It was my birthday on the 18th of June and because me and my cohorts are largely still at university at the moment I decided to hold my celebrations later in the summer. I'm going to be having a picnic where everyone has to come as their favourite historical figure (and if they don't they don't get any food). I, of course, decided to go as Marie Antoinette and so I began recreating the clothes she was wearing when this portrait was painted.
I got rather excited and ended up making her robe en chemise in about three days over the Easter holidays. There is one rather giant mistake but I'm going to live with it and maybe make another one in the future.
I used three different dress diary type posts in order to figure out how to go about making mine, Books 'n' Threads, The Dreamstress and Before the Automobile.
The first thing I did was cut out, fold and pin on the shoulder, neckline and armscye pieces to plot where everything needed to go, I would end up adjusting these very slightly later on but it wasn't any kind of important change. I then chopped five metres off of the seven and a half metres of cheap muslin that I'd bought and gave it a giant hem rather sloppily on the machine. I sewed as much of this gown as I could on the machine just because of the sheer amount of fabric, I didn't much feel like hand sewing all of that. I then created a channel all along the fabric at the waistline for the cord that would gather it in. This took forever, even with the machine, because I was trying to get it as straight as possible. I succeeded though so that's fine. After I did that I ran two gathering stitches along the top and then another one about three inches down from them and gathered it all up.
I then pinned and stitched the top all along the neckline and under the arms. This part was hand sewn because I had to leave it on the mannequin.
Unfortunately I couldn't figure out where the opening was supposed to be and so, in the spirit of it just being for a picnic I put it down the back. I have since learned that it should be open all the way down the centre front and am kicking myself!
Here you can sort of see how instead of dropping it a couple of inches under the arm I pinned it lower than my top two rows of gathering. Later on, once it was all sewn down I trimmed away the excess, following the shape of the armscye. Ignore the dodgy looking gathering, that was too be taken out later on so I didn't worry about how crooked it was.
For the sleeves I cut huge rectangles as you would with a man's shirt and then ran three cord channels across them horizontally at intervals. The puffs on Marie Antoinette's chemise are different sizes so I guesstimated the distance between the channels. Threading cord through all the channels was an absolute nightmare, I promised myself never again (although whether I keep that promise or not is up for debate).
To sew the sleeves into the armholes I gathered up the top and then hand stitched them in the normal way.
And this is what the robe en chemise looked like with the sleeves but without the rest of the shoulders or the neckline ruffle. I stopped taking photos at this point but I do have some bad selfies of me wearing it in our incredibly messy dining room. Here's a little teaser!
It's an incredibly feminine and fun garment to wear. I imagine I'm going to be paranoid about dropping anything on it all day. Also grass stains and dirty fingers and dust... This is why I don't wear white. Ever. On the upside, SO PUFFY!!!
Next up, underwear!
No comments:
Post a Comment