Apron, c.1952

 I decided an apron would useful in my modern kitchen, and so decided to make vintage one. As you do.

Since it's not for living history use, I just pulled fabric scraps out of my stash rather than worrying about accurate prints.

Scrap fabric. Finding two that didn't clash horribly was a challenge.

 

The illustration.

For a pattern, I went with the apron from the Haslan Books of Drafts No. 8 Lingerie (c.1952) No actually pattern instructions are included, so I cut the fabric as indicated, and just sort of pieced it together. I opted to use double layers on the waistband, bib, and straps, which allows most of the raw edges to be encased. I felled the seam on the lower section which joins the blue trim to the print.  The back isn't show in the pattern, so I simply joined the straps to the waistband; I'm satisfied with how it's working so far.

Finished apron.

Cotton Paisley Dress, c.1873

And now for the final dress from railroad living history day: my 1873 printed cotton. My character, Mrs. Mary Ann Montgomery, was living in railroad camps on the frontier, and recounting her travel exploits by train, boat and horseback, so I wanted to give her an identifiable 1870s outfit, which would also be practical and washable by the standards of the time.

A dark calico in a fun pattern seemed just about right.

I previously posted some of the original garments I consulted for this design, as well as the corset, bustle pad and petticoat used to give it its shape.

As previously noted on the petticoat, I used the gored skirt instructions from The Complete Dressmaker (1875). The bodice and sleeve are draped, using my 1850s methods out of The Dressmaker's Guide, but with an eye towards the bodice shapes shown in The Complete Dressmaker. The upper skirt/tunic is taken from an original in Patterns of Fashion II.

More bustled overskirt, because it's my favorite part of the dress.

 

Although it's the same pattern as the en tablier over-skirt from 1865 Lincoln Funeral dress, I handled the overskirt a bit differently. Last time, I gathered it vertically along the seams to get that mid-1860s 'swag' effect. For a more 1870s bustle, I followed the original shaping this time: the back lengths have three pleats in the side seam that joins the front, and then a series of five tapes at tacked at key points one the back width and then attached at the waist.

The secret to cool bustle effects: tacking things to twill tape.

This whole dress is in two pieces: the gored underskirt is set into its own waistband (flat along the front gore, pleated in the back), and overskirt is joined directly onto the bodice's waistband.

 

I technically did not put fasteners on the bodice, but instead used pins to close it.. After recent difficulties with my brown 1850s calico, I'm not feeling charitable towards books-and-eyes, so the pins will stay for now. Instead, my alteration priority is to add a pocket.

1870s Cotton Print Dress Research

Still on the train projects, specifically my living history outfit. This one was almost weirdly hard to research: a cotton print dress for c.1873. I did find some written instructions, such as the statement that plain cotton should be made with no ruffles or trim when intended for housework

The shape which I wanted for this dress is the layered 'tunic' (bodice joined to a half-length skirt) over a matching skirt/petticoat, as seen in this silk example:

Dress, c.1870, in the Met. Conveniently with each piece photographed separately.

Similar dresses, in cotton, appear in the July 1871 issue of Demorest's Monthly Magazine:

Cambric and striped percale cottons, per the descriptions.

Cotton walking dress, c.1871. VAM.

 

 

The material I have in mind is not a sheer, but I will include this lovely example just because there are so few cotton dresses to look at: 

Sheer dress, c.1872. The Met.

The Met also has a couple of cotton wrappers or morning dresses from this period what are made of more substantial cotton prints, like this:

 

Morning dress, c.1872-4. The Met.

There is no fiber content listed for this dress, but I find the simple lines of it (if not the exact sleeve shape) useful for envisioning the plain dress described in the magazine. For the record, the skirt appears backwards in this photograph:

 

Dress, c.1868-72. VAM.

Where the previous dress may be a little early for this project—the target year being 1873—this last dress is verging on being too late, with an estimated date of 1880. However, it's the dress most like my intended project (a plain tunic and matching skirt out of an opaque printed cotton), so I think it worth including. If I'm careful to keep to 1873 norms with the shoulder seams, waist position, sleeve shape, something like this would do nicely:

Dress, c.1880. LACMA.

Gored Petticoat, c.1873

Over the horsehair bustle pad goes a gored petticoat. Per a note in Demorest's (1875), the order for skirt supports is a short underskirt, then the tournure, then the upper petticoat, and finally the dress. This upper petticoat is meant to be cut along the same lines as the skirt which will be worn over it. Various sources explain the necessity for gored skirts to be worn over gored petticoats (examples from 1865 and 1873, and even some doll dress instructions from 1872).

For this dress and petticoat, I used the gored skirt instructions in The Complete Dressmaker (1875), using only 1 gore to each side on account of the fabric width. I ended up making the petticoat 4" longer at the back than at the front, allowing for the bustle. The skirt is attached flat to its waistband along the front panel and the start of the side gores; the rest is knife-pleated, meeting in a double box pleat at the center back. If I had more time, I meant to gauge this back section, but I'm satisfied with how the pleats have held shape, and don't plan to change them.

Horsehair Bustle Pad, c.1875

And we're back to the never-ending railroad event costumes. I already posted my bustle research, and opted to try copying a c.1875 horsehair bustle pad from LACMA's collection for wearing in my c.1873 outfit. 

Working only from images of the antique garments, I had to invent my own sewing process. 

I started by using the given center back length of the LACMA bustle (15.75"), and scaling the pieces of my bustle to that. For material, I went with a 20 3/4" hair canvas, which has a cotton warp and horsehair weft, making it the closest fabric I could find to a true 'crinoline'. To use this efficiently, I cut whole widths of fabric for the three ruffles. with the hair running horizontally along each. The base piece is 14.75" x 10"; I estimated the tape waistband at 1" wide, and assumed that counted into the total figure. The ruffles I took at about 3.5" each, with the 'puff' at the top 4" (7.5" for the whole piece).

I started by binding the lower edge of each of the 3 ruffles (using a 1" cotton twill tape), and doing the same for three sides of the base layer (the top edge being left raw for now).

It started easy enough.

All the pieces bound.

At this point, I also ran a hand running stitch across the largest ruffle, dividing it into the upper puff and lower ruffle.

The edge of the ruffles if not visible in that example piece, but after looking through all the originals I could find, it appeared that there were two main options: binding the ruffles and base together, or folding the raw edges of the ruffles in. I opted for the later. Starting from the bottom, I applied the right-hand side of the lowest ruffle, putting it right-side-to-right on the base, on sewing through both layers on the wrong side. The second ruffle got the same treatment, under-lapping the bottom ruffle slightly, and then the top ruffle as well. To get some height in the puff, I put three small tucks in the puff as I sewed the side seams.

Starting from the bottom. The raw edge if just turned over.

i

Up to the pleats on the puff.

I was able to repeat this on the left side (there's a fair amount of give in the ruffles). I then put the bone casings on the back. In retrospect, I should have done this first, back when I binding the edges, but I didn't realize the import of the named-but-unseen boning until I started trying to gather the ruffle.

It was possible to fold the ruffles out of the way since they only stitched at the sides.

Without inserting the bones (leaving one short side open on each casing), I pleated the bottom ruffle and machine-stitched it down to the base. I hand tried to gather the ruffles, but found the material much too stiff. Even with the small pleats, it was hard to get the fabric laying neatly. I repeated with the middle ruffle, with the gathering stitch between the puff and ruffle, and with the top of the puff. On this last, I didn't fold over the raw edge, but basted the base and puff raw edge on top of eachother.

Stitching down ruffle #2. Working bottom to top allows more maneuvering room.

To finish, I took a piece of 1" twill tape, lined up the center to the raw upper edge, and used it to bind off the top of the base and the puff. The long tails become the ties on the garment. Finally, I inserted the three 9.5" bones into the casings, and stitched them closed.

What happens without boning.

Completed bustle pad. Only slightly flattened from sitting on it.

 

All told, I'm quite satisfied with how this bustle performs. It's quite light, mostly keeps it shape, and gives my dress the distinct bustle shape I was looking for. If I were making it again, I'd add the bone casings in the initial step, go right to pleating the ruffles, and make the top puff about 1" long (also giving the ruffles a little more overlap in the process) to it looks more like the proportions in the original.

Evening Dress Ideas, c.1903

Another event-based deadline, so it's time to post some of the research and inspirations.

For this one, I need a fashionable evening dress for a c.1903 dinner.

Of course, I quite spoiled by all the specimens available at the Met. There's a number of sleeve options (elbow, short, very short length), of which I'm leaning towards the elbow-length sleeves of layered net.

Evening Dress, 1901-1905, from the Met.

 

There's also this dress with its more dramatic net sleeves:

Lucie Monnay Evening Dress, 1902-3. From the Met.

 

I like this dress's use of striped fabric to add color, texture, and contour along the skirt gores.

This next one is definitely worth clicking through for the full view: the embellishments are heavily layered on, adding more contrasting textures than colors. You can also see the train on the skirt, and the ruffles supporting it from the underside.

Evening dress, c.1900. From LACMA.

 

I wish VAM had more images to accompany this c.1902 evening dress, which has a very detailed description listing all the trims and decorative techniques used on it: self-fabric tucks, embroidered net, silver & pearl embroidery, and net insertion.

Backview of a c.1902 evening dress at VAM.

Though I think this one from c.1900-1905 is closer to what I might be able to attempt in the available time, given that there's apparently little trim on the bodice or skirt, with the embellishments largely confined to the net sleeves.

Taken all together, there are some key details I'll want to include to make my dress read as 1903:

• Gored skirts with a train, with minimal bulk through the hips
• Soft fullness at the front waist (hint of a pigeon-breast shape)
• Wide neckline out to the shoulder, fairly square
  
• Diaphanous mid-length sleeves
• Pastel palette, especially tending to pale yellows and pinks
  
• Fussy layering of trims, with different textures [especially with heavy beading/embroidery/sequins on very light fabrics like net and chiffon]
  

Pattern Resource from LACMA

This dolman is now on my to-make list,
despite having no 1885 outfit to wear it with.

I love the photographs on  LACMA's online collection, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they have free pattern diagrams available. Undertaking the Making: LACMA Pattern Project has 13 garments with detailed descriptions of the textiles and construction methods, along with line-drawings of the component pieces.

Bustles, 1870s

Still working my way through the railroad event costumes. My own character was from 1873, so among my other accoutrements, I needed to make a bustle. I wanted something distinct enough to say '1870s bustle period' but also small enough to be practical under a simple cotton dress (without a train).

So, I thought it was meet to check out the options.

We have some lovely transitional hoops which have that bustle shape at the top back, like so:

Bustle cage from LACMA c.1862-1870.
A little early for my purposes

The V&A has several lovely examples of this style in various shapes. If I needed evening wear, I'd probably try for something like this (or else a covered version like these):

"Princess Louise Jupon" 1871, VAM.

 

Fortunately, there are also a plethora of shorter bustle options in various materials:

Evolved skeleton skirt. Bustle, c.1872-4. MET.

 

Fabric and steel "crinolette", c.1870. VAM. A similar one from LACMA.

Down-filled bustle pad, c.1875. VAM. [Another.]

Not sure about the shaping, but this one would be easy to make.
Bustle, 1870-5. LACMA.

But I think my favorite might be the horsehair pads. They come in several variations with ruffles and puffs, and combinations thereof:

The winner. Bustle, c.1875. LACMA.

 

Demorest's Monthly Magazine also shows several varieties of horsehair bustles in July 1875, including a long version worn under a trained gown, and three of the shorter ones.

Short horsehair bustle #2.

HFF 6.5: Faux Food

The Challenge: Faux Foods. Try a recipe or use an ingredient that imitates, replaces, or tastes/looks like a different food. 

The Recipe: I wanted to try a "mock gooseberry fool" alias "spring cream" alias "rhubarb fools", but there was to be had so early in the season in this clime (no, not even in the frozen section of the grocery store). Next time. 

 

Instead, at the last minute, I substituted jumbles from Eliza Leslie's Sevety-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats. I selected this recipe, intending to use the suggested substitution of lemon essence for rosewater, only to find myself out of lemon essence and substituting lemon rind for the substitute lemon essence. 

JUMBLES.Three eggs. Half a pound of flour, sifted. Half a pound of butter. Half a pound of powdered loaf sugar. A table spoonful of rose water. A nutmeg, grated. A tea spoonful of mixed mace and cinnamon. 

Stir the sugar and butter to a cream. Beat the eggs very light. Throw them all at once into the pan of flour. Put in at once the butter and sugar, and then add the spice and rose water. If you have no rose water, substitute six or seven drops of strong essence of lemon, or more if the essence is weak. Stir the whole very hard with a knife. Spread some flour on your paste board and flour your hands well. Take up with your knife a portion of the dough and lay it on the board. Roll it lightly with your hands into long thin rolls, which must be cut into equal lengths, curled up into rings, and laid gently into an iron or tin pan, buttered, not too close to each other, as they spread in baking. Bake them in a quick oven about five minutes, and grate loaf sugar over them when cool.

The Date/Year and Region: 1830, Boston

How Did You Make It: In the period kitchen, which is usually fun and always an adventure. I started by creaming the butter and sugar (half pound of each, the sugar measured on the beam balance), which on this cold damp day meant 'beating the hard butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until they incorporated'. I then beat the three eggs (yokes and whites) with a birch whisk in a tapered redware bowl. I then combined all three, adding a half "teaspoon" each of powdered mace and cinnamon, and grating about 1/3 of a nutmeg (because I've been having trouble sourcing them and was running low). I grated the lemon (basically zesting it) with a replica tin rasp, and added it as well.

 

This made a really thin, sticky dough (perilously close to a batter). The first four jumbles, I tried rolling them in flour to make rings, but they just weren't looking nice. At my friend's suggestion, I then tried piping the rest of the dough (which made lovely rings on the tin, at least). I baked them in a slower-than-desired oven (cast iron wood-burning stove), on a replica tin baking sheet, which was buttered per the instructions.

 

The jumbles spread out paper-thin while baking. Though they tasted fine, they did not look well at all.  

Time to Complete: Unsure, as I was in the period kitchen without a clock. Less than 3 hours, if only because I know I spent more than an hour fighting the stove before any cooking started.

Total Cost: $1 for lemon, other ingredients on hand

How Successful Was It?: Tasted fine, but the texture was a mess. The lemon worked well with the spices, and none were overwhelming. Our verdict after the first pan was that more flour was needed, but we were so short on time that I just decided to bake what we had left (and still ended up throwing out the last pan worth of batter, because there just wasn't time). I'd like to revisit this recipe with more flour at some point in the future--I think that I need to really work a lot more flour in during the rolling step.

How Accurate Is It?: There were lots of little details here which got me closer to 'accurate' than usual. I used eggs from a friend's heritage-breed chickens (closer to the right size), a beam balance (for weighing ingredients), tried the divided spoon method to measure the spices, got to grate my substitute lemon rind on a reproduction tin grater (which works REALLY WELL), baked the jumbles on a reproduction tin cookie sheet, and did all of this in a (freezing cold) period kitchen with a wood-burning stove.

Jumbles. Very flat jumbles. Edible, though.

Book Review: Tudor Children

Cover for Tudor Children by Nicholas Orme

Medieval Children by Nicholas Orme is one of my favorite resource, so I was very excited to hear that he had a new book taking that research into the 16th century.

Like its predecessor, Tudor Children uses literary, documentary, and artistic sources to explore the lives and experiences of children in England during the Tudor Period (c.1485-1603). As Orme observes, few records made by children survive to reveal their lived experiences. Instead, small details must be drawn out of schoolbooks, memorial brasses, manuscript illuminations, popular plays, religious tracts, and occasionally court cases.

The eight chapters of this book (230 pages) are divided thematically into subjects such as religion, education, and recreation. The arrangement is also roughly chronological, beginning with birth/infancy, and ending with a chapter on adolescence. Although religion has its own chapter--dealing with baptism, religious instruction, and evidence for/against children's participation in church services--it also forms a frequent demarcation throughout the book. Every chapter includes some mention of the changes between pre-reformation and post-reformation England, whether in the ceremonies surrounding a birth, or in the reduced number of children's choirs in England after 1549.

A lot of the pre-1549 material is similar to Medieval Children, which makes sense, though it did give me a bit of deja vu. There is some very interesting historiographic discussion of how 16th century sources differ from earlier ones, including the effect of humanist education practices on surviving schoolboy writings. The book is also lavishly adorned with full-color images taken from contemporary art, such as that shown on the cover.

I do have one quibble with the research: on page 43-44, discussing children's clothing, the author states that drawers were worn, and elsewhere that their presence "can be assumed." This remark accompanies quotations listing the clothing provided for specific 16th century children, with drawers not included in the lists. I'm not sure where this came from; the main source cited for the topic of clothing, Anne Buck's Children's Costume in England, doesn't mention drawers before the late 17th century or braies after the 14th. It's a minor issue, but I don't like unsupported assertions of fact.

Despite that one point, I found this book enjoyable and informative, with sufficient citations and extensive quotations from period sources. The writing style is very readable by academic standards, though a step or two more formal than most popular history books.

 

Score: 5 stars.

Accuracy: High. Many period sources are quoted, and the book uses full academic citations with end notes. My one complaint in regards rigor is detailed above.

Strongest Impression: A solid overview of many aspects of daily-life, based on reputable primary sources. I'd highly recommend this volume for anyone interpreting the 16th or early 17th centuries, since we all were children at one point.

Cotton Print Dress, c.1895

Another for the railroad event. I fear the picture doesn't do justice to its amazing puffed sleeves. I like to think Anne Shirley would approve.

 

Cotton print dress with yoked bodice.

For this dress, we were trying to outfit a female telegrapher of c.1895. The goal was a washable, practical garment for a working woman, while remaining identifiably 1890s. 

I draped the bodice and sleeve, using a narrow coat sleeve as the base, and more-or-less adapting my 1850s methods to the diagrams given in Bertha Banner's 1898 Household Sewing with Home Dress Making. The sleeve puff is copied from an 1890s dress in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 2, though without the paper interlining which made the original nigh-spherical. The skirt was cut following instructions for goring skirts from Jeanette Davis's The Elements of Modern Dressmaking (1896) in conjunction with the description of a print "housemaid skirt" from Banner. The dress is worn over the corset previously mentioned, and a gored petticoat, which I neglected to photograph. The petticoat is cut along the same lines as the dress skirt.

1578 Plague Book

Found this in my bookmarks, with the ominous date of 2020, and thought it would be fun to share: instructions from Elizabeth I's government about controlling the spread of Plague. This book, in the library of the University of Virginia, is currently thought to have been printed in 1578 or 1579.

 

 

Title page from the Plague Book, c.1578.

I may need to think of a way to work this into street bit for Faire...

Corset, c.1895

Another for the railroad living history event. I needed to outfit our telegrapher for the 1890s. Unfortunately, my own corset for this approximate time was 1) barely started, and 2) going to be just a bit small for the lady in question. Instead, I ended up scaling up my custom pattern, and then fitting it to the volunteer. She found it comfortable, and I found it easy to drape a toile over, so I'm calling this a win-win situation.

 

The corset is from a double-layer of coutil, which I sourced from Renaissance Fabrics. The busk and 1/4" steel boning (and pair of spiral bones for the front curve) were purchased at Wawak. The grommets are from the two gross I purchased at my favorite neighborhood hardware store many years ago (RIP Hardwicks). Self-fabric binding.

Original: 17th Century Printed Petticoat

 Dutch petticoat from the second quarter of the 18th century; the fabric is a printed cotton made in India.

Petticoat, c.1725-49, VAM.

While there's unfortunately only the one photograph, the magnified view is excellent: you can see every detail of the intricate four-color floral pattern. The fabric is described as glazed, and from the image, the petticoat appears to be faced in a plain white (possibly also glazed) fabric, with a narrow tape waistband.