Autumn Zebra

Primarily for 1820-1890. Books Everyday Dress 1650-1900 Elizabeth Ewing The Victorians and Edwardians at Work John Hannavy Fabric of Society - A Century of People and Their Clothes 1770-1870 Jane Tozer & Sarah Levitt Working Class Costume from Sketches of Characters William Johnstone White 1818 Working Dress: A History of Occupational Clothing Diana De Marly Museums with some relevant online stuff Manchester Galleries Collection search Manchester Galleries " Collection Themes " includes a "Clothes for Work" section The Museum of English Rural Life has a lot about smock-frocks, sun-bonnets and the Women's Land Army and a little about other things - Collection Search People's Collection Wales Collections (use "Discover" box to search or look through the pre-made collections) has a lot of prints of Welsh 19th Century people, and a few photos of extant clothing. They may or may not be working class, but they look like "normal people...

I am so excited that tomorrow I can go to the university library to copy out information on how to make some Victorian combinations, as these will be the first item in my bicycling outfit I am going to make. Maybe there will be some bloomers or something in there too. I thought about doing a divided skirt, but I've decided to do wool bloomers, a woollen wide-lapelled jacket, combinations and a button-up pseudo corset thing. The cycling outfit came out of my wanting to make some "reform" clothing, so I'm also going to do a divided petticoat and some non-cycling late-Victorian or Edwardian clothes too. There's two books in the city about the women's reform clothing movement from 1850 onwards, and one has been out for the last 3 weeks and the other is at at the university library. I've applied for a library card, but they haven't sent it to me yet; maybe they lost my application :( I was going to read the book before making the clothes, but I got bored wa...

Here are some photos of me and G at the Oamaru Victorian fair. In my case, the bodice needs some boning which I did not have time to add before going. Doesn't my darling look lovely!! I didn't make any of his clothes. He bought the hat while we were there.

It's not finished yet.

Is it part 1? Or part 2? Or 3? I can't remember if I wrote about it before. In any case, I was going to take pictures of the draping of the jacket. But, I only ended up taking two pictures, one of the back and one of the front. Draping is where you get a piece of material, and lay it over the dress dummy or whatever, and then make the pattern by drawing lines on it and cutting it where you need to to get the shape you want. Here are my pictures. I did the back first, first the centre back piece, then the one to the side of it, then the one to the side of that. With each piece, I pinned the material on and drew lines where I wanted it to stop, or where it connected to another piece, or where it would need to be cut in order to make it lie flat. The front piece came after, but I did actually then change it completely later. The black lines are the seam allowance lines, waist line, darts, and where to cut for the lower edge, the cut out front, etc. The problem is that although it may ...

I think this will probably be mostly pictures of the finished item, but I shall try to write some details. Earlier in the process, I had made a black rectangle and put darts in it at the top to form the base for the bustle - the darts help make it fit better to a butt. I just did this on the dress dummy, but if you didn't have one, just chuck in the same darts as in a fitted skirt, or make it up. Then, I tried to calculate how big the stuffed channels should be which you can do by getting some material and pinning it on how you think it should go and then taking it off and measuring the material. Or you could make it up. I also wanted the material to be gathered horizontally, because this makes it curve as the gathered bit is longer than the base material it is sewn onto. I thought if it curved by itself that would be good as I wouldn't have to think about how to create a curved shape. Once again, either try some gathering or just make it up to work out how wide to make the mat...

The description of the bustel I decided to make, said it had a cushion in it that could be used separately as smaller bustle pad as well. So I made a cushion. It's stuffed with scraps of material. I put buttons on the back of it, which will attach it to the main bustle and also to a waistband I made to wear it by itself, as mentioned. To make it, I had already cut a piece of material to be the base of the main bustle, and I had that pinned on the dress dummy and bascially thought, hmmm, how big should the cushion be as compared to that? The yellow bit in the next picture is the waistband with flap to attach the cushion to. This is it without the 3 buttonholes. And that's that. It actually works really really well on its own. Even though it is ugly and boring and silly to look at :(. It is bigger and better than that other white one I made ages ago and restuffed recently, so far more suitable for my existing costume. The old one would be ok however for the middle Victorian more ...

I wanted to make a larger bustle for Victorian dresses requiring more of a "bum". I got lots of pictures of those available from the pattern companies and a few I found on online auction websites. I am going to make a wired one at some point, but I thought it might be quicker to go with this one first: (The image is from this great page comparing the different bustle patterns from various companies .) G remarked that the bustles in general looked like caterpillars crawling over someone's bum! To me this obviously meant that I should try and make MY bustles look like caterpillars. I did a bit of caterpillar research. (Click on the image for a fascinating larger image) There were a few that I liked - well actually I liked all those pictured which is why I drew them- but I thought the easiest one that adapted best to the medium was simply the striped one in the lower left corner. I have noted there that the orange is really more yellow :). This page contains a picture of bo...

Ok, I'm bored with the hem now, so I am going to post a boring blog entry - because yesterday was Wednesday and the blog schedule is now supposed to be sensible entries on Wednesday and Sunday. I probably won't do more on the hem today because I am sick and have to go to bed early. This is the bustle pad I made ages ago. See how sad and flat looking it is? Now, this is the bustle as it is now! I took the binding off and stuffed it more. Exciting, eh? It is now a lot better and will make more of a difference, so that's good. Yeah I know, the pictures don't say much. But it looks so much different in real life. Now it is all big and puffy... I think I should have stuffed it more to make it even more firm though, but the stuffing was starting to make it curl up and I didn't want it to curl too much. Oh well, I can always do it again if it gets flat again.

People often ask this question, and I don't really have any idea. I'm hoping to remember to keep track of the time it takes to make the next one. The current one took 6 weeks of almost all of my free time however, which is most of the time not used up by working, making and eating dinner, going out for lunch on Saturday and visiting my parents for Sunday lunch. The corset took half of the 6 weeks. After I finished that I spent 1 day of a weekend playing computer games instead :) The chemise and the bustle pad took one evening each (3-4 hours). Stuff to do with hats took one weekend I suppose, because most of it didn't work out and there was a lot of mucking about. So not that long. But I didn't do much else. Theoretically without having to make the underwear again, it would only take 2-3 weeks to make another outfit, but for some reason that doesn't seem very likely. You can get a lot done in an evening of about 3 hours though.

I don't think I ever posted pictures of the whole Victorian dress I made. So here are some, finally had some taken, and with a digital camera so I can get them onto the computer. I imagine that if you click on them you get to see the picture larger. (For information on my making this, click on the tag "Victorian" to get tagged entries.)

Here's a link to a post I did in a LiveJournal community about the Victorian corset I made last year, in case you are interested again for some reason. The Link. Here's the best bit of that entry anyway, a new pic.

And what do we have today? Two victorian dresses from the Antique and Vintage Dress Gallery website. Cocoa Dress First we have the cocoa dress, main page found here . This doesn't look like "cocoa" to me, but whatever. The key cool things on this dress I think are: the lace trim - good idea to trim a Victorian bodice you might be making that is looking plain... those cool bits over the hips that look like they might be joined onto the bodice. Unfortunately we don't have a straight-on front view to see what they look like from that perspective the interesting pull-through puff sleeve tops the funny folded pleat-like add-ons around the bottom of the skirt. I think it's a bow box-pleat or something We also get to see what one type of Victorian buttons look like, which is useful. Interlude Looking at antique clothes in auctions seems to be useful for two main reasons. One, most other sources of information seem to only give a very general average of what was worn in ...

Yesterday I finished making something, sort of, but it is no good so I haven't finished it properly, needs shoulder straps. Later I will try and sort it out, when I have time. Also, I want to sort out that polka dot skirt so it doesn't look so odd if I don't wear a long top. When I can be bothered. Got to get organised making wedding stuff. Enlarged a new pattern to try last night, need to get some material to try it, but might not have time to go today - have an appointment so that will mostly use up my spare lunch time. I could just go in the weekend but I want it now! On to the main event. The best antique dress One day, I want to make this. Probably over a period of two years so I don't have to rush or anything and don't have to spend ALL my time on it. Spending ALL my time on the previous Victorian outfit took only about 6-8 weeks I think, so even with multitudes of other projects it shouldn't really take 2 years. Link to pictures of the dress.... But I can...

Listening to: Metallica- Whiskey, Fuel, Memory Remains Since there are so many pictures today, I have made them small. Click to see them bigger. Hopefully it all makes sense. Testing First I got my length of material and tested out the basic idea for the skirt. The plan was just to drape the skirt on the form and cut the pieces, rather than, say use the petticoat pattern again, modified a bit to be closer fitting. (I mention this because the final skirt pieces, eventually, ended up being the same as the petticoat pattern, albeit closer fitting....). Picture of material pinned on to the form in the basic idea, roughly pleated at the back. You can see in this picture that there should be a front piece, ending at the front-side where the waist-band dips in; a side piece going from that vertical line where the front piece would end to where the pleats start, curving from the waist out towards the back and then down; a back piece, probably mostly a rectangle. What I decided at the time was ...

Another quickly made item in my Victorian era outfit was the chemise. It is probably not really historically accurate at all, but was designed in my usual method of thinking for these things. I looked at some pictures, couldn't really find pictures from the correct few years, found some general descriptions, made something up, simplified things, had various disasters, made some more stuff up and finished it. The bits I knew: chemise should be relatively short (knee to mid-calf?) no sleeves square or round neckline (maybe v-neck but this was only specifically talked about for later years) lace is common decoration generally closely fitted because bodices became more fitted and slim at this time So these basic, general elements were preserved in my version. Then I just had to make it up. I used my general torso pattern, drafted from the instructions in my pattern making book, intending to keep the vertical darts at the waist, but removing the one in the shoulder at the back. Actually...