Although I was originally concerned with the narrow loom width of my silk, it actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After spending many hours perusing Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion, I was thrilled to discover that almost all of the garments in this book were constructed from panels that are 22 inches or narrower... and my fabric is 21 inches! This gave me a good excuse to try out period rectangular construction techniques, and it made me feel good about having a very pieced skirt!
Although the Elenora of Toledo gown would have been an obvious choice for a skirt pattern, I eventually decided to base my version on another surviving garment worn by Pfalzgrafin Dorthea Maria von Sulzbach (#48 in the PoF). With the exception of one skirt worn with a French farthingale, all of the full skirts in Patterns of Fashion are constructed with rectangular sections for the front and back and some sort of gored panels on the side. There does not appear to be much evolution in skirt patterns during the 16th century, so I felt very comfortable using this later gown as reference, and the only major difference between it and the Florentine garment was that it was a bit fuller... and I'm a sucker for a really full skirt!
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| ignore the gathers... the final version will have box pleats |
I then cut out the silk and a muslin interlining, and sewed it all together. The muslin and silk pieces were each matched up, and then I sewed these double layers of fabric as if they were one. This gives my thin silk a bit more stability and body, and I am extremely pleased with how it turned out. However, my luck ran out at this point when I realized that I didn't have enough linen to make the lining! AARRGH!!! So I took this as a sign from the sewing gods that the linen just wasn't meant to be, and ordered some Habotai silk for a replacement, which hopefully, will turn out to be even better. So for now, I'm waiting for my fabric for the lining and guards, and there's not much else I can do until it gets here. Let's hope UPS hurries... I'm starting to get really excited now that it's finally looking sort of like a real dress!
Sorry for the long hiatus. I can's believe it has been a month since the last update! After I finally got my order of fabric in from Thai Silks, my next challenge was to add the guards to the hem... which ended up being the most ridiculously frustrating and difficult part of this project so far. A big part of the problem came from my over-indulgent choice of silk-backed velvet for the embellishment. I fell in love with the feel and amazing color (which alternates between plum, chocolate, burgundy, and black depending on the light), but I somehow managed to forget how much I despise sewing with velvet. It's amazing how selective my memory can be when I'm lusting after pretty fabrics. ;-)
So anyway, I'll spare you all of the boring details, but let me just say that good velvet is truly evil, and it almost caused me to have a complete nervous breakdown. I had forgotten how slippery and temperamental that stuff can be, and basically, it just refused to stay where I put it no mater how much I pinned, basted, pleaded or cursed. The second problem came from the fact that my hand-sewing skills are pretty horrendous, which doesn't help when you are working with a material that has issues with the sewing machine. I really wanted to go for the authenticity bonus points and hand-stitch all of the embellishments onto the gown, but it was taking forever and looked horrible to boot, so I had to re-evaluate my priorities and face a few facts about my sewing abilities (or lack thereof). I finally realized that hand-sewing is nothing to brag about if it looks like crap, so I decided to use the machine after all.
After sewing the guards on and ripping them off more times than I care to say, I finally made a pretty cool discovery that really helped me out of my predicament. I came up with the idea of backing the velvet guards with linen to keep them from slipping around so much. I did this by placing long strips of velvet and linen right sides together, basting them, then sewing up both sides. Then, when I flipped them right side out, the edges were nicely finished, and it sort of looked like a two-sided ribbon. At this point I could have tried to hand stitch them again, but I noticed that with the linen backing, they became fairly stiff if you machine-stitched them onto the support fabric, and this would provide additional hem stiffening so that I wouldn't have to add an interlining of wool felt to the bottom of the skirt like I had originally planned. The thick velvet pile hides the top-stitching remarkably well, and the linen worked so well to eliminate slipping that I didn't have to use one single pin to hold the guards in place while sewing them down.
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| a side view... | and a front view |
As for the size, placement, and number of guards, you might have noticed that my design has changed a bit from my original sketches. The more research that I did, the more I wanted every detail to be a true reflection of early 16th century Florentine fashions. The original sketch used a pattern of skirt guards that was inspired by a later German style, but Florentine gowns only have one or two rows of modest sized guards (if any!) very close to the hem. The combination of one large and one small row on a skirt can be seen in two paintings from this period (on the underskirts of the two center ladies in this fresco, and also in this later Italian painting), and a similar arrangement appears on a number of Florentine bodices.
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| an example of box-pleating |
The style of pleating was inspired by a skirt in a painting by Andrea del Sarto that clearly shows
box pleats on a Florentine gown. My side opening slits are exactly on the sides of the skirt with four panels at the front
and four at the back. Since the back of my bodice is seven inches smaller that the front,
I had to make single box pleats for the front and double box pleats for the back. But I think this
actually creates a nice effect since it concentrates most of the fullness at the back.
The pleats (which you can see in a close-up here) have been tacked
down to keep them fairly stable for the moment, but they will have to be adjusted
a bit more when they are sewn onto the bodice. Once they are sewn into place and pressed, they will
look much better than what you see in these early pics.
Maybe I'm just cursed, but the guards were once again a complete nightmare when I tried to add them to the neckline of the bodice. After looking at all of the Florentine pictures that I had collected, I decided to make two rows of guards at the neck like the example seen here. Wouldn't ya know... I fell in love with the most difficult style imaginable!
When I laid out some trial strips to check the placement, I discovered that the shape of my bodice would cause the corners of the guards to just sort of float out at the sides of my chest, but in order to look right, the bottom row needed to go all the way to my armpits. This problem seemed to come from my neckline being cut too low (this picture shows what I am talking about), but I wasn't sure that I wanted the neckline any higher, and I was out of silk anyway. I could also make it work by cutting the arm-holes bigger or changing the angle of the straps, but neither of these solutions were perfect either. To be honest, a big part of the reason this dress has taken so long is because I just couldn't decide how to fix this problem! After agonizing about it and dragging my feet for a month, I finally decided to raise the neck a bit and cut the arms a little bigger--that way neither alteration would be quite as noticeable. A small strip of extra fabric was sewn to the top edge of the bodice, and this ugly seam would be covered by a guard.
Word to the wise: If you are making an gown with guards at the neckline, plan out the embellishment details before you make your pattern and cut your fabric!
I also had a lot of trouble deciding how to put the bodice together since the internal boning complicated things quite a bit. The outer silk fabric was not as stretchy as the linen interlining, so I realized that it would have to be pulled very tight to make it fit the curve at the bust without wrinkling. Because of this issue, I decided to treat the corded interlining and flat-lined silk as one piece, and hand stitch another layer of lining to the inside to just hide to edges once everything else was done. I started putting it all together by pinning the outer fabric to the corded layer and then trying it on with the help of my nifty little temporary lacing strips. I then had to stretch and pin the outer fabric quite taut to get rid of the wrinkles. This step would not be as difficult if I was making the dress from a stretchier fabric like wool or linen, and I think it also would have been easier to make it stay smooth if the corded bodice was a separate garment worn beneath the gown. (*note from much later* My further experiments with hemp cord have made me realize that the heavy 1/8 inch cord isn't really necessary. You can still eliminate wrinkles and get great support with the much lighter 1/16 inch hemp cord, and the corded pieces don't have the same problems with stretching or shrinking if you use the smaller stuff. This change makes constructing a bodice with a corded interlining no different than one with plain fabric interlining.)
I then basted these layers together and finished the shoulder straps by hand. The guards were pined in place, then basted down, and the cornered were mitered and whip-stitched in place. I was a bit concerned about top-stitching the guards on the bodice like I did with the hem, but the guards on this Bronzino portrait that I found last week appear to be top-stitched, so I decided not to worry about it. I used the sewing machine to sew the guards on the shoulders and back, but I had to hand-stitch the front section since the hemp cords ran almost all the way to the top of the bodice, and I was too scared to try to sew through them on my sewing machine. Finally, the selvage edges of the neckline and side openings were turned in and basted down. There are still a few picky problems that need to be fixed, and the lining and eyelets will be added later, but hallelujah--at least I have a bodice!!! :-)
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| layers basted together | guards tacked into place | bodice front | bodice back |
I was held up once again by some annoying technical problems, but it looks like I've finally made it to the home stretch! After the last update, I had to remove part of the guards yet again to fix some minor fitting problems. Raising the neckline in the front made it stick out from my chest quite a bit at the top, so I put several small darts under the first large guard to make it better curve back in over my breasts. I also had to take up one of the shoulder straps which somehow ended up being almost 2" too big. I'm still not quite sure how that happened!
Then to top it all off, I discovered that the pleated skirt didn't fit the bottom edge of the bodice quite right, so I had to un-do the pleats, refigure the measurements, and sew them again. But at last, the skirt and bodice decided to play nice with each other, and I actually have something resembling a dress!!! I still need to add a lining to the bodice and sew the permanent lacing holes, but that should be a walk in the park after all of the drama I've been through so far. Oh, and by the way... I tried it on with my Elizabethan shirt for the new pictures just for the heck of it. I think it look pretty cool like this--all I would need is a belt or a sash and I would be ready to go.
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