just for the potential for cute little bows all around the waist.

 Also, because of the eleventh hour necessity to split it up the back, the bottom of the backmost tabs are taking way too much strain and so can't lace well.  It's kind of my own fault for having such a dramatic bit of shaping at the side back seam, but it doesn't effect the overall look too much.

Those issues aside, I am tickled to death with how it turned out.  It is exactly what I envisioned when I put the two fabrics together.  I wore it for the better part of the afternoon and there were not any screaming comfort issues.

Also, at two years after I'd finished my lovely embroidered coif, I finally have an excuse to wear it.

 As much as I love the attack laurel coif patterns, I have to admit that they are really big on me.  My hair's long but fine, so my only hope for tying it on was to do two braids over the top of my head to give the cord something to pull against.  It worked pretty well while the knot in the cord held, but it was too slippery (it's my silk tablet woven hairtie) to stay in long-term, and after a few attempts and the pictures I just stopped bothering with it.

Closing in

I haven't written in a while, but I've been the busy little seamstress.  It's just been slow going due to a lot of hand work lately.  I am very, *very* close on my petticoat bodies.  I was having a crisis for a while because I wanted to use the gold silk from the corset binding for a guard around the bottom, but was mightily paranoid about having enough.  The gold silk came to me courtesy of Mistress Bianca, and largely consisted of one or two large pieces (that I hacked into greedily for the corset binding) and several much smaller bias-cut triangles.  I ended up sewing all of the triangles together into a super bias trapezoid in an effort to eke as much length from it as possible, and I managed to get all I needed with some to spare.  The corset still needs a small amount of binding around the inside of the armhole, but I'm waiting on it until I can really test out the wear to see if there needs to be any adjustment first.  The petticoat just needs a few eyelets to fasten in the front to be functional, and I'm suddenly on the fence on whether or not I want to do eyelets all the way around the waist to correspond with those on the corset tabs.  It might just be more trouble than its worth.

I do love it though.  The gold silk looks fantastic against the green linen, and the skirt itself is very full (4x my waist measurement).  I can easily rock out the sort of wenchy bodice look in my corset-and-petticoat, and I'm very eager (after the challenge) to make an elizabethan-style jacket out of some lovely green shetland wool I got a while ago to make it respectably middle class.

With all of the effort into my underwear and with less than 100 days until the end of the challenge, I'm seriously considering calling my petticoat bodies my "intermediate" layer and foregoing the loose gown.  That way I can devote my time and attention to the blue silk gown and all of the necessary frippery without having another garment hanging over me.

Here's to pictures as soon as I finish the last bits and find my camera!

I survived hand binding!

I think the fifth sewing circle of hell is hand-binding corset tabs into eternity.

I'm pretty ashamed of the inconsistent job I did on this binding, but I grit my teeth and did it and now it's done and other than a very small amount of adjustment I'm just going to have to live with it.

I do have to give my friend Karena some mad props for saving my sanity on this.  While I was at fighter practice bitching about sewing down this stupidly frustrating binding, she offered to take it on in exchange for some consultation and drafting work on her own Elizabethan outfit.  In my weakness (I think I said something about oh please take it away just make the pain stop) I took her up on it.  She ended up getting waylaid by her own sewing deadline for a wedding, so i ended up doing most of it anyway, but it was enough that i could rediscover my motivation and push through it.  THANK YOU!  It still needs 9 sets of eyelets around the waist, a bit of boning adjustment, and binding around the armscye.  I'm waiting on that until last because I might need to make adjustments to the armscye for comfort, and I've found the best way to figure that out is to wear it for reals once or twice.

If you've been following this you might have seen that my original pattern was for a one-piece corset with lacing only up the front in similitude of the effigy bodies, but the boning made it shrink to the point where it was *really* overly busty in the front.  The back was split and eyelets added (criss-cross style instead of spiral, because I know from experience the limitations of my dresser/husband) and the effect was perfect once I gave the girls a little more room.

I also looked closely at the gold silk bits that made up the original binding, and I *think* I'll have enough for two 1" rings of guards around the bottom of the matching petticoat.  I'll be reacquainting myself with my rotary cutter shortly to find out for sure.

LJ Archives: May 2011

May 15th:  New Project:  Effigy Bodies

I started this corset ages ago, before I really got my butt in gear to finish my blue kirtle.



It's fully boned (though I suspect I'll pull some bones out of the back) with cable ties, and is made with two layers of duck canvas.  There are only a few tabs cut out now, but I will cut out a few more later to keep it from fraying too much.


And here it is with the silk taffeta outer layer pinned in place.  It looks very similar in color to the last picture, but it's actually a really great magenta color.  Since this silk was from a thrifted skirt, I had to split the large front pieces more or less in half. 



I also wasn't super happy with how the front was connecting to the side back seam when sewing it by machine, so I'm handsewing it in place.  I'm not entirely worried about making it look pretty because I'm planning to cover it with a decorative satin stitch that matches the binding.

Which will be this:


Bianca had several large pieces of this gold silk lying around, some with the bias already marked, which was awesome, considering the trouble I had finding any at the fabric store.

Yay progress!

May 15th:  Kirtle Progress:  Tablet-Woven Reinforcement

To do the braid around the neckline and lacing edge of my kirtle, I used a simple setup of 2 cards with an SZ twist, with all blue thread that matched the fashion fabric of the dress.



The cards were turned in a continuous forward motion, which built up a lot of twist in the unused warp threads.  I wanted to have the 'switch' to happen at the halfway point at the CB seam, which involved untying the end and combing out the twist.  After the halfway point the cards were switched to backward turns.



Instead of using a shuttle, I just used a needle threaded with the weft thread (the same 1000 denier silk as the warps).  I used the needle to beat the weft, and then sew it down to the edge in a circular, whipstitch motion.

Note:  This process KILLS the weft thread after about two inches of work.  I had to use very small sewing lengths.  It's also not great for your fingertips and fingernails, which will get pressed on and scratched up.

Also note that in this picture I used the backstrap method to tension it (the warps are tied to a belt around my waist).  I don't recommend it.  After a while you won't be able to reach your shed.  This happened to me, so I set up two fixed points with a doorknob and a table leg.

Also, I about wanted to kill the little hummingbirds on my protege belt, the pointy little devils.



The flash kind of ate this shot, but you can see how it turned out.  You end up with something very much like a herringbone braid that sits not really on either side of the dress, but on the very edge between the layers.

I worked this while the front seam of the skirt was still open, which worked out really well.  Corners were kind of a monster, but I found that if you work a little weaving after you hit the edge but without attaching it, you could work up a little 'slack' and sew it onto the new edge after the corner.  No pictures of it, sorry (it's very hard to convey what I want a picture of to my husband, and taking it myself just isn't going to work).  I'll try to explain it better when I teach it.

The dress is currently hanging up, waiting patiently for gravity to do its thing before I sew the hem.

May 13th:  More Tablet weaving Crazy

It seems that when most people do tablet weaving they use something like this:



It's decent.  The design dates to something like the 1930s and Angie seems to always burn through her tension bar, but it's much more portable than something like this:



These setups are pretty cool, and conceptually it's the only way to do the crazy warp-sewn braids like what I did on my blue dress (for the class I'm going to try to have the cards threaded between two clamps on a table), but even if you make it collapsible, it's not exactly portable in the grab-and-go sort of sense.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel:



Box looms.

Technically the figure here is doing narrow rigid heddle weaving, but it can also be used to good effect with tablet weaving.  The problem is trying to find one that can go double-duty.  While this one from Spanish Peacock looks awesome, it doesn't look like they're offering it right now, and there are a few other sellers/SCA merchants that look to offer something similar in the 200 dollar range, though they all seem a bit too short to get a good shed.  Alternately, there are directions available to make one from scratch, which is beyond my capabilities (I need another sub-hobby like a hole in my head) but not beyond those of someone really awesome and talented.

Perhaps someone as awesome and talented as my mom. 

Did I mention that my mom is awesome?  And occasionally reads this blog?  And has woodworking tools?  And loves me so much?

May 10th:  KA&S and Tablet Weaving

Kingdom A&S was pretty tiny this year attendance-wise, and since pretty much all of the attendees were either entrants or judges, there wasn't much going on in the afternoon.  The fabric sale fundraiser seemed to work pretty well, but it seemed all of the good stuff disappeared right off the bat, so I didn't get anything.  My blue dress was only lacking a hem, and I need to finish pressing that and do it so I can get some decent pictures, but it got decent scores -- I don't remember the rank it got but it scored somewhere around 35-39 on average (out of 50).  My embroidered coif got masterwork level, which was pretty awesome since I have a lot of "this old thing?" feelings about it at this point (all of the scores were in the 40s). 

Even sans hem, I wore the dress later in the day and got a ton of compliments on it, including one from Elizabeth lamenting that mine was bluer than hers (and next to her she looked navy).  Win!  Everyone was also super impressed with the warp-sewn tablet weaving I did around the neckline -- if we go to Uprising (kind of up in the air right now) I think I'll try to teach a class on it.

I really should get more photos of my completed work.  It's kind of embarrassing.

Tablet weaving is on my mind lately.  A gal on   is working on a fantastic tudor-era gown with tablet-woven trim, and it made me think about how we in the SCA tend to stick tablet weaving on all things Viking and not much else.  And then I stumbled upon this!  And this:

16th century silk brocade with tablet-woven edge
Philadelphia University Design Center (via A Fashionable Excuse)

I mean, I know that tablet weaving was done in the 14th, 15th, and 17th centuries, but I'd never quite made the connection that it was still kicking around in the 16th.  Plus, I got a ton of compliments on the hairtie I wore to KA&S (a very simple pink-and-white striped design in silk thread).  So...there might be more tablet weaving in my future.  Especially since I just ordered this and this for my birthday.  Yay me!

LJ Archives: January 2011

January 27:  Garb etc.

I got together with my good friend Michele (who decided to play in the SCA again after an extended break) with the intention of starting on my green linen kirtle, but decided (yet again) that I need a new corset.  It really happened when I decided that I really would try to draft a bodice pattern properly by using the sempstress body block draft and thinking that I could finally make pretty underwear that actually fits.  Now I'm sitting on a pile of red duck canvas and some magenta silk that I found ages ago and suddenly camp garb doesn't seem so important anymore.  I can't believe I keep doing that.

Anyway, here's what mine ended up looking like.  It took the better part of an afternoon, but it seems to work pretty well.



And here's my first attempt at a corset pattern that kinda resembles the effigy bodies.  Due to the brightness, you can kinda just barely make out the places I've marked out for tabs -- each one is 2.5 inches wide, and extends past the waist line for about 3 inches.



I started thinking that the back piece looked really weird, so I tried again with a little different placement of the side back seam:



I'm not sure what difference it would make between the two -- theoretically it could, since the angle of the boning would be different as it approaches the side back.  #2 will likely be a bodice pattern regardless.

In other news, I'm making decent progress on my handsewn 15th century kirtle, and I'll be posting pics hopefully soon.