Colors in Fashion 1704-1918

Fashions come in living color, usually...except when black is popular, which, once again, it is this year. Further, color in our clothes has been full of symbolic meaning probably since time began. Think of Madame X and her black clinging gown on pale skin, or how gauche it used to be to wear white after Labor Day, or why bright red on your tie or skirt evokes Valentine's Day or passion.

Popular colors have also been tied to scientific discovery...when aniline dyes appeared in the 1850s, people went nuts for shocking bright colors, which was shocking, shocking! to some eyes used to the gentle tones of dyes made from vegetable sources.

Photo: exhibit cover photo

The Kent State University Museum, Anne Bissonnette, curator, put in an exhibit between 2004 and 2006 that explored color in clothing, and lucky for us, they put much of the exhibit and its commentary online, and have kept it there.

Do have a look at The Right Chemistry: Colors in Fashion 1704-1918. The exhibit takes you through specific colors in turn, such as purple and mauve, and then shows you garments in those colors with some details about them.

Want to read a few nineteenth century views on color in dress?

• Have a look at Chapter XXIII: Harmony of Color in Dress, in Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress of the Best American Society (1881)
• See also Color in Dress: A Manual for Ladies (1872)
  

Creating Full Ostrich Plumes

It turns out that usually rich-looking, full and fluffy and curled antique ostrich plumes are not single bird feathers, but sewn-together combinations of multiple feathers.

As stated in the 1928 book The Nu-Way Course in Millinery and Hat Design,

The single plume is used very rarely for a trimming. The full, thick ostrich plume is made up of one feather of which the quill is perfect, built up underneath with less perfect feathers to give the required weight. The feathers are bleached and dyed, then starched, and finally curled.

Further, the 1922 book Millinery says,

Willow plumes were very popular a few years ago. Each tiny feathery fiber is lengthened by having several lengths of the same kind knotted to it, a tedious, fine, hand process. The result is a plume with long, sweeping feathers.

The art of creating these so-full plumes is not lost. See Lynn McMaster's costuming and pattern site for her page on developing nice, thick plumes from several thinner ones, then curling them to taste: Joining, Shaping, and Curling Feathers. This will not create a willow plume, but then, I am not sure many of us would like to spend hours knotting tiny bits of feathers.

Read more about trimming with ostrich feathers from these sewing manuals on the VintageSewing.info site:

• In the Nu Way book: Lesson 11 -- Ready-made Trimming.
• In the Millinery book: Chapter VIII—Hat Trimmings—Feathers

Two Trimmed Edwardian 1909 "Beatrix" Skirts Dress Diary, Part 2: Designing a Graduated, Shaped Flounce

Polly desires her Beatrix skirt to have a tall flounce. Skirts of this era often were flounced, although as 1909 turned into 1910 and then the 19-teens, flounces appear to receded in popularity in favor of bands of flat embroidered, lace, or pleated decoration.

Some of the prettiest flounces I've seen are graduated in height. A graduated flounce might start at, say, seven inches in height at the skirt's front panel, but incrementally become taller until it might reach some fifteen inches at the back of the skirt. Combined with a short train, the effect is of two curving lines receding from one another.

Another characteristic of Edwardian tall flounces is that they were frequently cut shaped and on the bias, so that the top of the flounce would be sewn on flat, while the bottom, being wider and on the bias, fluttered out. Such flounces are softer and more clingy than a flounce made of fabric cut straight of grain and then gathered.

Emma Ruth of the Sense and Sensibility described how to make a shaped flounce, and I followed her directions in making Polly's flounce, photographing as I went. Here is how it went:

First, I laid the skirt pattern pieces out on the floor, one right next to the other and matching the seam marks, as if they were making up the shape of half of the skirt.

Then I taped several pieces of waxed paper together and laid the resulting piece of paper on top of the pattern pieces.

In the first image you can see the pattern pieces laid edge to edge, and the waxed paper placed atop.

Next, I traced the line of the bottom and sides of the skirt pattern pieces onto the wax paper.

After this I drew the flounce line. Starting at front of the front panel pattern piece I marked a spot at 7 inches or so from the skirt bottom. Then I drew a curving line that increased in height as it went to the pattern pieces for the sides and then back of the skirt, ending at a position about 15 inches from the bottom of the final, back skirt pattern piece. I cut out the result. Now I had the basic pattern for the flounce, but...I needed to make it flare.

In the second image I have drawn and cut the basic flounce pattern. The front of the skirt is to the left; that's where the flounce is most narrow. The back of the skirt is at the right, where the flounce is widest. Like most pattern pieces, the pattern is for one half of the flounce.

So, on the base pattern I drew long vertical lines several inches apart, from the flounce bottom almost to the top. Then I cut each line with scissors, slashing the pattern pieces and spreading them at the bottom. The more I spread each slash, the wider the fabric would be at the bottom of the flounce and the more the resulting fabric would flutter and flare.

In the third image, a closeup, you can see the vertical lines drawn across the pattern, ready to be cut and slashed.


Finally, I laid another piece of wax paper over the slashed and spread pattern, drew a fresh pattern, and cut that out. Voila, shaped flounce pattern!

In the final image, I have cut and slashed the pattern to create the shaped flounce pattern, and have laid a layer of waxed paper atop, ready to draw the final pattern. Because slashing causes the pattern to curve, I had to add several little pieces of wax paper to fit the curve.

(Emma Ruth noted that if I wanted a gathered flounce I would have slashed each line from top to bottom to break the pattern into separate strips, and then would have spaced them out. Then I would have cut a new pattern from the resulting shape.)

Emma Ruth had another note about preparing the flounce: hem it before applying it to the skirt. Otherwise you're in for a lot of work.

Warm thanks to Emma Ruth for her kind direction. It all worked so well.

Sewing Mornings Continue

A few days later, Polly and I met to work on her skirt. We seamed the main skirt up, and Polly had her first experience using a treadle. She took to it immediately, even getting the hang of working the W&G wheel, which turns in the opposite direction of most sewing machine wheels.

Then I used the flounce pattern to cut out Polly's flounce from her navy and white stripe seersucker, and laid it on the plain skirt. What a nice effect! The stripes on the bias contrast nicely with the stripes on the straight part of the skirt. Can't wait until it's applied to the skirt.

That day's work was attended with a few technical difficulties, shall we say? I hoped to use my Singer handcrank's gathering attachment to make the small ruffle to attach to the main flounce, but it kept jamming, and then the Singer's tension went wonky, a condition from which it has yet to recover. Yargghh. So Polly gamely worked on a trimming ruche by hand...

A few days later we met again, and I demonstrated applying a period placket, using an original garment as a design guide, and we set the waistband, too.

Working on that fabric has been most interesting: did you know that working with narrow striped fabrics can make you dizzy, and ditzy? After several hours of cutting, sewing and ruching, both of us felt a little woozy.

And Rebecca's skirt? It's seamed up and has its waistband, and is ready for the lace insertion. I even found some true period torchon lace to use to trim it with!

Box Pleating Dress Trim by Hand and By Machine

I had been planning to trim a bed jacket with box-pleated trim for some time but wasn't sure how to do it. None of my antique sewing manuals were of help; the closest I got was the Harper's Bazar reprints in Frances Grimble's Reconstruction Fashions book. They illustrate complex pleatings but don't say how to achieve them!

Turns out there's help!

If you want to box pleat narrow trim by hand, it's simpler than it looks. All you need is pins and the fabric to be pleated. What you do is to make little accordion (knife) pleats of the same size, one to the right, then one to the left, and then one to the right, and then one to the left, and so on.

To see how it's done, have a look at Jennie La Fleur's YouTube tutorial at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbJyLaHS6b4. Thank you, Jenny!



To make box pleats by machine, you can use a fork to manipulate the fabric to the left and right, just in front of the sewing machine needle. Heather McNaughton demonstrates this on her Truly Victorian pattern site. See her Help and Answers page at http://trulyvictorian.netfirms.com/FAQ.html and click on Fork Pleating. The video is in Quicktime, takes forever to load. Be patient. I had to wait nearly an hour to download it.

Narrow-Hemming the Bottoms of Seamed Garments: Advice from TreadleOnions

In the Corset Cover Dress Diary posts I wrote about having trouble creating fine machine hems around the bottom of the corset cover. The seams connecting the fronts and backs of the garment kept clogging the hemmer because the amount of fabric was too much. I wrote,

"It's impossible to do around the seams, though, so you have to stop near these eges and hand hem them afterwards. Not terribly efficient. Once you have a well-fitting pattern, might as well hem each piece BEFORE you seam the pieces."

So I asked the folks on TreadleOn, a super-duper online community for those who use treadle machines. Always warm and helpful, several Onions gave me tips on how they deal with the issue. I've reproduced several of them here, with a few edits for context.

• The way my grandmother taught me to do this is to clip a triangle off the seams with the widest point being at the seam itself, and the point being about 1/4" up into the seam. That leaves less fabric for the hemmer to have to turn and stitch, and works about 99% of the time. On lightweight fabrics, batise or light cotton, it works 100% of the time because there isn't that much bulk there in the first place. By just snipping 1/4", almost the entire snipped area is inside the hem, and if you press the seam open before running it through the hemmer, it's even less bulk.
  
  If you're doing heavier than light fabric, you should hand-crease the narrow hem at the seam so it will feed through the attachment properly.
  Marilyn S.SE TX
  
• I'm not sure how they did it in the bad old days, but when I cross seams with my narrow hemmer, I first make sure those seams are trimmed to reduce bulk. I usually cut a triangle from each one, such that it tapers from regular width to nothing at the raw edge. Then when I am sewing along and get close, I stop and remove the hem from the "curl" of the foot. Using my fingers, I fold the hem as narrow and as flat as I can over the seam, then stitch across it as neatly as I possible, with the foot riding totally on top of the hem. Once past the seam, I stop and re-insert the fold into the "curl" and proceed to the next obstruction.
  Jennifer, Calgary, AB
  
• I usually [do] the tuck[ing] or hem[ming] before sewing the seams. Recently I tried it the other way on a petticoat and it just didn't work. I usually finish my seams by pressing the seam open and then turning each seam allowance under and stitching down the folded edge. Not period authentic, but it looks nice and wears well.
  Annie, Pennsylvania

Thank you, Onions!

Edwardian and Victorian Skirt Plackets: Where to Find How Tos

Skirt plackets: who knew they could be so complicated? Or such a royal pain?

These days we put zippers in everything, even new-fangled invisible zippers that continue the seam line with no annoying and revealing extra stitching around the zipper slash.

It used to be all so very different. Women relied on hooks and eyes sewed into long plackets to hide outer skirt openings. Petticoats frequently had nothing but a plain placket with strings at the top...so that placket opening could gap! You can see an illustrated example of one of those in one of my previous posts. Oh well, at least the gap was invisible to outsiders.

Anyhow, in making up a 1911 skirt from online textbook instructions (see previous posts for details on that textbook), I was told to make a continuous placket. See the image of a placket turned inside out, at left (courtesy Vintage Sewing.info).

Well, such a placket looks awfully thick and amateurish on a worsted wool skirt. At least mine did. I hated it and ripped it out.

Finding a Whole New World of Fancy Placket Knowledge

Don't bother in looking at most modern sewing books for fancy plackets. Most of them pay more attention to sleeve plackets. Blech.

Instead, have a look at American Dressmaking Step by Step by Mme. Lydia Trattles Coates (1917), on http://www.vintagesewing.info. See lessons 188 to 197. The text and illustrations take you through invisible plackets, extension plackets, and so on...all plackets that will look a lot more professional on an outer skirt than the one pictured above. That's an extension placket at left.

The lessons cover everything from setting in facings to handling the hooks and eyes neatly.

The date may be 1917, but the techniques should be good for quite a few decades prior to that time as well.