Monat: September 2023

As already mentioned in my last CADD-post, I started sewing on a lingerie dress made from umpteen metres of ivory batiste and my wedding cape veil.

You have seen me working on my underwear (Pattern Truly Victorian TVE02), only mentioning the petticoat (Truly Victorian TV170, View 4) in the passing. Here it is, worn. This outfit is more or less a „three cheers to the sewing machine gods“, as it heavily depended on two feet. One: my 4 mm rolled hem foot, that already came with my Pfaff. My wife just had bought a ruffler foot for our Bernina and I would have been so lost without that one.

The upper part of the petticoat has a seam length of about 2,5 metres, that‘s feasible. The flounce has a seam length of a little more than 5,5 metres. Sewing the tucks was a lot of work and just ruffling it up automatically made me dance for joy. The true test of my patience would have been the bottom ruffle though. The fabric strip was 11,2 metres long, hemming it was… taking long. Ruffling it together to the 5,5 metres was also taking long, but when I imagined doing all that the old-fashioned way? It took waaaaay shorter.

The skirt itself (Originally Truly Victorian TV 247 with an added back panel to Frankenstein it into a fantail) had the optimum length to go over the petticoat when hemmed with my rolled hem foot.

The blouse again was a Frankensteined project, I used Black Snail Patterns #0314, the 1890ies shirtwaist as I had used it before to make up something Edwardian-ish and I knew it would make an acceptable pigeon breast. As the pattern is front-closing I had to use it backwards, meaning I cut the front in one piece instead of two and split the back up to be able to add a button panel. That, as strange as it sounds, was the easy part. Now came adding the yoke from my cape veil and then carefully cutting away the batiste under it. All done by hand… It took me all of three days, but the finished blouse is well worth it.

Add a dip-waist belt made from the pattern in Izabela Pitchers‘ Victorian dressmaker and voilà, there we are.

The hat is the same as for the bicycling costume, only dressed up differently, the gloves are vintage, the parasol is an astonishingly well kept original, the cover needed only minor repairs.

I barely blogged about the making of these clothes, they were a part of the pre-CoCo sewing frenzy.

Actually, it all started with the boots. The American Duchess “Cambridge” boots cried “STEAMPUNK” so loudly I simply had to have them for our planned steampunk outfit.

As they were described as bicycling boots, I ventured closer into having a look at bicycling fashion at the turn of the century, found the Bikes and Bloomers project and then stumbled into just the perfect black, white and blue houndstooth fabric at our local fabric store. On the next visit to our usual Stuttgart hunting ground I found a perfectly matching deep teal wool for a matching coat.

And there we went. Bicycle Bloomers (Black Snail Patterns #0216) in blue and a sports blouse (Black Snail Patterns #0614) in a wonderful thin white cotton with thin blue and black pinstripes came first, then the waistcoat (Reconstructing History RH942), made from the houndstooth. In the next step I made up the button-up skirt following a self-drafted pattern based on the Bikes and Bloomers pdf and a necktie.

Costume College, where I wore the outfit first, proved that my guesstimate of the necessary length of button-up-strip was off by at least ten centimetres. Back home again I swapped it for a newly made one, and now the length was fine. At Costume College I had a workshop with Shelly Jackson from the Clockwork Monster where I sewed up a boater hat with a houndstooth hatband, meant to go with the costume.

This photo was made during the first outing at home.

And here you see the skirt in action ad Bad Nauheim.