Trip to Colorado and wearing the Victorian Mourning Dress

My husband and I went on a get away for our Anniversary to Colorado and did a few fun costumy things while there. 

The first night we drove about 8 hours in the rain to Fort Collins. Fort Collins has a very cool little pub called Dungeons & Drafts.  The food is very good and the drinks are excellent, as well as themed for geeky, nerdy things. For example, I had a Butter Beer (Harry Potter) and a Frost Mage (World of Warcraft) for drinks and my husband had The Cap (Captain America) and a sonic screwdriver (Doctor Who).  The whole place is reminiscent of a Dungeons and Dragons Inn and they encourage people to dress up in any costume.  In fact you get 10% off if you do.  Finally they have a game library from which you can borrow games to play with your friends while you eat.This is a really fun place and we would love to go back again.

Dungeons and Drafts

Game Library

 The main reason for the trip however, was to go to the Emma Crawford Wake and the Manitou Springs Coffin Races.  These are annual events in Manitou Springs.  The Wake is held at the Miramont Castle and is basically a short dinner theater that moves from room to room in the castle.  It is historical and intended to educate about wakes in late Victorian times and the effect on the whole household.  After the wake, dinner is served.  Many guests dress up, so I wore the full Victorian Mourning gown and my husband wore his full Victorian.  Unfortunately, we only got a background shot with my husband in full dress.  We also did not take pictures during the wake to avoid distracting the other guests or the actors.  Still it was a lovely evening.

Men's basic without the hat and coat

Back of my dress and my husband in full dress

Dress back

Dress front

 Since we planned on attending the Coffin Races the next day, we stayed in a very cool Victorian Bed and Breakfast called the Avenue Hotel. I highly recommend this place, the breakfast was amazing, the rooms are really beautiful and the owners are wonderful.  We were so comfortable there and had such a lovely time.  A friend of mine and myself wandered around the house and took pictures. Also the front yard was wonderfully decorated for the coffin races so we took some spooky pictures.

The next day we had our amazing breakfast from the Avenue hotel and then went off to tea at the Miramont Castle and to watch coffin racing.  The basic idea is that the coffin (shape and style up to the team) must contain an "Emma" (again the dress for Emma is up to the team) and must be pushed by 4 people.  The teams run in heats of 2 coffins and the winner has the best time.  Some people did go for speed but most went for style.  For example, there as a Viking entry with the coffin as a ship and a giant sail, which added a great deal resistance for running.  Other really crazy ones were: Khaleesi from Game of Thrones in the coffin pushed by 3 large dragons (wings are also bad for running and the heads appeared really hard to see out of) and Drogo; the fast food guys (again Jack in Box giant ball head is not good for vision or running); the news crew with news helicopter coffin; as well as lots of amazing Halloween themed groups.  Also many of the crowd were dressed up.  I tried to get pictures but there were way too many people to get good clear shots of the coffins.  However the whole event was simply a ton of fun and I hope to go again.

Victorian Mourning Gown Bodice

The bodice was relatively simple and was fairly straight forward, thankfully the Truly Victorian Pattern was easy to work with.  I made a quick mock up and discovered the the neckline had to be lowered and the collar redrafted. However the rest of the bodice fit really well and went together fairly easily.  The only hard part is the beautiful pleats that make the tails in the bit were a bit difficult to set, but so worth it.  The bodice is fully boned on the seam lines and on the darts and has a waist tape to keep the back firmly pulled to my waist above the bustle. This waist tape also prevents the bodice from riding up when worn.

Once the bodice was together, I stitched a bunch of beaded trim purchased from M&J Trimming onto the bodice.  The three appliques on the back above the pleats and the one in the center back below the collar are left over from the trim on the skirt.

Bodice back

Bodice front

 A quick note on construction, I decided to flat line all the pieces and then use cotton bias tape to finish all the edges on the inside of the bodice.  This made for really really nice edges, but lots of hand sewing.  This bodice took me much longer than any other I have made, but the smooth edges were so worth it.  The only area of the bodice with an additional lining is the tails on the bodice which in addition to flat lining in cotton, have a silk lining as well in case they flip up while wearing this bodice.

Here is a good detail shot of the trim.

Finally, I made the sleeves out of some of the left over semi-sheer ruched silk used on the false underskirt.  This fabric was stretchy so I made up the sleeves and then altered them until they fit right.  I then used some of the sheer stuff left over from the skirt ruffle and made some quick ruffles for the sleeve edges.

 

Victorian Mourning gown skirt

I have been plugging along on the Victorian Mourning gown and it has taken way longer than I anticipated.  I really underestimated the time required to sew on all the little beaded appliques.  However the base skirt is finally finished.

The first thing I did was fill out the front panel with beaded appliques and beaded fringe (both of these were purchased from M&J Trimming).  I added black beaded loop fringe to the ends of the bows on the front of the dress.  I then took a beaded trim that consisted of square medallions, fray checked between the medallions and cut them apart.  I then sewed the separated medallions down the false opening panels.  Here is a full length picture for the the overall effect and a detail picture to show the medallions and fringe.

I was very worried with how long adding the beaded appliques took that I would not get the butterfly train done and the back of the skirt would be too plain. I had already planned to do the bustling but decided to add a sheer ruffle out of fabric from my stash.  I stitched down the ruffle and hid the stitching with a narrow velvet ribbon.  The ruffle is added only to the sides and the back.

To get an idea of how the skirt would look, I put on my dress dummy over some of my underpinnings.  I plan to wear my red silk corset and my basic bustle.  The corset is drafted from my own pattern and the bustle is made from a Truly Victorian pattern.

I have not posted about the red corset on here so I will give a little information.  I drafted the pattern myself.  It is funny to see it on the dress dummy because the shape on the dummy is completely different than the shape on me.  Contrary to the view on the dummy, this corset is over bust (although low in the bust) and gives a very different final shape.  

The bust is shaped by the addition of a gore on either side and the boning stops just below the bust gore.  The bone channels are flossed with black heavy cotton thread and with slightly different patterns on the top and bottom.  I am trying to get more adventurous in my flossing and some day hope to be able to make designs like the ones from the Symington Collection Flossing Sampler, a portion of which is available free here.

Here is the corset with the bustle for full effect.  I love this bustle.  Since the bustle effect is due to ties in the back, you can adjust them or completely untie them so the bustle is flat for travel.  So very convenient.















With all the underpinnings on my dummy, I was finally able to look at the skirt.  I am pretty happy with it and am glad it was not too plain to wear on its own.

Skirt Front

Skirt back

Skirt side

Victorian Mourning Gown begginings

My friend and I are attending an event in Colorado, a Victorian Wake at the Miramont Castle in Manitou Springs in a couple of weeks.  The Miramont Castle is really fun to wander through and I could not resist the chance to attend the Wake.

Of course this means I needed a dress. I have always wanted a Victorian Mourning gown so this was the perfect opportunity.  I have a Pintrest board for inspiration here.  Although I have decided not to copy a particular dress, my favorite is this dress from the Met Museum here.  I love the false front/split skirt look and decided I need this for my dress.

To start with I needed patterns.  I am using several from Truly Victorian that I will modify as needed.  I have always had good luck with their patterns.  I will definitely make the bodice and the base skirt, but I have not yet decided on the butterfly bustle yet.  It would be so lovely, but I worry about the train in the crowd.

The skirt plan: I will make this skirt with the bustled back and ruffle. I plan on only adding the ruffle to the sides and the back of the skirt.  The front of the skirt I plan to make in different silk to appear as an underskirt and will add narrow partial front pieces of the main silk as a false opening. 

TV261-R 1885 Four-gore Underskirt

 If I have time, I would like to make the detachable Butterfly Train.  I just dont know if I will have time before this event and again trains and crowds are bad together.

TV361 Late 1880s Butterfly Detachable Train

 For the bodice, I really wanted the triangular neck opening, so I have decided to use the 1883 Tail Bodice.  I plan to use the short tails and 3/4 sleeves for this particular dress.

TV462 1883 Tail Bodice

For fabrics, I bought silk from Dharma Trading company.  I had originally wanted  to use silk velvet, but they were out when I went to order.  I settled on the 19.5mm Black Charmeuse as a substitute.  Although this is one of the heaviest silks they carry it is still super light weight!  More light weight than anything I have made Victorian with before.  This makes me nervous but we will see how it goes.  I also rummaged around in the stash and found some other silks for accents that should work well.  For example, this sheer silk below to fill in the false front in the skirt.

Sheer silk with lining

To start with I cut the front panel of the skirt out of some of the stash silk.  This silk is see through so it is lined with black cotton.  I treated the sheer silk and cotton as one  piece and darted it as per the pattern instructions. I then prepared some double sided Charmeuse silk pieces for the false opening.  I then stitched all these pieces together to be treated as one for the front of the skirt.  For the start of the decorations, I made tubes out of the black Charmeuse and made bows.  The bows are hand stitched to the skirt to keep them from moving, but the tubes are left free  until they meet the false sides to give the impression of being separate pieces.  Here are a couple of pictures so far!  I took pictures both with and without the flash.  No flash is truer to the colors, but the details or lost.  The flash image shows the details much better.

Skirt front no flash

Skirt front with flash

HSM for May: Practicality a simple set of Victorian Skirts

I was wandering around the internet trying to decide what I wanted to make for the May Practicality challenge when I ran across the skirts shown to the left.  I love these skirts and I love the pockets, they are so functional and yet stylish at the same time.  Even better, these skirts were one set of 3 that were the subject of a very well written article by Sunny Buchler for Your Wardrobe Unlock'd (for those with subscriptions, the article is here).

Sunny did a wonderful job fully analyzing these skirts and there was so much information to aid me in creating my own, yet I still managed to mess the skirts up pretty badly.  I have gone back a forth a couple of times on if I wanted to post about this attempt or not....but with all the talk lately in the online costume community about the myth of perfection, I figured I would go ahead and post anyway.  This was a good learning experience for me, particularly since I am still pretty uncomfortable with the construction of Victorian clothing.

The brown skirt set is from 1869-1874 and I love that the pockets on the front are no only functional but show staining that suggests they were actually used.  The original skirts were wool, but I had some brown twill laying around that I felt would be perfect.  I also decided to vary my skirts a bit from the original and add a 3rd color trim as a method to use up a ton of oyster colored bias tape that has been sitting around my stash forever.  I was inspired to do this because the pockets on the original were piped and I also had matching oyster colored piping in the stash I could use on my own pockets.

Sunny's analysis was absolutely wonderful!  She provided information on the number, size and type of pleat for every position on the skirt.  Using her article, I easily made the underskirt.  The underskirt is kept fairly flat in the front with only one very shallow and wide pleat. The majority of the fullness in the skirt was kept to the back.  The sides of the skirt had knife pleats with a set of stacked pleats in the center back for fullness.  The is skirt is really very satisfying to wear as it moves beautifully!

Underskirt Front

Underskirt Back

  The overskirt is where I got myself into trouble and I should have realized it earlier in the process before construction.  I remember thinking I would probably not have enough fabric for both skirts and that I would likely have to piece the underskirt significantly.  When I made the pattern pieces and laid them out somehow they fit.  I should have realized this suggested that I made the pattern wrong and I should have remeasured the pieces and compared again to the original article.  I missed adding the measurements for the fact that the overskirt also had layered pleats in the back and only added enough for single pleats. Now the overskirt is way too narrow across the back bustle area.  As a result, the lack of room across the back pulls the sides of the over skirt back and creates a very narrow front silhouette.  As you can see below how narrow the skirt is from the front and the pulling across the back.

Both skirts Front

Both skirts Back

I do like the way the pockets came out, although I attached them upside down from the original (oops!). And I do like the way the buttons came out.  I was a bit leery of hand covering large buttons and if they would look OK, but I do love them. 

I have since fixed the pattern issue, but I cannot get more of the twill to match.  The brown set of skirts will need to stay too narrow, so they will not be appropriate for Victorian wear.  I think I will keep these skirts for Steampunk, but I plan to make a new set of skirts using the corrected pattern for actual Victorian wear.  I guess I can say that my May Practicality challenge produced a pattern, if not actual skirts! And I learned quite a bit from this experience.

Historical Sew Monthly! My first goal of 2015

I have always wanted to participate in the Historical Sew Fortnightly, but was too intimidated by the new item every 2 weeks plan.  I loved following those who did participate and was so inspired by what other made with those challenges.  This year, since there is a month for every challenge, I thought I would try and participate.  I am so excited!

I am still figuring out what I want to make for each challenge, but I have started on the first one which is listed below

January – Foundations: make something that is the foundation of a period outfit.

I was very inspired by an article on Foundations Revealed on the creation of a corset from a patent.  The patent is from 1883 filed by Catharine A. Griswold.  Sandra Stuart, who wrote the article, made an amazing corset using this patent and I absolutely loved the look.

Here is the link to the patent Patent 291335 and below are the 2 main images from the patent to give you and idea of the shape of the corset and the pattern pieces.  I absolutely love that this corset has straps!

 I did my first attempt at resizing the corset and it was complete failure!  I took the pattern pieces and resized them in Photoshop.  The measurements all looked good, however when I got it put it was completely wrong.  The bust measurement has most of the area in the actual bust, where as I am fairly small busted but apparently wide across the back for this pattern.  I could not lace the top at all and the front gaped quite alarmingly.  The corset also compressed my ribs too much for any comfort and the hip shape was poor for me. I will try again to alter the pattern for my shape and hopefully round 2 will fit well enough that I can at least get a picture.

Victorian Picnic

The Steampunk Vampire dress is made such that the steampunk bits are all added as accessories.  I did this so I would also be able to wear the dress as a regular Victorian dress.  I had the opportunity to wear the remade dress to a Victorian Tea hosted by a local tearoom.....I just needed to get the remade dress to a wearable state!  Thankfully, I had made this dress before so it went together pretty quickly.  For the most part I remade the dress exactly as it was before.  There were 2 big exceptions, one planned and one not so planned. 

The planned one was to make a Balayeuse.  Basically this is a removable dust ruffle for a skirt.  I got the idea from an article on Your Wardrobe Unlockd, which is a fun costume e-zine which I am a member of (Making a Balayeuse).  If you are not a member the e-zine allows the authors to put their articles on their own site after some period of time and the same article is available on the author's blog (Yesterdays Thimble).  I thought a dust ruffle would be a great idea for this skirt since half the stripes are white and that means they show dirt!  Anyway, I did not follow the article since this skirt is an odd shape, I used the skirt pattern as a guide and made a Balayeuse out of cotton muslin.  In the pictures, I have it just pinned to the inside while I figure out the correct height, you can see it poking out the skirts in some of the pictures.  I want it to be a bit longer to protect the skirt but not show too much since it is very plain.  Once I get it properly adjusted, then I will make button holes on the Balayeuse and button the Balayeuse to the skirt. 

The non-planned change was the addition of a pleated ruffle around the bottom of the skirt.  I finished cutting everything out and realized I had fabric left over.  I had a really hard time estimating fabric since the pattern calls for 45 or 60 inch wide and the original was 45 wide, but the new fabric was 110 inches wide.  I used all the remaining fabric to make a box pleated ruffle for the bottom of the skirt.  Ok, so enough talk time for some pictures! 

Some notes: I did not manage to finish my new hat, so the hat I am wearing will be replaced in the future!  The beautiful fan I am carrying was made by The Treasures Of Dawn and the stockings and shoes were from American Duchess.  I love how comfortable the Victorian Button Boots are!  The other very lovely dress was made by a good friend of mine, I love how her red and green dress came out and I especially love her hat!

  

Black and White Victorian Remake waterfall drapes

I am continuing to work on the Black and White Victorian.  Mostly I am still sewing all the panels for the skirt together.  I have also washed the corset and the rear skirt drape red silk in synthropol to attempt to remove any remaining excess dye.  After removing the excess dye I remade the rear skirt drape.  I am still very unsure that I have removed all the excess dye, so I am going to attach the drapes to the finished skirt with hook and eyes so they are removable in case I ever need to wash the skirt again.

Black and White Bustled Victorian Remake

A friend has invited me to a Victorian picnic!  I am so excited, however, the only Victorian I have finished is made of heavy velvet and will be way too hot for a outdoor, summer picnic in New Mexico.  So I decided this is a perfect opportunity to redo my favorite Victorian dress ever.  I made a Victorian dress and steampunk accents for a Steampunk Vampire outfit.  I loved this dress!  Unfortunately, after only a few pictures and one wearing of a couple of hours, the dress was ruined.  I was so very angry that I have refused to remake this dress as I get angry whenever I think about it.   However, I am going to remake this dress for the picnic and a new hat as well!  

Here is the surviving bodice and the ruined skirt.  The new fabric has wider stripes and is a slightly different black, so I am going to have to redo the whole dress.  However, I am probably going to save the bodice, remove the trim and maybe alter it so I can wear it with a different skirt.

If anyone is interested in pictures/blog of the original dress it can be found at my old blog
http://dalbeth.livejournal.com/     The tag is steampunk vampire for those who might be interested. 

The first big step is remaking the skirt, as I did the first time, I will be using the Truly Victorian pattern for the 1875 Parisian trained skirt.  I learned from experience the last time that this lovely printed cotton behaves epically badly in the front aprons.  Last time, I figured this out after the skirt was constructed and spent hours trying to stitch stay tapes to the undersides of the aprons with it hung from my curtain rod.  This was most uncomfortable, so I am adding tapes before I put the skirt together this time. 

Here is the top apron.  This is a pretty narrow apron, so I did only one tape.   I used cotton twill tape for this.  I have no idea of tapes likes this were ever used on the front aprons in period but I figured it is at least a plausible solution.  I hand stitched the tapes.  

On the bottom apron I stitched 2 tapes rather than 1.  This apron is narrow enough for 1 tape, but with the tape in the top apron and the vertical strips having both aprons with center tapes gives a very strong and structured vertical line.  I wanted this to look more organic than so structured.