I think Victorian corsets are in fact still conical stays

Technically. At least some of them.

This is, sort of, a follow up on my last post, and sort of a follow up on an older one that preceded it. A while ago I posted about this 1840s corset from the Met Museum, and how, when I broke it down to pattern pieces and looked at the grainlines, it reminded me of J.S. Bernhardt's Fig. F pattern.

Corset, American or European, 1839-1841, silk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ID: C.I.38.23.10b-d

Well, now that I've looked at Bernhardt's book and not just Sabine's Short Stays Studies...

Nevermind Fig. F; look at Fig. B!

It has exactly the vertical seaming over the bust that certain mid-19th century corsets like the one above do. Also, hip gusset in the back.

Compare Fig. B to my rough draft of the Met corset:

 

Divide the back pieces of Fig. B differently - cut at the "i" hip gusset slit that's closer to the front and incorporate the gusset itself into the back piece (notice that that particular spot lies around the underarm line both in Bernhardt's draft and mine!) - and change the remaining tabs into a large hip-hugging gusset; raise it over the bust a bit... You've got yourself a mid-19th century corset!

Of course the pattern pieces are tilted slightly differently in my rough draft, because I wasn't drafting it on a conical plane. And in fact, I think the grainlines are the main difference between Bernhardt and the later corset - Bernhardt, or at least Sabine according to him, lays it out with the centre back on the grain and everything else fanning out from there, with the centre front almost on true bias. The 1840s corset also has the centre back on grain, but the tilt of centre front is more akin to its tilt on the draft itself, as if you left the draft as is and just rotated the back pieces so that they are on grain... 

On the other hand, though, if we consider Bernhardt-style stays as a precursor, it suddenly makes a lot of sense why a lot of Victorian corsets cut the side pieces tilted, on bias! Which otherwise comes rather out of nowhere if you're instead looking at them as a direct descendant of straight-cut Regency stays.

Fairly randomly chosen 1878 US corset patent from haabet.dk

All in all, it's fairly clear to me that if I started out with a conical block a la Bernhardt, it would actually be way easier to get exactly the results I need for this particular style - I would have far less counter-intuitive places to do subtracting of empty spaces in. The conical draft already wraps around the body the way you want it to and accounts for its non-rectangular nature; you just cut it up into sections where you need to and take it in so that it really hugs the body and supports the bust. Does that make sense?

Like so:

 

It's a quick and dirty draft and I forgot a couple things, like taking it in in the back. But you get the idea. One day I'll do it properly; it's pretty clear to me now that I will have to. :D

A teeny tiny detail, but even the fact the hip gusset is cut on bias now falls into place for me - it seems many late 18th century stays cut them that way.

Ergo: Victorian corsets are still conical stays!

But that's not all! There's another fun image to support my working theory!

The working theory is that professional staymakers continued cutting things the way they knew, and just kept gradually updating the styles. That the straight-cut gussetted columnal stays we think of as Regency stays, that we think of as the direct precursor to Victorian corsets, are, in fact... well, not an evolutionary dead end, I think they may well have contributed something. But it seems to me it makes a lot more sense if they contributed less than we think. I think that the picture will be more complete if we think of it as Victorian corsets having at least two ancestors, not just one. That all the experimentation of the long Regency era resulted in the subsequent designs picking up features from all over the place.

Which brings me to the aforementioned another image. This is a detail from a satirical print from 1823:

"Painting"´, William Heath, 1823. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Well, if that doesn't look a lot like what we consider to be 1790s transitional stays. In the 1820s! (And the picture can't be much older than its publishing date, what with her hairstyle, puffy chemise sleeves, and the dress to the left of her that I cut out from my selective image.)

I see two not immediately striking but I think very important differences in the image, compared to "transitional stays" like these:

Corset, 18th century, Met Museum, ID: C.I.41.94

One, the pronounced curve of her busk - really quite similar to the 1840s corset, especially in how it curves over the stomach instead of the more or less straight belly line of 18th century stays.

Two, the fact the bust cups do not look gathered but smooth.

Somewhat like these:

Corset/stays, dated to 1820s-1840s, Glasgow Museums, ID: E.1948.31.a

 I am currently aware of three 19th century corsets / stays with smooth cups of this sort - the Glasgow example above stands out among them by having seamed cups (really they seem quite similar to a modern bra), likely to accommodate a larger bust. Three still isn't much, but it already is more than the one I knew of years ago, and goes to show that this was, in fact, a Thing. The third one is in the Czech National Museum, was featured in Stays, or a Corset?, and unfortunately has no online presence that I know of. It also has fully corded cups, in a diagonal pattern that I am tempted to say I am seeing in the Heath print, but I think what's actually happening in the print is simply shading.

The three extants are all, more or less, stays of the columnal style, so seeing it done on the conical plane in this picture is super-interesting. And it supports my theory that there was a lot of experimentation and variety going on in the first half of the 19th century, the styles were by no means set in stone, and they did not necessarily conform to our modern ideas of what was happening when.

A pattern for the stays in the print could basically be achieved by combining Bernhardt's Fig. B/Fig. D with the bust cutouts of his Fig. C - although, based on comparison to the pattern draft of the stays from the Czech National Museum, you should probably make the cutouts a bit narrower and deeper - there needs to be a busk in the centre front going all the way up, and since there are bust cups in the cutouts, the bottom should likely reach the bottom of the gusset slit:

So, yeah. This patchwork of styles apparently existed. Or at least likely existed - we still have to keep in mind it's a satirical print. But since the stays don't seem to be being satirised and therefore don't seem overly exaggerated, and they show quite a lot of detail that actually makes sense in the larger context of early 19th century corsetry, I think the likelihood of them being a complete fabrication is low. Tabs in 1823 are a bit surprising, but the bust cups are not, and thirteen years earlier Bernhardt did include tabbed drafts in his book and apparently said one could and should mix and match according to taste. So... there definitely is more to corsetry of the first half of the 19th century than we used to think.

It makes a lot of sense to me that, as there began to be more emphasis on the natural waistline again, at least some staymakers simply returned to cutting stays the way that worked for that. They just added the experience gained from Regency styles to it - such as a greater reliance just on the cut of the fabric for bust support, as opposed to fully boning the stays and/or packing them with strength layers. And using gussets in more places than just the back hip.

Throughout the long Regency period there had been old-fashioned ladies who still preferred the old smooth cut of stays over the bust gussets (Bernhardt also mentions as much in 1810). And people in more remote, rural areas had not made the switch so swiftly - sometimes never. (Czech folklore collectors noted / recorded that fashions could take up to about twenty or twenty-five years - basically a generation - to filter down to regional dress more remote from urban centres at that point in history, and that's just talking about the elements of fashion that did filter down into it.)

The period of raised waistlines was not so long that all the old staymakers would have died out and taken their knowledge to the grave. It's not a breach and a complete change, it's a gradual evolution.

It actually possibly continues all the way to the Edwardian era, when we once again get an openly conical design with the "Corset Radical" that I did a Deciphering post on years ago:

Corset "Radical", Federer & Piesen, Prague, c. 1905. The Museum of Decorative Arts Prague, ID: 104484

One of the joys of my nerdy existence is that someone has actually made a corset like that since then!

Again, US patent from haabet.dk

Now that I have the idea of a basic conical block to compare it to, this design makes even more sense. I wonder how exactly A. P. McGraw (or Federer & Piesen?) arrived at it? Even if it was not through a conical block, I think my ideas of creating one could easily be applied to it...

More on those ideas later, I hope.

Drafting sewing patterns in Inkscape: Setting up your grid

If you want to draft patterns in Inkscape (which is a free vector aka line-drawing program, aka the free alternative to Illustrator), your best bet is to start by setting up the auxilliary grid. I find that with the help of grids, I can turn paper patterns digital even without mucking about with scanners (which I don't have myself) and the correct resolution - more on that later, hopefully. But the best part for us historical costumers? If you set up your grid right, you should be able to do scaled patterns or draft those block / apportioning rulers drafts straight into your own measurements. (With the caution that things like bust cup sizes still won't enter into it - always do mockups.)

Although that's a step too far if you don't yet know how to set up the grid to your specifications. Which is something I've only just discovered how to do properly myself, so I'm happily sharing.

I'm sure there are other tutorials for this out there; but I often find it's easier to read tutorials written by someone coming at the problem from the same angle as you... so here's from a pattern-drafter and historical costumer to others.

Here's my sleeveless spencer pattern, digitised with the help of Inkscape grid, still missing its side piece for some reason. I'll have to look into why I stopped at that point; I suspect it's because I lost the paper pattern...

Now, up front, I'm Czech and my Inkscape is in Czech, so sadly I'm not always sure about the exact English terminology. If you have the same version of Inkscape, things should hopefully all look the same, though. Mine is 0.92.2 (5c3e80d, 2017-08-06). (Which reminds me maybe I should look for an update.) You should find yours in the Help section under About or some such.

So, yes, I've only just figured this out properly. In the post about drafting a corset from pictures, I mentioned that I had trouble switching my grid to milimetres... It's because when you change units, Inkscape is clever and retains the dimensions of your previous grid! :D

Setting up your grid is easier when you work in metric. You don't usually have to worry about divisions much - Inkscape works with decimal numbers, and your units work with decimal numbers, so it's quite easy.

Inches require more math and theoretical mathematical thinking. Which goes to show that inches are an older unit from a time when people just did things with physical measures that could be folded in half, instead of with mathematics in their heads...

So, to set up a grid for the first time, you go to File Properties, under the Grid menu, and set up a grid by choosing the type of grid you want (apparently it's "Rectangular" in English) and clicking "Create new".

(BTW: If you want to draft hexagonal patterns for patchwork, the other type of grid can help with that - which is something I should have realised about a month ago when I mucked about and struggled with trying to draft out the Golden Wedding Ring block...)

Make sure you have checked that the grid is turned on and visible (important!). The last option says something like "snap only to visible grid", which means that if you zoom out enough that you can only see your major, red lines, your nodes will only snap to the red grid.

And then you define the exact properties you want your grid to have.

Once you have once set up a grid, you can just turn it on or off, and just change the properties as needed - unless you want the other type of grid, or unless you removed / deleted it somewhere in the process, in which case you have to create a new one again.

This is how I get a "milimetre paper" effect with my unit being milimetres:

 

You go to the Grid menu on the right, choose your unit, and then decide at what intervals you want your lines to be. As you can see here, I chose to have my basic, blue lines at 1 mm and my major, red lines at 1 cm. 1 cm is 10 mm, so that's easy. Your basic lines will be at every 1 whole unit, in both directions (along the X and Y axes), and your major lines will be at every 10 lines (that's the last setting there at the bottom).

You can also check (bottom left) that you want your grid to display only as dots rather than lines. But personally I find the lines much easier to see and work with.

Note that whenever you change any of those numbers in the menu on the right, you have to hit Enter or click in another menu "window" for the change to take place. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward.

Where it starts to get a bit confusing is when you decide to change units. If I switch my units to cm, I get this:

Suddenly my lines are at every 0,1 of my unit (since 1 mm is 0,1 cm). My major lines are still at every 10 lines.

This is why I had trouble getting mms out of my grid when drafting my corset pattern - I did not notice that the numbers had changed when I switched units, so I could not understand why the grid resolutely stayed the same...!

(You could also change where your grid is centered on the X and Y axes. Those are automatically centered in the left bottom corner of your page. Messing with that is more trouble than it's worth for our purposes - we don't need that because frankly the page does not enter into the drafting process at all the way I do it - except maybe as a rough gauge for how many pages the printed pattern will take. If for some reason you wanted to change where your grid is centered, you would have to know the exact coordinates of the point where you want to move it.)

Of course, you don't have to have your major lines at 10. I can do a "half-centimetre" version by setting them up at 5 mms:

The only thing that bothers me about this system is that I'm limited to two types of lines, so I can't have both a detailed "milimetre paper" and mark 5 or 10 cms as well. If I want that type of super-helpful grid, I have to add more lines manually... which can interfere with my drafting a bit as those "objects" get in the way. Maybe there's still a way around that but I haven't figured it out yet...

Now, inches. As I said, inches require more math.

To help you, the various divisions translate into decimal numbers like so:

1/2 = 0,5

1/4 = 0,25

1/8 = 0,125

1/16 = 0,0625

And if you're math-and-numbers-challenged, you can write down those numbers or print them out on a piece of paper to stick at some place where you'll have it in sight and won't lose it.

(You can get those numbers easily with the help of a calculator by dividing 1 : your division number. If you need, say, 3/8, you then just multiply your 1/8 decimal number by 3... But part of the point of setting up our grids in Inkscape is that you avoid that further multiplication and just use your grid as a ruler.)

So if you want an inch grid divided down to sixteenths of an inch, you set it up like this:

With your basic lines being the decimal number for 1/16 (i.e. 0,0625) and your major lines at every 16 lines.

Just for fun: Because Inkscape goes that detailed with its decimal numbers in these settings, you can go extra-detailed with... what is it called, thirty-secondths?

And now you can give Vanessa's tutorial a whirl regardless of whether your pattern draft uses cms or inches.

As a teaser for how you would do the apportioning rulers stuff: Your X and Y measurements don't have to match.

Here's the same grid in inches:

So... yeah... just with some help from a calculator (you most likely have one on your phone), you can totally do the apportioning rulers drafts to your own measurements. Or create your own apportioning ruler / tape measure for doing it by hand. But more on that at some later point...

How NOT to draft a women's sloper: Why the FreeSewing.org Breanna sloper for women does not work at all (unfortunately)

In the loquatious manner of old books, the full title of this blog post continues:

Containing therein an explanation of the fundamental importance of the difference between dart width and dart angle.
Or
What shenanigans Marmota gets into when she has too much free time on her hands and wants a quick solution to something (Spoiler alert: It was anything but quick.)

I have to say right ahead that this was written back in May so some of the info about how the FreeSewing.org site is set up here is dated. The problems with the pattern remain exactly the same, though.

I also have to say right ahead that the sum total of my knowledge of programming is a neat zero, so I have no idea how the actual code works and cannot unfortunately fix it.

I do, however, by now know a thing or two about drafting sewing patterns, and about measuring and altering them to make sure they fit - seeing as I'm exactly the sort of non-average person FreeSewing.org is targetting:

In their system, back in May, the closer you were to a standard size, the more your diagram looked like a perfect circle. Mine was a perfect splotch.

So I can at least offer an explanation of why it doesn't work. Why the way they take those detailed measurements (that for the most part do make sense to me) and turn them into this pattern... results in a pattern that does not work at all. Long story short: the very base of the women's sloper is flawed and does not seem to take into account some fundamental truths of sewing and pattern-making.

Namely how you deal with darts and angles.

I hope that this post will both work as a (very detailed) review for other existing / potential users to see exactly why that particular covetable pattern (custom slopers are covetable, right?) doesn't work right now, as well as hopefully help the programmers do things better in the future when it comes to women's patterns. Because I do love the idea of OpenSource patterns!

(And maybe it will also help explain some things about drafting your own slopers. I learned a lot from this myself.)

Deciphering Historical Clothes: A c. 1840 corset & Drafting a pattern from photos

I've been stuck at home with a flu for over a week. After the first couple of days when I really felt awful, I now feel mostly okay except for a bit of a cough, a bit of a temperature and the fact any sort of physical activity tires me very quickly.
So I'm stuck mostly sitting down and trying to invent ways not to go crazy with boredom and do something more productive at least with my mind.

Which in Marmotaland sooner or later means DECIPHERING HISTORICAL CLOTHES.

I have corsetry on my mind, what with deciding that I need to make myself new Regency stays (my size has changed so much that I eventually figured out altering my old ones was probably more trouble than it was worth, alas). Along the line, I got to wondering about some 1830s-1840s corsets without bust gussets (I always have the 1840s low-key in my mind because the discontinued kacabajka adventures hang over me), and that led me to this c. 1840 corset in the Met.

Atelier Nostalgia (who has recreated it and whose blog post directed my attention back to this particular one) noted that it has no bust gussets. Which she says was unusual but I think it was actually quite common at that particular point in time and soon ceased to be so for some unknown reason - plenty of the c. 1830s corsets are simple "princess seamed" affairs. She also noted that the museum helpfully provided lots of detailed photos.

Those photos are, of course, ideal for deciphering.

Behold my usual messy colour-coded pictures:

Blue is for seamlines between pattern pieces.
Purple is for boning and the front busk.
Red is for the very narrow boning channels which may involve narrow baleen (is it possible to make baleen so narow? I have no idea), or cording, or even reed - which you can totally still use in Victorian corsets! To which this 1863 patent by Lavinia H. Foy attests with this sentence: "Rattan and whalebone strips can be inserted in the usual manner..."
Green is for grainlines. Sorry for making it so pale; I didn't want to cover the details underneath too much with all my scribblings, and went a bit overboard on the transparency. It should be easier to see in the full size. (What's not accounted for in my pictures and what I did eventually figure out is that the front hip gusset is also cut on bias. I am still not entirely sure about the back gusset but I think it might be on straight of grain.)

The corset is made from satin, which is a beast for determining grainlines even in real life, let alone in photos. Luckily, some of the photos are VERY detailed, allowing me to make a better guess, especially because in some places the fabric is a bit worn, which exposes the yarns more and makes it less of a quesswork. Also the lining (see additional photos at the museum site) is plainweave, which also helps; although I think the lining doesn't quite match the outer, it does more or less correspond to it.

What struck me was that the centre front was not cut on straight of grain, and neither was the side piece - leading my train of thought straight back to my Regency stays enterprise and the Bernhardt stays, specifically Fig. F.


There are definite similarities between this corset and the Bernhardt stays when you look closely (aside from the aforementioned, the hip flare is basically just an addition to bring the corset lower down the hips). That got me so excited about this corset as a possible sort of missing link between Regency and Victorian styles that I went ahead and roughly drafted out the pattern for myself in Inkscape, more or less following the principles lined out in Cathy Hay's Corset Making Revolution article. (ETA Nov 2020: Sorry, that's no longer available. The Foundations Revealed website has changed the way it works and there are no free articles now.)

And it worked.

Well, obviously I haven't made a mock-up yet. But my experiment did yield a pattern that looks like a good starting point for that. It's also similar to this possibly early 1850s corset on the Abiti Antichi site (which still has shoulder straps and on the other hand seems to have some sort of proto-opening-busk), so it's probably a very good basic style for the 1840s mid-19th century.

But more than that, as Atelier Nostalgia also noted, it's also a style that you can find it later corsets as well. And not just the 1850s. It looks surprisingly similar in principle to a couple corset patterns in patents from the 1860s and 1870s on the Haabet site.

And, from my browsing of museum collections, it also looks like a style that, with slight variations, carried all the way to the 1880s. Most 1880s corsets tend to have wider fronts, though, and are usually more along the lines of the gussetted or princess-line corsets you can find in commercial patterns. But you can still see elements of this sort of construction even in some later corsets.

1870s-1890s corset from the Tasha Tudor colelction sold by Augusta Auction

The difference being mostly the fact later corsets have opening front busks, cross-lacing, and tend not to go so low on the hips. Many of them also utilise bust gussets instead of the bust seams of this particular style.

All this basically means I've developed a method of drafting a certain kind of Victorian corset pattern that can work, with various alterations, for a period of about 50 years from the end of the 1830s to 1880s! It's different enough from the commercial patterns I'm aware of, and yet ubiquitous enough in museum collections that I think I really hit on something here.

This is what I eneded up with. It will still nead fine-tuning, especially in the underbust area, but it's definitely a workable start.
(The exclamation mark on the left means my division of the waist is imprecise because what I really needed was decimal point numbers and I couldn't do those quite so easily in Inkscape without changing the grid - which is a bother, so I'll get around to that in paper stage. Basically at this point there is zero waist reduction and I think there needs to be at least a little bit of it.
The exclamation mark at the front hip gusset means that particular seamline is in serious need of truing - and the hip gusset will need some slashing-and-squishing after I get around to altering the waist.)


In order not to make this post too long (more than it already is), winding and difficult to navigate, and in order to make it easier to make stuff linkable (I'm not flattering myself to think this will be linked, am I?), I will eventually put the whole drafting method for this particular style in a separate post, probably after I've had a chance to make a mock-up and really see how well it works. Although now that I have shared an actual flat pattern draft, I guess you could also just apply Cathy Hay's method to it without waiting for the next post. :D

And when I get around to physically drafting this pattern, I'll definitely do some sort of further pictorial comparison between it and the Bernhardt Fig. F to prove my point. It's not quite immediately obvious - especially because the distribution of seams is a bit different - and I don't think I'd have thought of it had I not been drafting the Regency stays just before. But that front dip, slight bias in the front and bias on the side (also just slight in the Bernhardt stays) did make me wonder. If you lengthened the two back pieces and the front tip of Fig. F, and introduced hip gussets, you would get something approaching the 1840 stays and all those subsequent styles!

What I will share here regarding the drafting is this: I knew, instinctively, that this drafting method might work because I've done it before with my first Regency stays. I looked at lots of photos of extants. Focused on seamlines and where they sit on the body. Drew myself some technical drawings. And drafted the thing in a grid following my own measurements in a method similar to what Cathy Hay does - except that I used a lot more measurements to make sure it really fitted me.

So yes, this can totally be done just from photos - as long as they are decent quality and you have more than just one view. Look where the seamlines sit on the body. Find the underarm line (3 in my plan below). Find the waistline (C) and underbust line (B - in this case it's a lower underbust). Figure out the grainlines. Go from there.

In this particular case, I was lucky because the museum even provided a flat photo, so I could use that as my rough starting point for a flat plan (and use some common sense to account for the distortion).

If you don't have a flat photo - I didn't for my Regency stays, both because there aren't that many online in the first place and because the stays were an amalgam of many individual garments - draw yourself a sort of gridded flat plan first, not bothering with exact measurements for now. Make several such plans if it helps you to make sure you understand how it goes together.

And then you fine-tune that plan with actual measurements. Make your default horizontal lines the length of the biggest measurement of the main pattern pieces (excluding gussets), minus your preferred lacing gap, and go from there, leaving gaps where your other horizontal measurements are smaller. Or (like Cathy Hay) go with the bust, overlapping your pattern pieces in places where you're bigger (hips).

Meaning that for this particular corset - with its bust seams - I went with the bust measurement for my horizontal lines (and added the gussets for my hip / upper hip measurement, which is slightly bigger than my bust). For my Regency stays, I went with the underbust (because I was using both bust and hip gussets and really needed them to fit snugly at the underbust).

If you're drawing on paper, it may help to start with a scaled down pattern (in pencil!) to see at one glance if you're really going in the right direction. Your scaled down first draft can also double as a draft for your boning layout. (Or do it like I did now and draft your pattern in a grid in Inkscape or similar vector graphics program - that has the advantage of allowing you to correct mistakes cleanly, including the "back" function.)
That draft is your first dry run. It will help you catch any mistakes and things you forgot to take into account before you draft full-scale on paper. (There will totally be mistakes and things you forgot to take into account. On my first run through this pattern, I completely forgot to take into account the bust-to-waist difference in the back, and the fact you want your corset to dip in the underarm area. Among other things.)

And even then, always make mock-ups. :-)


You could apply the method to other items of clothing as well, but what with them not sitting close to the body like a corset does, and involving things like pleats and gathers and sleeves, that will involve even more trial-and-error. But it can totally be done, as Sabine of Kleidung um 1800 and Bránn both demonstrate. Especially if you start with something simpler like an apron, and something in a patterned fabric like a check that makes it easier to determine pattern shapes.

So that's my five cents concerning drafting from photos. And 1840s corsets. Some people seem to think the 1840s are boring. I hope I've just proven they're far from that.

HSM '19 Entry for Challenge 7 - Unexpected: My sister's Moravian Wallachian bodice

What the item is: Moravian-Wallachian bodice for my sister

What is the unexpected feature? The colour blue. These days, the typical Moravian-Wallachian folk costume bodice is red (usually with green or gold trimmings). But in my research, I found out that's actually only a c. mid-19th century development; before that, red dye was more expensive and red bodices were only worn by well-off women, and for special occasions. One of the colours more common historically was blue, and as we hacked out the ideas for her costume with my sister, we found out she really liked the earlier version of it.
(Also, strikingly, it unfortunately came out much darker and brighter than expected - my inexperience with that brand of dye shows. :P I did use about 1/3 recommended amount as per Jacquard's instructions for "most saturated results", but apparently I should have used much less... :-( )
Here are two modern reconstructions of blue bodices in Moravian Wallachia in the beginning of the 19th century that were our primary inspiration for this - and show the sort of colour I was actually aiming at. :P The first also shows an extant picture - originally published in a book I unfortunately don't own.

Material: For the outer, overdyed cream wool worsted (a sort of brushed twill?) strengthened with woven cotton iron-on interfacing to roughly imitate wool broadcloth with my resources. Lining is a cotton-linen blend I bought in Ikea about ten years ago.

Notions: Dark red polyester satin ribbon for trim (sewed on with wrong side out to lessen the shine). Blue cotton thread for machine-sewing the outer, white cotton thread for machine-sewing the lining, white linen thread for handsewing the lining in, dark red silk thread for sewing on the trim. Blue linen buttonhole twist for sewing on the buttons. Dark red silk buttonhole twist for buttonholes & the embroidery in the back. (All links to Sartor, because they ship all over the place and I'm pretty sure they carry the same brands I used; but I only bought the linen thread there myself.) Metallic filligree shank buttons. (The plan is also to add hooks and eyes in case her figure changes, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.)

Pattern: My own, based on lots of Wallachian bodices viewed online, most of them not extant. Derived loosely from the basic bodice & princess seam tutorials by Bilikis Signatures on YouTube, because her simplified drafting methods struck me as a good starting point for a more rural garment; but I drafted front & back separately, because my sister is very busty. Then tweaked in mock-up.

(The centre front is actually cut on grain.)

Year: c. first half of 19th century

How historically accurate is it? About 50/50, I guess. Colour came out a tad too chemical. Material is mehish, though not too bad for our budget constraints & what's readily available (I'm not happy about the polyester trim, but the rest works quite well). Pattern is an educated guess. Machine sewing on seams & straighter bits of trim to speed it up. Aside from that, the construction method is plausible but not documented, and I think I made some mistakes because I was figuring it out as I went. I am not certain about the embroidery in the back, its existence is also a bit of an educated guess - I couldn't find any back pictures of extant bodices or historical depictions from the back; current bodices mostly have pom-pom-like decoration there but there are also some embroidered ones, and my sister wanted her bodice as smooth as possible.

The folds were, at first, delightfully neat - sew vertical seams, clip into seam allowance, fold, stitch seam allowance at the top of fold without stitching through to the outside, press.

The outer and the lining were sewn separately - I pleated the folds in the opposite diretion on the lining, without sewing down the top, and then I pressed the edges down and fell-stitched the lining in. This created a problem with the folds, however, in part because I had done a stupid and embroidered over them before I sewed in the lining - so it was even messier than it would have been anyway. (I've forgotten that I still want to sew pieces of fabric over the top inside to clean it up and secure it... see below how rather messy it is at the moment.)

The embroidery, though, makes me quite happy despite. I stitched tight triangles of overlapping stitches right above the folds to secure them, and then did a little decorative embroidery above it, in a bit of a spruce-branch pattern (or chicken feet, depending on how you look at it...) to echo the embroidery of spruce branches my sister made for her shirt.

(Callback to that post: As you can see now, I didn't interface this with downproof ticking in the end.)


Hours to complete: About 2 days for fabric dyeing & pattern creation & prep, about 3 days of rather intense sewing.

First worn: Not yet. It was meant to be worn at the final promenade at the Prague Folklore Days in July with the rest of her costume, but it was too hot for it so the bodice was left off. (She works as a guide for foreign dance ensembles almost every year and wanted to finally join in in her own folk costume.)

Total cost: I got the wool as a super-discouted remnant with holes and smudges at work, so this amount came at c. 30 CZK! The lining fabric was bought ages ago but I'm guessing it would have been around 80 CZK per metre (it's very narrow). Can't remember exactly how much the notions were - let's say also c. 80 CZK for the interfacing, c. 30 CZK for ribbon, 100 CZK for buttons (bought from a seller online), about 30 CZK for negligible amounts of thread, most of the cost being the linen and the silk? About 180 CZK for dye + shipping (my sister bought that, so I'm not entirely sure, either). So a bit over 500 CZK all together? Because of my extreme employee discount, mocking up broadcloth still came out considerably cheaper than actual broadcloth, which starts somewhere around 500 CZK per metre...

* * *

Sooo. That pattern-drafting method.

I discovered Bilikis a couple months ago through a YouTube recommendation when I started watching more crafting / historical videos on YouTube. I really like her demonstrative explanations, although some of her methods are not up to scratch if you're used to modern Western sewing methods. (Others, though, on the other hand offer some simple insights especially for a historical seamstress that modern Western drafting methods overcomplicate, so it balances out.) First thing I noticed is - that folded almost-symmetrical drafting method may create problems for busty ladies.

So I divided all of my sister's vertical measurements into front and back, and drafted front and back separately.

(She decided to wear her corset underneath her costume, which isn't exactly accurate but makes her a lot more comfortable, as a very busty lady.)

I also, initially, took away width in the front both at the sides and at the centre, creating a sort of trapezoidal shape; after I made a mock-up and found out there was length missing at the front and a bit of width missing in the bust (I think I underestimated my ease in that area), conveniently missing exactly where I stopped my angled "dart" in the front centre so I could just add it along that line - I rotated the pattern piece to put the centre front on grain and added length both on top to widen it there, and on the bottom to account for the missing length that her bust ate up, i.e., I lengthened the front to the point where the new hemline formed a right angle with the front.

Like so:

(Plus button overlap.)

Which was completely intuited, but may actually be a pretty good method to deal with that front length shortage due to bust while keeping the same side length as the back? I'd have to think more on that. Generally, I think I'll have to give more thought to this drafting method as relates to various historical patterns - it's a really neat starting point.

Because I had two princess seams in the back, I think I used smaller measurements for my darts than Bilikis uses in her tutorial. I had to take them in a little during mock-up after all, and generally had to balance the back a little - taking width from the centre and adding it on the other side of the pattern piece only at the waist, which I think had more to do with my sister's specific build (she's pretty sway-back-y) than the drafting method as such - the exact sort of thing mock-ups are for.

I also had to cut into the armscye considerably in the front - mostly because it's a sleeveless bodice, I think. And to adjust the shoulder slope - my sister has very mid-19th century shoulders! (The picture above already features these two adjustments.)

Oh, and I moved the shoulder seam very slightly to the back - which you can see with my abundance of cellotape in the pattern above. Now I think about it, with my aim date, maybe I could have moved them even further? But it would have messed with the neckline and my aim for a pattern that's as simple as possible.

* * *

I made the buttonholes following the tips in the buttonhole tutorial(s) from Fort Ticonderoga, which proved priceless.

Aside from the fabulous tip to rotate the thread couter-clockwise, it was especially the tip on focusing more on keeping them even than at keeping them tightly packed that came really helpful. I just somehow completely forgot about the cording...

Here four of them finished, with some of the basting already taken out. I originally planned on doing six of them, but then decided only five looked more balanced.

Not bad at all for someone who's mostly managed to avoid buttons for fifteen years of sewing! Definitely all thanks to Stuart Lillie's tutorials. (Okay, and maybe also my general ability to handsew surprisingly neatly, and the power of handbasting stuff - a little more work that saves you a lot of trouble in the long run!)

* * *

This is a placeholder where I may share the finished pattern one day, to make life easier for other busty ladies out there.



P.S. I've introduced a new tag, "Mess of making", which will be strategically placed at posts of particular importance to the truth of occasional sewing fails, messy insides and shortcuts taken. What with sewists online recently often bringing up how discouraging it can be when everyone keeps showing only picture-perfect finished makes, and how helpful it is to see others make mistakes, too: here there be my mess of making, as promised in the very beginning of this blog. I'm not going to show you the mess that's my room, but I do promise you I won't, ever, stick to picture-perfect finished projects only. After all, my love of sewing is just as much if not even more for the learning process as it is for the ability to make pretty clothes. :-)