Dress Diary - 1876 Walking Dress pt 1 - Pattern and impressions

I hate copying patterns. 

I've spent several hours this weekend copying the Patterns of History 1876 Bustle Dress pattern. I lover everything about this dress, from the v-neck embellishments to the longer bodice, and the longer overskirt with it's fullness swept into a demi-train. I'm not sure how I feel about the back of the overskirt; I might modify that into a long pleat, but we'll see. 

This particular pattern was published in 1975, taken from a dress in the collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, for which they have a complete province. The patterns for the foundational skirt, overskirt, and bodice are fairly conventional, and in some ways similar to more recent patterns. However, I feel like the more recent publications miss some important points, largely that the skirts of 1876 have very different supports than those of 1874. 1876 was a transition between the Early Bustle profile and the Natural Form profile. By 1876, bodices were longer, ending in some cases at hip level. Overskirts were also longer. The hip and derrière areas were not yet tightly fitted, and the high bustle of the early 70's had given way to a more moderate derrière with fullness transferred to below knee-level. My impression is supported by a number of fashion plates from 1876 - and this pattern.

Due to its age, this pattern isn't widely available. I felt pretty lucky to get one from a seller on Etsy; it was in mint condition, sealed. The pattern is printed on 6 large sheets of sturdy paper. Being 50 years old, that paper is set in its folds and discolored a bit on the edges. I do not cut patterns; interestingly, the directions with this pattern recommend not cutting, but tracing the pieces. 

I use Pellon Tru-Grid 810 for tracing. Some searching on Ebay turned up a bolt at about the same price as those cheap JoAnn days. Tru-Grid is printed with a 1" grid, which I like for maintaining grain on the fashion fabric. Because it is a non-woven fabric, it is a bit awkward to lay over the creases of the paper, and I've been using weights and yard sticks to tame the chaos.  

Why do I hate copying patterns? It's tedious. I feel that I can't get a perfect copy. The Pellon always moves. In the case of this pattern, it is taking all my patience and perseverance to get a decent copy. Okay, okay - a couple of millimeters of difference in a line won't make a significant difference, but I'm picky. 

On the other hand, copying patterns means that I retain a pristine copy for later use, for reference or if I need to make a different size. It's a good thing, and so I persist. 

The Patterns of History pattern comes in single sizes. The one I was able to get is a size 14. 

I am not. 

I will have to grade this pattern which means that the copy that I'm making now will not be the copy that I cut out. I worry about multiplying errors. This pattern does not provide measurements for a size 14, so I don't have any idea about what measurements it's based on. However the waistbands are 27", which means that I need start out adding 14" to all circumferences. Good thing that I have lots of mock-up fabric. 

One other benefit of tracing a pattern is to build familiarity with the pattern. For instance, this pattern makes use of facings, which I believe are ahistoric, not to mention being unnecessarily fiddly. I will be flat-lining instead. This pattern also uses a built-in "cincher" in place of a corset; of course I'll be dispensing with this work-around designed for the modern woman. One difference from more recent publications is that this pattern has 5/8" seam allowances. I'm used to 1/2". 

The other notable thing about this pattern is that the ruffles are all cut on the bias. Because I'm using striped fabric, this was my plan all along, but to have them in pattern pieces is ... interesting. Looking at the pattern pieces for the ruffles and ruches, I can tell that there are some interesting embellishment effects that I may or may not use. 

It's a bit like a Janet Arnold drawing of an extant dress, without the handy grid underlaying. I'm copying all the parts that I'm likely to use, but since I'm not cutting the pattern I'll have it for reference if anything goes awry. 

 

1876 - Commemoration, Creation, and Transition

This year is the 150th anniversary of the creation of Colorado. We're known as the Centennial State, because we are the only state in the union that was established on the U. S. centennial. Between this auspicious anniversary and that of the U. S., celebrations are planned for this summer all over the state.

Colorado is a state with a storied history. These lands - being rich in resources and beauty, and on the U. S. frontier in the late nineteenth century - seemed to attract all sorts of interesting people who came here for largely economic reasons. Before Anglo-Americans arrived, the region was home to several indigenous cultures, people who were displaced and murdered for the wealth that was to be exploited by the colonizers. Some of our history is truly shameful, and still there are stories to be told about remarkable people doing remarkable things. Part of our "official" celebration is to platform the histories of all people who have historically called this region home, along with recognizing that our shared history is how we make decisions about our future that reflect our values of human rights, ecological conservation, and the rule of law. 

For all of these things, I'm pretty proud of my (second) home state. 

It's convenient that our founding is centered in the era that neo-Victorians enjoy so much. While there are a wide variety of commemorations happening all over the state this year, I'm most interested in those that refer back to the 1870s - 1890s. DVSS has been holding an annual excursion up to South Park for several years, usually to South Park City in Fairplay, but sometimes to the railroad revival in Como. This year, South Park City intends to put on a commemorative show in their Living History Days in August. 

I simply must have a new patriotic frock. 

And 1876 is the problem. 

Those of us engaged in sartorial history generally divide the last quarter of the nineteenth century into four eras. Early Bustle is 1870 - 1876; Natural Form is 1877-1882, and Late Bustle is 1883-1889, while the Belle Epoch is 1890-1900. The change between each dress era is pretty dramatic. Well, all but the first two. 

There seems to be a transitional period of 1874-1876, in which the skirt silhouette changed from bustle to slope, and not fitted in the derrière and thighs. 1876 fashion plates show the cuirass bodice of the upcoming Natural Form style over this new skirt shape. The rear silhouette no longer featured the elevated rump; instead there is a long continuous line from narrow waist to floor or beyond to the end of the train.   

The "princess" or polonaise style was also popular in 1876, long bodices which transitioned into drapery below the waist, worn over the same skirt shape. Overskirts and polonaise fronts are longer than seen earlier in the Early Bustle era. 

While both of these styles bore some resemblance to the dress eras that bracketed 1876, they are clearly not typical of either of them.  

Some original skirt/overskirt and polonaise patterns are available for these transitional years, however modern patterns have skipped this transition almost entirely. To be fair, there were still a few full bustle skirts in 1876, but the trend away from the bustle is clear. Truly Victorian has one 1876 skirt (TV 216, the Parisian Trained Skirt) which seems to have the current base form, but with an excess of embellishment. TV carries the classic cuirass bodice from which all kinds of modifications can be made to neckline, hemline, and sleeves - it will do perfectly for 1876.

Ageless Patterns is a great source for the originals, but they're almost entirely too small for this body and would require grading. I do buy them however, because they provide the shape of the original garment which can be applied to patterns like TV. The princess gown in Figure 2 is fairly typical of the year and available from Ageless Patterns. 

Black Snail and Laughing Moon are both missing this style, although the Black Snail 1870 Wrapper Dress (#0919) might be a good base from which a princess gown could be fashioned. 

However, there is one pattern out there which seems to be a really useful source - the Patterns of History 1876 Bustle Dress. (Figure 3) It features a cuirass bodice with a lovely shawl collar and a long overskirt which has an understated bouffant back. The coat sleeves, collar, and hemline are heavily embellished. The bodice has a peplum back which I find to be especially fetching. One of the better points is that it's a pattern made from an extant gown in a Western (Wisconsin is kind of West, right?) U. S. museum - which means that it's a decent cultural fit for 1876 Colorado. I believe (based on patten reviews) that it has a train, although the drawing shows the skirt in a walking length - bonus for traveling through a dusty western town. 

Now, to find it. 

It took some time and a lot of search terms, but I have indeed secured one, in size 14. Unopened and uncut. I feel like a lucky girl, even though the price has increased somewhat from the 1970's list price. While I may have to grade parts of it, I expect that (for the bodice anyway) it will be mostly a process of applying shape changes to TV 420B, the 1879 Cuirass bodice. Photos of women in 1876 show that the skirt of the cuirass bodice does not have to fit the hips so carefully. Skirts are easy to grade. I'm eagerly awaiting its arrival, and hoping that it's a bit like opening Janet Arnold. 

Who, by the way, also skips 1876; however, the 1878 day dress in Patterns of Fashion 2 looks remarkably similar to POH 1876, if the POH dress was one piece. 

I do have one other book which might be of help. Frances Grimble's (for whom I admit to having few charitable feelings) Fashions of the Gilded Age Vol 1 has the trained petticoat in it which supports those long sloping skirts. I know this, because I've made one - before I lost the book somewhere. 

Try to find that one; it's out of print. There's one on ebay for <koffs> $331 USD.  The good news is that it's readily available through ILL, and so I'm eagerly awaiting its arrival. 

A lot of research and a plan is beginning to come together, however nebulous it may be. I've decided to use the POH 1876 pattern as a jumping off point. I have in my stash an indigo blue 19th-century style cotton print and a length of striped cotton in red, white, indigo, and Wedgewood blue. I'd prefer the bodice and overskirt to be the blue, which leaves the stripe for the foundation skirt and cuff/collar trimmings. I also have a great gob of netting lace and cotton embroidered lace which I want to deploy as in Figure 1. I'm largely interested in the ornate necklines and sleeve cuffs as illustrated in contemporary fashion plates, and  the decorative possibilities of cutting that stripe on the bias for flounces and ruches. 

I'm making some ribbon cockades in Colorado colors - red, white, blue, and gold for decorative elements, and I'm considering other ways to bring gold into the r/w/b scheme. Small gold picture buttons are on order, picturing little birds perched on a twig. 

For undergarments, I will need to make a new long ruffled petticoat. I'm certain that I can make some significant improvements on the one I made long ago. 

Sew patriotic, right? I can find no evidence that women wore these colors in commemoration 150 years ago. However, I'm planning on this ensemble to get a good workout this year, perhaps with a less obviously patriotic underskirt next year. 

Early Bustle 6-piece ensemble after Janet Arnold

Since Lara made me the Early Bustle polonaise, and since I'm building the undergarments (and the skirt) for it, it seems like it would be a shame to only have one gown that I can wear with it. (I know, right?) However, that skirt and bustle are still in process, and I'm not starting on a new project until I finish something, so I'm resolved to hold off on a second 1870s project. For now. 

However, I can't not ruminate and plan, so here is the current thinking. 

This all started because a friend gifted me with a silk queen duvet cover and shams of striped two-tone gray or silver dupioni. It seems to cry out as Early Bustle, especially since this striped pattern appears in Janet Arnold, taken from the gray and blue striped original. 

The original ensemble is silk and cotton, with blue ruchings and fringe trim. It's a 6-piece ensemble consisting of skirt and overskirt, basque, two bodices, and a gilet. One bodice is a day bodice, and the gilet is a detachable filler for the deep square neckline. The other bodice is an evening bodice. 

This is an elegant solution to issues of economy in both the cost of fabric and space, and it meets my interest in the "capsule" wardrobe concept, in which several coordinating pieces can be combined in an assortment of ways to achieve a variety of looks and uses. 

The original evening gown bodice features a low wide neckline and short puff sleeves, while the day bodice has long sleeves with flared cuffs at the elbow and wrist. The square neckline of the day bodice was popular, but the attachment of a removable gillet creates a more modest presentation. 

The basque is removable, and I can imagine a couple of basques created for this ensemble with different shapes and decoration to switch up the presentation. 

An additional feature of the evening bodice is a net or beaded lace insert to draw the neckline in, adjusting it to the desired shoulder placement. 

I'm also attracted to this original gown because of the liberal use of buttons - I'm kind of a button fiend, and my "trademark" is using non-matching buttons of a similar size and color on all my Neo-Victorian creations. 

The other things that I especially love about this gown are the bias-cut ruffles, and the yards upon yards of bubble gathered ruchings. I'm not sure how I feel about the fringe; my personal taste runs to lace. We'll see about that. 

The ensemble would take a woman from day into evening with a simple change of the bodice. During the day, the ensemble would be worn with long sleeves and the removable gillet and be termed a "day" dress; in the evening, the lower sleeve and gillet would  be removed for dinner or a social event; the entire bodice changed to the low neckline and short sleeves to convert the ensemble into a ball gown. 

Several dressmakers [1] [2] have recreated the pattern, so I've been looking at their dress diaries to see how they addressed Arnold's pattern. I'll admit it; I don't have a ton of confidence drafting patterns from Arnold. They're complex. So much stuff. Parts and parts. 

I feel more comfortable starting with a known quantity, so I'm going to buy Truly Victorian patterns and start with making adjustments from them. This should work well, since most dress pieces followed a set of standard forms; skirts were similar shapes, and bodices all are basically about the same. The patterns are as follows:

• 1875 Ball Gown Basque
  
• 1871 Day Gown Bodice
  
• 1870 Trained Skirt Ensemble, View B
  

The basque and gillet patterns will have to be drafted from Arnold, but they're straightforward and I can handle that. 

All those TV patterns together are 12.5 yards of fabric. There are not 12.5 yards in a duvet cover, so I need a contrasting color. And since the duvet cover is silk, I really feel strongly that the rest of the ensemble needs to be silk too. I can't help it. It just needs to be. 

So I'm looking for some contrasting plain silk taffeta. (Dupioni is okay - and cheaper - but it really wasn't used much for clothing in the Victorian era.) I prefer aubergine, but burgundy is good too. The plan is to make the bodices of the striped silk, and trimmed in aubergine/burgundy silk, and then construct the skirt out of the contrasting silk, with the ruffles in striped silk. The best price I can find on burgundy taffeta means that I still need to invest $135 into fabric. 

I'll keep looking. 

The dress diary will come in the fall of 2023, when I have time to actually start on this project. I hope to have it done before Costume College in March 2024.

[1] https://thedreamstress.com/portfolio-1871-pink-extravaganza-afternoon-ensemble/

[2] https://teainateacup.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/making-an-early-1870s-gown-skirts/

Dress Diary: When in doubt, add another petticoat (part 2 - engineering)

And here we get to the engineering of a petticoat. 

To review, I'm making the first of about 3 walking length petticoats, based on an exemplar from The Delineator magazine from 1896. They will be made of premium bleached muslin, with faux silk absinthe green ruching. 

The first petticoat body is cut of seven gores, as my skirts are seven gores. It will have 2 tiers of applied ruffles, and an adjustable waistband. The petticoat is designed to be convertible to a ballgown length, by applying buttonholes to attach a ruffled and ruched train. 

Before I found the exemplar that I liked the best, I had already cut out the seven gore body of the petticoat. As a matter of fact, I'd flat felled the seams and hemmed the body. I'd cut it somewhat shorter than the skirt of course, since being a New Woman, I didn't want my petticoat in the dust and mud. 

I wasn't planning on two tiers of ruffles. 

But here we are, and so I didn't feel too bad about cutting off that hem. 

I'd also hemmed 6+ yards of 8" ruffle, but again, two tiers, so I'll have to re-engineer. 

The ruffle tiers

Ruffles are long, tedious, but basically mindless. Tear the longset strips of yardage that you can, flat-fell seams between lengths, make sure that you have a full bobbin, and hemhemhemhem... 

I made a new length of ruffles with about 7 yards of 5" muslin which will yield a 4" tier after finishing. My petticoat body hem conveniently measures at 4 yards, which typically requires about 6 yards of ruffles. I'll be honest - I didn't feel like cutting off a yard of length, and so I went with it. The ruffle length was hemmed with a narrow rolled hem on one side, and with a gathering stitch on the other. 

The ruffle was then gathered to the hemline, and placed about 3/8" from the edge, right sides together. (I might have placed a piece of lace between the body and the ruffle for extra, but I didn't on the first one. Maybe the next one.) Turns out that 1:1.5 doesn't seem like an adequate hem to ruffle ratio for this application, so the extra yard was a good thing. 

The ruffle is stitched to the body hemline and then the extra length is folded over and stitched down to finish the inside seam.

The bottom tier is 9.5" wide and 14 yards long, which is 2x of the top tier. Changed my mind to use green organza ribbon for the ruches, at 28 yards long gathered 2x to the ruffle. Each length of ruching ribbon was pinned at 1 yard intervals, and then gathered within those intervals to keep the fullness consistent across the entire ruffle tier. The top row of ribbon ruching is placed at 4" from the hem of the tier, and the bottom row is at 2" from the hem. Finally, the ruches are stitched to the ruffle tier. 

The ruffle volume increases dramatically with all the ruches attached. 

The bottom tier is then stitched together in an enormous circle, and the back seam is aligned with the back seam of the petticoat. To gather the bottom ruffle tier, I pinned the bottom tier - finished top edge to the right side of the top tier - at 12" intervals to 6" intervals on the top tier, pulled the gathering threads and then pinned the gathers evenly in the 6" spaces. The bottom tier is then stitched onto the top tier. 

This manual method of gathering is super labor-intensive, and depends on doubling the tiers each layer to get a good amount of support for the skirt. I have no idea how many hours I've spent on this one petticoat, but it's been at least a few full days of work. I will be using a ruffler attachment on my machine for the next petticoat, and hoping that I can get adequate volume. 

The waist

There is actually no "band" on the model from The Delineator; it's a bias-cut facing. A 3" wide bias band is stitched to the right side of the waistline with a 5/8" seam allowance, the ends finished in a narrow rolled hem. The waist tapes were stitched below this seam to the inside of the vertical seams between the second and third gores - but one of them pulled out on the first wearing! So I pulled out the other, and ran a new twill tape through the entire waist facing - which was turned and pressed to the inside, and then stitched down. 

The REST of the Story

The Neverending petticoat persists. 

After finishing it, I decided that it was a tripping hazard and needed to be taken up 2". 

Did I do the easy thing, and take off the ruffles to shorten the body? Oh, no! I reasoned that while I'm currently wearing flats, I might be able to manage heels one day and so didn't want to actually shorten the petticoat. I took a one inch tuck just above the top tier and then folded in the bottom hem for another inch. The length is perfect, and I'll be using that length for petticoat #2. 

In addition, the twill tape on hand at JoAnn's is too wide and too stiff for the waist tie. I've ordered a more suitable length from Amazon and will be replacing the replacement. 

In short, this was really a wearable mockup, and I've learned a lot for the next 5 petticoats that I need. Make it shorter, how to finish the interior seams, and I need to learn to use a ruffler attachement for my machine. I love the bias-faced waistband, and will continue to use that. The adjustability is perfect for my changing size. And the floof really does make the 1890's skirt silhouette.