Robe à la Française - the hat + final result

Previous:Robe a la francaise - dress

So, last post was all about the dress but while I made the dress, I also made myself an tricorn hat. I found really nice hat off the internet:

http://www.victorianhatter.com/page-2-tricorn-hats/
 & etsy store

 But I was not very eager of spending again so much money on the costume that already had required so much money. So I thought.. I will try myself to make hat similar like that. It is not going to be easy and I have no idea how to do it but let's try.

I ordered myself really cheap (I think it was 5-10$) pirate hat thing from ebay and then started to work on it. I used the same green cordon as I used on the dress on the sides of the hat. To stitch it into the place was many hours of work and my poor fingers.. they hurt so much as it required so much strength to push the needle trough the hat (the hat was made of stronger material than expected). Anyway, I had the ribbon at place after a lot of work. 

Then I went to fabric shop and got some smaller feathers. I found nice green ones that fit well with the dress and stitched them into the place. Then the next trouble was the veil at the back. I wanted green one but the shop only had few horrible tones. I got one that I thought was most similar to the dress but it looked so weird when it was done:

Veil added to the hat.

Then my trouble where the rivets on the hat. I tried to find fancier one but couldn't. In the end, like two days before leaving to the larp, I was hopeless but I came to the idea.. I used silver things used for jewelry making and clued them over the usual rivets.

Looks much better, doesn't it?

So, I also got myself black veil for the back and one really nice black veil for the front. I also got two big black feathers that I actually sewed to the hat after I had flown to Sweden (not that going to the larp with this hat has my hand luggage was also quite fun.. I just had that mysterious plastic bag that I hold so lightly as it was fragile and I was afraid of hurting the weathers).

Anyway.. I proved myself that with some time consuming work, I can make random ugly hat into really nice hat.

So, as I said.. I wore the dress on larp but sadly I have none of the pictures taken of me. This year, I wore the dress second time in a masquerade and from that time I do have photos.

 So, the dress, the hat.. :)

Robe à la Française - the dress

Previous:Robe a la francaise - petticoat&panier

Making this dress was a new kind of challenge for me. First of all - the amount of fabric I cut out. So, as I had that great simplicity pattern, I was quite confident that I will follow the instructions and it cannot go wrong. I was wrong - sadly I found the instructions to be hard to understand and they seemed to skip steps that were important. 

I started with making the bodice part. For the lining inside I used again that really strong linen I have. The trick for me was to deal with the rivets and applying them. I had never done that before (or.. more precisely, I have never succeeded on applying them) but I did managed it after getting myself a different kind of applier (the one where you put the rivet and fabric between some kind of plastic thing and hit it with the hammer). The only problem was that in order to get the rivets applied, I had to apply a lot of force and it hurt the plastic applier and rivets started to move inside it. Therefore, i had to get a new one before this project was done.

Anyway, the bodice. It also contained the most interesting part of the dress: draping. The pattern had it's own guide but it felt not draped enough. Also, I put much more fabric into the draping part than the pattern suggested. I sewed together two widths of the fabric (so, in the end, the width of drapes should be 3 meters) and used much nicer guide I found online. That method gave me really nice result. (even thought I spent hours on the floor, trying to pin it..)

But having so many layers of the fabric over itself was hard for the sewing machine. I broke one needle I think and then poor machine needed to go to repair shop (and I borrowed my mom's machine meanwhile to finish) as it started to make horrible sounds :S

Also, I got some weird mismatch with the pattern at this point. The part of the dress coming over the shoulder and connecting front and back did not fit and I was totally confused. I did some hocus-bocus and made it fit but it hurt me later.

I actually think that draping part was the hardest on technical side. Rest was just sewing really long lines.

bodice on the mannequin

So, next part was the skirt part of the dress. The hardest part of this was making the jags at the top to fit. I do not think it came out perfect and I had to take into account that I made the dress narrower than the pattern. Anyway, I managed to attach the skirt part and make the front stitch (even thought something weird was still going on there with extra fabric that I did not understand why it was there)

Dress is starting to look like dress :D (and the hat makes a first appearance, more of it later)

And the back..

So, next step were the sleeves and when after finishing the bodice, process was fast, the sleeves hurt me. First, I tried to follow the pattern and make sleeves have two sides and gather it all together but it felt so stiff and really robust and the gathering did not looked nice (also, it was hell trying to sew it)

adding sleaves (and my necklace arrived.. it was little wrong color but it looks gorgeous)

Anyway, I realized this is not going to work and as I was running out of fabric, I had to unstitch the sleeves. A lot of work hours. I decided to take a break from the sleeves and work on the stomacher. I was running quite on the time, so I had no time to take huge embroidering project as I started to like the idea of using the same green fabric for stomacher and have silver embroilment (floral deco) on it. I tried to find stitching machine but apparently there was none among my acquaintances. I thought going to the shop where they offered embroilment service but it was so so expensive that I decided to drop the idea and make stomacher simply from the silver fabric I also used for the petticoat. It was more simple than I first thought but it was fine and I always have the idea that I will make the green embroiled one later (one year later, it hadn't happened).

Stomacher took many long hours, adding silver atlas ribbon at the sides, having strong linen at the back with glue fabric. And then I added huge black snaps (small ones, i was afraid, are not going to hold it) to hold the stomacher at place. That process took many tries as the mannequin (even if carefully calibrated) was not suitable for fitting those in place. So, it was adding one snap at the time, making one side fit and then making the other side. I think it was two nights, watching tv and sewing snaps.

Stomacher is added

So, I was still trying to avoid the sleeves and I went to make the under-dress from really nice and thin linen fabric. I googeled about under-dressed of that time and decided to go with really simple method. It was supposed to be rectangle and then triangles at the side but I was lazy again and combined them together so I would have less stitching.

(oh no... horrible drawings again)

Under-dress being made

Also, I started to work more on the details on the dress. I found really nice ribbon from the shop that was almost has wide as the stitch at the front of the dress. I combined it with cordon ribbon I had planned to use before.

And I got some really nice lace for the underdress side of the sleeves.

So, making that ribbon and sewing the underdress - it all took me less than a day (it was one very successful Saturday)

So, results so far:

Underdress and corset alone

Panier and petticoat are added

Dress with ribbon and stomacher has got some frill-ribbon to make it little more sophisticated

So, then, it was back to the sleeves as everything else was mostly done.I did some googeling and found amazing blog about really fancy robe a la francaise and she had made brilliant looking sleeves:

http://starlightmasquerade.com/taupe-robe-a-la-francaise-sleeves-done/

So, I decided to go with something similar. I sadly did not had any better way to work the hard egdes of the fabric rather than introduce fabric to some heat (candle) - I tried using small zic-zac from sewing machine but it looked horrible. It made the fabric (yup, reminding me that most of the fabrics we wear are plastic) melt nicely and made sure there is not going to be spliting. 

 This time it worked much better. I did the gathering manually (instead of using machine like on my first try) and made it worked. And that actually was it. I sadly have no pictures of the finished dress before the larp (nor actually from the larp - except big group photo where the dress can hardly be seen).

And I am actually glad I had so much time to make the dress. I was able to work on it with normal schedule and I finished just before leaving to the larp. It took me 2.5 months but I still think it was all worth it.

(there is going to be another post.. about the hat)

Robe à la Française - Petticoat & panier

Previous:Robe a la francaise - corset

So, now when I was done with the corset, I started with the actual dress. The dress itself will contain many pieces and I went with the most easiest one at first - petticoat. I had nice silver fabric for that. The main question for me was how will I decorate the petticoat.  As the fabric itself had quite a lot of pattern, I decided to go with just a frill at the bottom. As most of the petticoat is going to be hidden under the dress, I only made the frill at the front part of the petticoat.

Making the petticoat was quite easy. The petticoat contained two rectangular pieces. Both sides had been gathered and lined. For wearing the petticoat,it has ribbons that could be used to knot the petticoat around the waist. In order to have the side pockets (that became out to be brilliant to put hide things under the dress with a little bag) hold together, I used hooks on both sides to force it to be closer.

(sorry for not my so great drawings)

Petticoat is ready (without pannier)

 Then, the next step for myself was making the panier. I did not had pattern for it but just followed instructions from this great site: http://www.marquise.de/en/1700/howto/frauen/paniers.shtml The difference was that I decided to make not a long panier but quite short and modified the suggested pattern in a way that i could cut it out from two pieces of fabric. I used really strong linen and strong metallic corset supports (they were quite expensive but I knew that in order to hold that weight that the dress is going to be, I need something strong.

So, first I sewed two pieces of panier together and then I used satin ribbon to make tunnels where I pushed in the metallic corset supports. My mistake was that I did not thought that the metal is going to push itself out of the satin ribbon and I tried to fix it by adding extra pieces at the end of the tunnels from even stronger fabric and it helped a little but it is not perfect solution.

Using ribbons at the bottom to make the panier be in the right shape

To hold the panier in the right shape, I added four ribbons (atlas ribbon again) at the bottom of the pannier that could be used to knot together and therefore force the panier into the required shape. Also, there are ribbons at the top that are used to knot the panier around the waist.

In the end, I must say, panier was much more trouble than I expected and metal was hard to work and tunnels took long to make. I am not happy with my result as it contains some sloppy sewing but my excuse was - it is going to be under the dress: noone is going to see it.

Panier under the petticoat.

When I had finished with panier and tried petticoat under it, I realized that the petticoat was wider than my panier (and even thought I felt myself so wide when I tried panier on myself and had to go trough doors sideways). So, I took the pleads at the sides together more, almost 1/3 I would say as the original pattern seems to be for so much wider skirt.

Fixed petticoat with panier