A very historical birthday picnic

Now I daresay this is the post in the 'chemise a la reine saga' that I've been most excited for.
The picnic was lovely, we had an overabundance of food and everyone made a real effort with their costumes. I spent most of the day marveling at how great my friends are and how much I love them. Okay, soppy stuff out of the way... We had lots of people oggling at us and many tourists took photos which was fun at first but after a while it got a little tiring, especially because very few of them asked permission. It was pretty entertaining to see how creative people got though (shout out to all the people that took fake selfies with us eating in the background).

Taken by my friend Maddy or Frida Khalo as she was that day.

We picnicked at the Royal Naval Colleges in Greenwich and I spent a fair amount of time wandering around the area collecting my friends so I got to listen in to lots of the muggle's (non costumed people) comments about my attire. A few people reconginsed who I was, something I was quite surprised about but the prize has to go to the six year old boy that turned around and remarked to his parents 'Look, pretty Georgians! I wonder why they aren't fainting?'. You go kid, you go.

Towards the end of the day my friend Bel took some photos of a few of us and they're suitably ridiculous but also suitably gorgeous (she is a wonder with a camera and more of her excellent photographs can be found on her facebook page Uskglass Cosplay) and so here they are, the more serious ones first so that I can tell you about my costume. 

Underneath my robe en chemise I wore a linen chemise, striped knit cotton stockings from Nehelenia Patterns, a bumroll (but not the very pronounced one I made for university) stuffed with rags, a cotton walking length petticoat and an organza walking length petticoat. I skipped out on stays because I hadn't finished a pair yet (I wouldn't have worn them anyway, I wanted to be really comfy) and my American Duchess Kensingtons. You know about the hat, wig and dress, the sash was a last minute edition and it's just made from very badly hemmed poly organza (read: I hate it but it did the job).

Check out that fun sunburn. That comes from lying in a field
for days on end reading 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell'
whilst wearing my glass.

My friend Arthur came as Charles II and we had a joke about us being party monarchs. This spawned the photo you see above and also the following ones, perhaps some of the best pictures I've ever had the privilege to be in.

Top row: my sister as Anne Bonny, Emilia as Marie Laveau
Middle row: Hannah as Jane Austen, Arthur as Charles II
Bottom row: me as Marie Antoinette
Don't ask me why the Pimms bottle is there, no one knew.

And an even less serious photo.

I think theme parties are the way forward, this was so much fun and my friends are a bunch of very imaginative people. Besides the guys that you've already seen we had Van Gogh, Sir Isaac Newton, Salai, Da Vinci, Rosy the Riveter, Oscar Wilde, a musketeer and Frida Khalo.
I went home very happy and very eager to make and wear more 18th century clothes, I felt so pretty and comfortable all day.

My next few posts will chronicle my progress with my 18th century stays, I'm at roughly the halfway point with them so I thought I'd better catch up on some progress posts. 

La Hérisson mark 2

A few months ago I tried my hand at turning my old wig from my Daenerys Targaryen cosplay in an 18th century (1780s-90s specifically) la hérisson or 'hedgehog' wig. Aaand it failed. Dramatically.

 

Under a hat and on the wig head it was just toeing the line of awful but on my head it was worse than horrendous. Think, cheap party clown wig and you're close.
I realised belatedly that I shouldn't have used a blonde wig. I honestly have no idea what I was thinking when I decided to butcher this one, probably something along the lines of 'blonde hedgehog inspired styles worked on Kirsten Dunst in 'Marie Antoinette' thus they will work for me too'. Whatever was going through my mind I was wrong. But, I learned from my mistakes, moved on and tried again. Luckily I have plenty of past their best wigs that lend themselves perfectly to experimentation.

Let us first look at my inspiration...

My main reference point.
A portrait of Marie Antoinette Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1783

Mr and Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk)
By Thomas Gainsborough, 1785

Fashion plate, 1790s

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
By Thomas Gainsborough, 1785-87

Fashion plate
1780s

From Journal de Luxus, 1791

The first step I took was to trim my brown wig to around shoulder length. When I started it reached around the middle of my back and since the blonde wig being too long was one of the main factors in its impressive fall from grace I knew to start off with a much shorter wig.
I then took small half inch to one inch sections of hair and rolled them around strips of cloth.

I forgot to take any photos of this bit the second time around so here's a picture of what the rag rolling looked like on the blonde wig. The brown one looked much the same except it had perhaps twice the number of rolls in there. This made for much smaller, tighter curls. The bottom section of the wig I left down for much of the process, going in at the end with four large, thick socks and rolling it into four curls. These gave a bit more life to the ponytail part that hangs down my back.

Once the curls where tied in I put my wig in the sink and poured a few kettles worth of boiling water over it. I left it there until the water was cold.

 I then took it out and towel dried it to get the excess water off before leaving it to air dry overnight.

Once it was dry I then carefully undid every knot and unrolled the curls letting them spring back on themselves. The boiling water melts the plastic hair fibres into a different shape and thus the curls are permanently fixed in place. The brown wig was perfectly straight when I started and once I'd removed all of the fabric strips it looked like this.

When I froufed (shut up, that's totally a word) up the blonde wig I had to do an awful lot of back combing because I left it so long, that ended up looking awful and the wig looked matted instead of curly. This time I merely separated the curls with my fingers and only lightly back combed a few of the sections on the back to keep them from hanging down too low.

Similar to the above photo but lighter so you can see more
of the curls

Yet more frouf!

And the final amount of frouf

 I left the curls across my brow more whole than their counterparts on the sides and back of my head, this was done so that the lines were cleaner and it was easier to tame. I also wanted that section to appear more wavy than curly. The large ponytail curls were the last to be undone I immediately tied them back to keep them neat.

With my fingers coated in LBCC Historical Apothecary and Cosmetics' lavender pomatum (a birthday gift from my parents) I combed my fingers through the wig. Then using a powder brush and hair powder from the same place (also a birthday gift) I brushed the wig with a fine layer of white hair powder. In retrospect I should have used more as it wore off qhite a bit throughout the day.

So, without further ado, have some 'still in my pajamas at three o-clock in the afternoon 

but wearing a fabulous wig selfies'.  

Here I tied the wig back with a silk sash in a lazy imitation of some of the fanciful ribbon dos ladies seem to sport in some portraits. I really adore this wig, I feel like it flatters my face shape and I felt incredibly beautiful whilst wearing it, even in my pajamas with no make up on.

The hat of a queen

I had my birthday back in June and there was a distinct historical theme in the presents that I got, but that's a subject for another post. Here I want to talk about the hat I got from my parents when became the hat for my Marie Antoinette costume.

I'm sure you are all very familiar with the portrait I was copying but in case you aren't here it is again.

The hat that I received was 'Straw Hat late 18th-19th century' from Nehelenia Patterns, I then decorated it with the powder blue ostrich feathers and satin ribbon that I bought from Barnett Lawson way back in January.

Sorry for the strange colours. My mother took this and didn't realise I had a filter on.

 Because the feathers I bought were spads (AKA the slightly less awesome ones), not primes I had to do some stuff to them to make them prettier. I didn't mind this because instead of spending £17 on each other I spent £3.
The first thing I did was curl the feathers in with my curling iron, this in itself made them look fuller. Then I curled the shaft or spine of the feather by digging my thumbnail in and bending the feather over it at intervals. This is how I got them from practically straight to the lovely curl you can see beneath.

This hat is made large so that it will fit over the large hairstyles of the 1780s and 90s so I couldn't take a photo of it on my head when I'd just finished it but I promise you that I have photos of it on and they are wonderful!

18th century underwear

As promised, a little bit about the underwear that I made to go underneath my chemise a la reine.

I never got quite as far as making stays but since it seems that you don't necessarily need to wear them underneath that style of gown I didn't worry about it too much.

Here you can see a linen chemise and a poly-organza petticoat.
All the seams on the chemise are flat felled, the hem is just a simple (but rather broad) double turned hem and the neckline is gathered on the front half with a thin satin ribbon that I fixed at each shoulder. Unfortunately everything but the neckline and eyelets the for the ribbon to go through is machine sewn, I was in a mood to get it done quickly and didn't feel like hand sewing it. I used about two metres of linen, following instructions that I found here. In retrospect I should have made the gores for the sides a lot wider, it's comfortable and easy to walk in but I'd prefer if it flared a little more.

Both petticoats - I made another cotton one after this photo was taken - are also entirely machine sewn. I used (I think, this was a while ago now) four metres of poly-organza for the one pictured and four metres of white polycotton for the other. My mother was out at a gallery and passed a market where they were selling the cotton for £1 a metre so I asked her to buy six for me.
I used the same method of pleating as on the petticoat I made at university except I did mine the proper way, in two halves, the top edges bound with cotton tape. I left the sides open for 9" for the pocket slits.

Underwear wise on the day I wore; my chemise/shift, a bumroll that I originally made as a bustle pad (stuffed with fabric scraps), the two petticoats I mentioned above and some cotton knit stockings from Nehelenia Patterns. 

Chemise a la Reine

I believe I mentioned this project quite some time ago but the time as come for me to start revealing it properly.
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!

Picnicking in royal style

For my birthday this year I wanted to do something different, I've never been super great at the whole house party thing (and anyway our house isn't really big enough for the amount of people I'd want to invite) but I do know how to have a good picnic. So inspired by a conversation I had with my friend James I decided to have a themed picnic. The theme is, 'come as your favourite historical figure'.

Now, with my ardent and unrelenting love for Marie Antoinette I already knew who I would be going as and since I've had this idea for about three weeks already I also know what I'll be wearing and have made most of it, I guess I'm just a little bit excited?

This is the portrait that I'm copying, it's an incredibly important part of fashion history and I've always wanted a robe en chemise, it's also a relatively inexpensive dress to make so I went with it enthusiastically.

 

Another bonus of this ensemble is that I'm not so sure dear Antoinette is wearing any stays, see how rounded her bust is? That's not a shape you get with stays. Of course I could be wrong and it could be the fabric of her gown making her look so soft around the edges but if I don't manage to get stays done in time I'm confident that my robe en chemise will look fine without them.
Over the next few weeks I'll share my progress on here. So far I've completed the dress and am gathering the things I'll need for her fabulous hat.