The Courting Dress: This
dress was based essentially on the Holbein portrait of Lady Guildford.
It was the first dress I made for my wife after we started dating.
My material choice, as usual, was guided by frugality. I was able
to find a medium weight upholstery with a nice diamond pattern
for a dollar a yard, so that's what I used. The bodice lining
is a fairly heavy cotton and the fur is fake.
I opted to close this dress by way of hooks on the
left side. It made for a very nice look with no laces showing,
but it was completely unforgiving of any change in its wearer.
Needless to say, this was the first and last time I tried this
option. The sleeves are narrow at the shoulder, which makes getting
in and out of this dress something of a challenge. I've only had
a couple of opportunities to make this sort of dress, and I haven't
been able to find a way around that problem yet. The skirt is
conical in front, rectangular with box pleats in back.
The greatest success of this dress was the corset that
I made for it. It has a wooden busk in the center front and tightly
packed "reeds" in the rest of the front. Having no access
to actual reeds, I took a friend's advice and cut the straw off a cheap
broom. It worked amazingly well, providing the required support
without being too rigid or uncomfortable.
The Wedding Dress: The
first dress was enough of a success that I convinced her to marry
me. This dress was based on a Raphael portrait, again fairly loosely.
I actually spent money to get the material I wanted for this one,
choosing a dark green velvet for the dress and gold satin for
the sleeve linings. I think it was lined with the same cotton
as the red dress.
This dress laces along the side back seams like the
Eleanor of Toledo dress in Patterns of Fashion . I have a depressingly
small costuming library, so the few books I have get a lot of
use. Achieving the profile I wanted for this dress required no
extra support.
The Comfy Dress: This
dress is not as challenging pattern-wise as the previous ones, but it
was a very useful project all the same. My wife isn't nearly the
clothes horse I am and generally prefers more simple clothes,
mostly T-tunic style dresses. After the recent birth of our first
child, she realized that nursing in a T-tunic was a difficult
propostion. I decided to make a loose T-tunic style dress with
buttons down the front to suit her new requirements.
This was my first major button project since I decided to give up
machine sewing, so it was quite good practice. I used cheap plastic
pony beads covered in the same fabric as the dress as buttons.
Once I got in the swing of it, making buttons and buttonholes
by hand was really pretty easy and less frustrating than dealing
with machine buttonholes.
Big Blue: This
project was a stitch-for-stitch steal from Patterns of Fashion, down
to the pocket bag in the pluderhosen. Even with such a good resource,
the pattern was fairly challenging to alter to fit me. Some of
the construction methods I used seem ludicrous to me in hindsight,
but all in all it turned out reasonably well.
I learned that using hook-and-eye closures on a garment with lots
of metal bobbin lace is a recipe for disaster when getting in
and out of it.
The Zebra Suit: Many years and many projects after my first
doublet and pluderhosen, I went back to see if I could do it any
better. The basic pattern was mostly the same as before, with
a different treatment on the panes of the pluderhosen and no shoulder
wings. At this point, however, I was recently unemployed and had
no means to go out and buy velveteen like I had used before.
Digging around in my fabric, I came up with a lightweight off-white
cotton and a huge spool of black cord that I'd picked up at the
discount fabric store. After a little experimentation, I found
that the only way to get the cord to go on straight and in even
rows was to put it on by hand. I essentially used a back stitch
that went through the cord and both layers of the doublet material.
I had originally only planned on a few lines of cord on the doublet
body, but soon it became a major undertaking. Early on it occured
to me that if I was going to spend hours and hours putting trim
on by hand, it would be a shame to do the rest of the sewing by
machine.
As the project progressed, I was amazed by how much easier and more
effective it was to do things by hand. I had such better control
over each stitch that I hardly ever had to take anything back
apart. Working layers together and binding the edges was far less
mind-bending than trying to figure out how I would turn strange
geometries inside-out. When I got to the point of putting in lacing
holes, I kicked myself for waiting so long to start doing them
"the right way". In the end, the only down sides I saw to sewing
exclusively by hand were increased thread usage and time. The
doublet and pluderhosen took four weeks of full-time sewing, though
the first two and a half weeks or so were spent just putting on
trim. In addition to feeling better about myself and less seam
ripping, I was also free of the sewing machine itself. I could
work in any room of the house, at meetings, outside, or wherever.
