Civil War area dress 1

At the end of last year I signed up for western style larp taking place in Czech republic. I was reallye xcited when I got my casting as I got to play high society lady and that meant I could do one of those fancy dress projects. The story takes place 1866 so I decided I will go with the civil war area dress as it should be almost fine. 

The LARP was inspired by TV series "Hell on Wheels" so my first source of costume ideas was from the tv series. I really loved Lily Bell on the show and would have loved to play her but its fine. Playing char (who to my knowledge has not been in the show) gave me more freedom to choose my costume. 

The costumes from the TV series were all very practical and quite simple. I do understand that as they were living in that wild west. So, I did not get any specific good ideas from shows screencaps.

I started with gathering some general idea of the dresses and fashion of the area. I first thought that I do not like those dresses or.. I loved ball gowns but for that kind of out door event I needed something more casual. I did a lot of sketching and I think I finally fell for the era's fashion when I saw photos of Ada's dresses from movie "Cold Mountain". I particularly fell in love with the following:

So that was my starting point. I loved the ornaments at the sides and I really wanted to add them.

Then I started to look for a pattern. At that moment I did not know that simplicity has almost perfect pattern (4900) for that costume and the pattern I found was 4510:

So, I did some sketching to figure out what exactly do I want. I went to the fabric shop with following sketches:

So, I decided to use the pattern I got and add the bottom part of the jacket myself. I tried different options for skirt but decided to go with layers of ruffles. I also decided not to make it as a dress but more like separate parts: jacket and skirt. As I had no idea what kind of weather awaits me at the start of May, I might have needed to add layers below the costume or I was worried it may be too hot to wear and I might want to remove the jacket and wear simple blouse under it.

I actually spent a lot of time finding suitable fabric. I went to different fabric shops and returned empty handed. I wanted something that wouldn't be very thin and would be strong. I wasn't sure about the color either. I love bordeux red but I was worried that on that time it would be more suitable for "other kind of ladies". The shot on the pattern was done using purple fabric. My boyfriend tried to suggest me dark blue. I was still amazed by that amazing green fabric I found for my robe ala francais dress. I was torn until I walked to that amazing purple fabric with amazing pattern and texture on the clearance sale. 70% off. Wow. It was very expensive fabric still but I thought it is perfect.

Fabrics used in the project

 The pattern also stated that i needed contrast fabric (I went with the black lining fabric I have used before) and organza for the sleeves. I managed to find amazing piece of organza with gorgeous embroidery that I used for the sleeves and decorative layer on the collar.

So, after the research I figured out I need the following pieces:

• Jacket
• Skirt
• Blouse with organza sleeves (pattern had the sleeves as stand alone but I wanted them to be connected to a blouse I could wear without the jacket)
• Underskirt
• Bonnet
• Corset
• Pannier

With the corset and the pannier I took the easy way out: I had that kind of cheap "made in China" wedding pannier on my costume stack. Actually, it was good choice as I needed to travel on plane and other girls were having horrible time managing to make their pannier fit into their luggage. With my "wedding pannier" I was able to wrap it around itself three times and fit it without troubles. I ordered a cheap white corset and first I planned to change the overall fabric on it as on the image it looked to be really reflective horrible white material. In the end, it came out, it was really nice and matte so I used it the way it was.
Next>>

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

Older project: Robe à la Française - planning

So, last year I did a project what was the most complex and the lengthiest thing I have ever done. I signed up for international larp in sweden and because Nordic larp has much higher costume standards than the ones I am used to, I wanted to make really nice and in some level historically accurate dress. The time period was 18th century (they had specific year that I cannot remember it anymore). So, after doing some searching of what kind of dresses were worn on that time, I found some fascinating pictures of Robe à la Française. I like that "cape" like thing at the back so I was sold even thought it looked so complicated. Why not. On that moment I had around 3 months till the event.

First thing that I decided was that I will need pattern for the dress. I would have improvised but I wasn't sure about the bodice nor the sleeves (I always think that I could improvise everything else, expect sleeves).

After googeling around, I found that Simplicity had amazing pattern (3637) that had right kind of dress.

So, I knew what kind of pattern I wanted but getting it was hard as it was out of print and not too many copies were around. In the end, I managed to find one from french ebay and I paid for it much more than I planned but I was fixed on the idea of getting this pattern - I had tried few simplicity patterns before and they were not that simple but it felt good to follow instructions.. And this whole project scared hell out of me anyway. Making that kind of dress.. :S What was I thinking (I actually even considered buying one dress from etsy at first but then.. I started to feel sorry for my money.. to spoilt it: I think I spent almost the same amount of money in the end for all the parts and pieces of this project + huge number of hours but it was worth it).

It was also sure for me at the beginning that it is not only going to be dress. There is going to be underdress, corset, panier etc..

First I planned to buy the panier as it sounded quite complicated to make myself and I wasn't sure I could get anything that would be suitable to make it. In the end, as the cost quite a lot, I decided to deal with it in the end. If nothing else works, the plan was to get myself the "usual" panier that wedding dresses have and use ribbons to force it to be in the (almost) right shape.

So, I knew I will be making four different pieces for the project but I had no idea what design the dress will have. What colors, what materials etc.. I ended up making a sketch for myself to get the concept of the char..

So.. that was the original idea. Black and red combination was crossed out by my mother who told that on those time no proper lady wore red so.. in the end.. I decided I will go to the fabric shop and see what I can get.

I ended up with a velvet like green fabric that looked to be more light but I needed to buy a lot of it. I think the pattern's envelope said I needed around 20 meters of 115 cm fabric. That sounded way too much for me. The fabric I got was 145 cm wide and I only got 10 meters of it. I actually planned to have more draps at the back than the pattern had (the drapping of the dress was the most magical part for me that made me wish to make it.. and when I looked the pattern and some projects other people had made, I thought no.. I want more.. and i found online tutorial that had more draps and used it.. in the end, I think, I decided I will have as many draps as much fabric I will have left). Anyway.. 10 meters was enough and I had two full lengths for drapping and for one set of unsuccessful sleeve cuffs. (and even if the fabric felt more light than real velvet, 10 meters of it is really heavy).

I also got really nice light white linen for the underdress. For the peticoat I got fancy silver/grey curtain fabric with nice little flower ornaments. That was actually great find. So the dress was changed from red/black to silver/green. Interesting choice as I would have never thought about it before but that was the best I could come up.

• corset 
• petticoat&panier 
• dress
• hat + final result