A Dormeuse Cap, Part 3: Finishing the Cap

About an hour ago, I finished the cap. Then I tried it on, without being in costume and with hair put up in the quickest manner. You know, the cap functions pretty well. Perhaps the back is a little high, and needs to come lower down towards the neck, but otherwise the sizing is right, and the cap sits up and away from the brow as it was so often worn. It weighs nothing and therefore would be appropriate for summer wear.

It's just as airy and transparent as I had hoped, too, and with a ribbon set with a shaped bow to the front, should be pretty to look at. It's apparent why women made gauze caps: they hide, and they don't, simultaneously.

Oh, if you like, you can read about the initial research and the first part of design and construction. 

Our back yard, seen through the gauze of the cap. It should be clear (urp) how transparent
the silk gauze can be.

My goodness, what a process it was to complete it. Will I ever use lapped seams again to attach the wings to the rest of the cap? Never, never, never. What a royal pain, plus nearly impossible to keep the individual stroked gathers in place. If I ever make another cap, it will be with rolled and whipped seams, without a iota's doubt.

The cap closes in back with narrow cotton tape from William Booth, Draper. 

Quick edit, on Tuesday: Oh, for Pete's sake. Look at that back, will you? In the grand hurry to be finished, I forgot to create the ties in back as originally planned: there should be an eyelet in the middle of the caul's tape channel. The two ends of the tapes should be sewn to the far ends of the caul, the other ends pulled through the eyelet, then pulled to tighten the caul, and tied together. So I am not really done. Bother.

Well, enough at looking at pictures and enough complaints. Let's cover how I actually did the work. Watch out: long post ahead...

The Process of Finishing the Cap

Note: this section was written along back when I made the cap, but for some reason languished in unposted form, probably because I wanted to add more research. Now it's many years later, January 2021. I found the text, edited it as well as I could, and have republished the post. In the intervening years, Larkin and Smith published several highly researched cap patterns and American Duchess published its Guide to 18th century Dressmaking book, including cap patterns with detailed instructions. Both are highly useful, although Larkin and Smith (At the Sign of the Golden Scissors) patterns are hard to find. As of last week, their site seemed to be taken down, and how sad I was to see that.

Therefore, what's below is clearly experimental, and like any experiment, I critiqued my work and found it wanting.)

Let's look at the construction of the gathered double "wings" or ears that make a cap pretty to look at and pretty to wear. Let me repeat that the construction here uses 18th century seams and stitches and concepts. However, since I don't own or have access to either an 18th century cap and only limited photos that are in high enough resolution to make out what's going on, here I am going on a combination of photos and secondary research. That means that what I did was speculative. Photos are nice, but oh, they do not replace actually seeing an extant garment.

Remember our inspiration cap.

Now to discuss why I did what I did, and why it's not the popular way to go now, and rightly so.

The Band

At the time I made the cap, it was still popular to make caps with a band two layers thick. The caul would be fitted in between the band pieces and sewn down. The wings would be treated the same way. It's simple but results in a rather thick and opaque effect.

As I was using silk gauze, having a two-layer band would show very obviously and make the cap look less airy.

Sue Felshin, an experienced 18th century reenactor, who wrote "How To Make a Cap", last updated 2001 and available on the 18thcNewEnglandLife site at http://people.csail.mit.edu/sfelshin/BRY2K/making-caps.html#lined-band. She wrote: "I don't know of any 18th century cap artifacts where the band is doubled (i.e., lined), although I have to say that I know of very few cap artifacts of any kind." 

Well, that settled it. My band was a single layer thick. and it would retain its airy look.

It was lap-seamed to the caul, with hem stitches on each side.

Constructing Doubled Wings: Needlessly Fiddly

First I had to figure out how I was going to make those pretty rounded "ears", another term for the pair of wings that sit on each side of the front of the cap, without having to hem the outer edge. As a rule, I rather like hemming, but hemming silk gauze? Eeeeooouuu! No fun. It's like hemming flyaway hairs on a cat running headlong.

So I ran an experiment. I cut a wing as a long straight piece. Then I sewed a curved line of gathering stitches in an approximation of the elongated oval of the ear shape, then gathered the wing, watching as the wing curved by itself into the pretty ear shape.

Aha! If I cut the inner edge in a curve, where the gathering is done, rather than the outer edge, then the outer edge wouldn't need hemming.

So I removed the gathering stitches, stretched out the fabric, and made a paper pattern from it. That problem solved. That's how the wing pieces got their curved shape.

Each set of doubled wings (ears) was of course treated separately. I cut four wings, all matching, from the paper pattern. On each piece, the straight edge is the selvage; the curved edge is the one that was to be gathered. On the curved edge, the wider part is lower on the face, near the cheek, the narrower part is at the top of head.

I layered two wings and dealt with them as a single unit. That meant that I had two long raw edges sitting one atop the other. Raw edges are anathema, so I turned a very narrow hem on each, and sandwiched them together so that the raw edges were inside.

Then the resulting pair of edges were stroke-gathered as one. Talk about fiddly! It was not enjoyable work, especially with silk gauze.

Double-layer wing with two rows of gathers, in the process
of being stroked and gathered to fit the band. 

Then I turned under the front edge of the band. You can see that in the photo above -- it's the piece of fabric in the top left-hand portion of the photo. The completed gathered edge of the wing layers was laid underneath the band and back-stitched in place. Back in 2013 as I was constructing the cap someone -- oh, who was it? Gah! I no longer know -- published a blog post about their new 18th century extant cap find, and I was chuffed to find that their cap used a lapped seam between band and wings. That's what made me decide to use a similar effect on my cap.

Double-layer wing one gathered and pinned to the band.
Note excess bulk at seamline. Not what we want. Bah, humbug.

The result is functional, but definitely not optimal for a transparent fabric. If you examine the cap you can see the inside raw edges of the wings through the gauze, and added up, the work is about 1/4" wide. That's fine if you put a ribbon over it, but it's too messy to be a viable solution for a garment that might be cleaned. It was not the right way to go.

What I Should Have Done

It's likely that seams could be handled in a number of ways, but the way that's most popular now is based on research such as that from the researchers/mantua makers at the Margaret Hunter Shop in Colonial Williamsburg, Larkin and Smith of At the Sign of the Golden Scissors, Sue Felshin, and others.

The lovely Samantha, the Couture Courtesan, wrote sometime before I constructed the cap a Livejournal post that no longer appears to be live, titled "A Correct Cap". In it, she wrote "This cap is made of single layers of silk gauze, with all the edges finished (rolled hems in this case) and whipped together. This is the way that the vast majority of caps I've seen were made--not using two layers for the brim and then sandwiching the ruffles or pleats and caul in between the two layers. The single layer method is a bit more difficult, because hemming anything curved is the biggest pain in the neck, but it's what's correct and I think it looks lovely." She should know, since she interned at the Margaret Hunter shop. As you know, this is the way most people construct caps now.

Why didn't I choose to do so, too? Well, I liked lapped seams, and I was used to stroke-gathering, although I was used to whip-gathering, too... 

Just to confuse things, I own an early 19th century cap, the band and the frill of which appear to have but one seam. The band edge appears to have been whipped at the same time as the frill. Huh, years later I can't figure out where my head was at the time. Suspect that many of you have had similar experiences.

Look carefully at the seam between the band and the frill. I see one seam, not two.

Well, the cap's long done and remains function and pretty. However, I never wore it. Not long after, Larkin and Smith published their cap patterns and I bought one of their kits, and never looked back. Perhaps someday the poor neglected thing will get a handsome blue silk ribbon to cover its seam sins, the back tie will be corrected, and I can wear it.