Stays not upon the order of your going...
Jacobean stays.
This is the foundation (literally as well as figuratively!) for a much bigger project. Not quite on the scale of the 2010 18th C marathon, but getting that way! There will be at least two gowns to go over the stays.
It started with the discovery that while I can still get the 18th C stays on, and walk about in them, doing so all day was going to be uncomfortable. VERY uncomfortable. Sadly I have gained a couple of stone (which I am trying to shed!) from when I made them, and while they will expand widthways enough to encompas my fuller figure, not having swum regularly for over 18 months means that my upper arms and shoulders are rather flabbier than when I last wore stays for a three-day event, and they dig in uncomfortably under the arms.
OUCH! for a 15-hour day!
However, they were good enough for a try-on of the toile for the frock, and therefore for the extrapolated stays from the bodice pattern.
The stays were cut from two layers of fabric: the inner layer is a stiff twilled cotton, and the outer layer a firm polycotton jacquard curtain fabric. The seam allowances and edges were bound with 2" wide single fold bias tape cut from an off-cut of polycotton sheeting.
Once the seams were stitched (using cotton polycore thread from Empress Mills), and the neck and armscye edges bound, the boning channels were marked up and stitched from the inside.
The bones were inserted from the bottom, the shorter boning channels cloed off, and the bottom edge bound. The boning is Trifold polyester ballen replacement therapy. It has the advantage of being cheap, readily available, and very good for this use. The ends of the bones were bound with PTFE plumber's tape. Quick, easy, cheap. And readily removed when recycling bones from an abandoned project! This whole thing is a stash-buster, being made from the off-cuts and left-overs of previous adventures.
I followed the boning pattern used in Waisted Efforts, rather than the one from Seventeenth Century Women's Dress Patterns. The reason for this choice? Well, as this is for LARP rather than Living History, I didn't feel spectacularly dedicated to a pattern of boning taken from the supporting layers of a gown rather than actual stays, and asravenriganis following the Seventeenth Century Women's Dress Patterns boning pattern for her gown foundation, I thought it would be a good idea to do something slightly different and see what happened... Experimental archeology, if you like. There's nothing to say which method was more prevelant at the ime, as not enough extant examples exist to make that sort of deduction.
In this one you can see the horizontal boning pattern. It worked much better than we expected, but I'll let the raven walk you through her experiences with this one.
Once the base was completed, it was time to put what came to be known as 'the flappy bits' on. These are the front lacing panels. They flap about...
They got cut from the jacquard only as they are cut on the fold. This makes them a bit softer than the base. The original experiment in Waisted Efforts has a single bone in the front, but I added an extra one do they go down both sides of the eyelets... I'm a DD and the extra support felt like a decent idea.
I cheated mightly at this point, being slightly bored after all those boning channels and bones, and used the grommeting machine and two-part gromets rather than stitching the eyelets. No, they are not as pretty as stitched eyelets, but no-one will see them behind the stomacher of the gown, and there is limited time for this project. And we have the grommeting machine. It gets peeved if you leave it communing with the sleeve roll and the poressing cloths in the drawer for too long!
Grommeting is actually quite good fun. It's fast, it's relatively easy, and they really don't look at all bad in these smaller sizes.
The holes were poked with the awl, expanded with the hair stick, the gromets helped into place with the stick, the other side added and then squished neatly with the lovely purple grommeting press! Yay! It took about 15 minutes to do all eight.
I did try it on, but as I have yet to make the shift to go under this set of stays, you'll have to make do with them on Vera until that is done!
Oh, and I had assistance from the cute little Maeve while drawing the patterns!
(And yes, the mangled quote is period! [The original is 'STAND not upon the order of your going... '] Macbeth was probably written between 1603 and 1607, the first recorded performance was in 1611, and it was published in the First Folio edition in 1623. The stays and frocks are for an event set in 1628. While most folk think of Shakespeare and The Globe as Elizabethan theatre, the theatres of the period were not closed permanently until 1642, by the Puritans at the start of what came to be known as the English Civil War[even though it was far from the first civil war enjoyed by that nation!])*
* Damn! I taught English Lit for waaaaay to long! :D
This is the foundation (literally as well as figuratively!) for a much bigger project. Not quite on the scale of the 2010 18th C marathon, but getting that way! There will be at least two gowns to go over the stays.
It started with the discovery that while I can still get the 18th C stays on, and walk about in them, doing so all day was going to be uncomfortable. VERY uncomfortable. Sadly I have gained a couple of stone (which I am trying to shed!) from when I made them, and while they will expand widthways enough to encompas my fuller figure, not having swum regularly for over 18 months means that my upper arms and shoulders are rather flabbier than when I last wore stays for a three-day event, and they dig in uncomfortably under the arms.
OUCH! for a 15-hour day!
However, they were good enough for a try-on of the toile for the frock, and therefore for the extrapolated stays from the bodice pattern.
The stays were cut from two layers of fabric: the inner layer is a stiff twilled cotton, and the outer layer a firm polycotton jacquard curtain fabric. The seam allowances and edges were bound with 2" wide single fold bias tape cut from an off-cut of polycotton sheeting.
Once the seams were stitched (using cotton polycore thread from Empress Mills), and the neck and armscye edges bound, the boning channels were marked up and stitched from the inside.
The bones were inserted from the bottom, the shorter boning channels cloed off, and the bottom edge bound. The boning is Trifold polyester ballen replacement therapy. It has the advantage of being cheap, readily available, and very good for this use. The ends of the bones were bound with PTFE plumber's tape. Quick, easy, cheap. And readily removed when recycling bones from an abandoned project! This whole thing is a stash-buster, being made from the off-cuts and left-overs of previous adventures.
I followed the boning pattern used in Waisted Efforts, rather than the one from Seventeenth Century Women's Dress Patterns. The reason for this choice? Well, as this is for LARP rather than Living History, I didn't feel spectacularly dedicated to a pattern of boning taken from the supporting layers of a gown rather than actual stays, and asravenriganis following the Seventeenth Century Women's Dress Patterns boning pattern for her gown foundation, I thought it would be a good idea to do something slightly different and see what happened... Experimental archeology, if you like. There's nothing to say which method was more prevelant at the ime, as not enough extant examples exist to make that sort of deduction.
In this one you can see the horizontal boning pattern. It worked much better than we expected, but I'll let the raven walk you through her experiences with this one.
Once the base was completed, it was time to put what came to be known as 'the flappy bits' on. These are the front lacing panels. They flap about...
They got cut from the jacquard only as they are cut on the fold. This makes them a bit softer than the base. The original experiment in Waisted Efforts has a single bone in the front, but I added an extra one do they go down both sides of the eyelets... I'm a DD and the extra support felt like a decent idea.
I cheated mightly at this point, being slightly bored after all those boning channels and bones, and used the grommeting machine and two-part gromets rather than stitching the eyelets. No, they are not as pretty as stitched eyelets, but no-one will see them behind the stomacher of the gown, and there is limited time for this project. And we have the grommeting machine. It gets peeved if you leave it communing with the sleeve roll and the poressing cloths in the drawer for too long!
Grommeting is actually quite good fun. It's fast, it's relatively easy, and they really don't look at all bad in these smaller sizes.
The holes were poked with the awl, expanded with the hair stick, the gromets helped into place with the stick, the other side added and then squished neatly with the lovely purple grommeting press! Yay! It took about 15 minutes to do all eight.
I did try it on, but as I have yet to make the shift to go under this set of stays, you'll have to make do with them on Vera until that is done!
Oh, and I had assistance from the cute little Maeve while drawing the patterns!
(And yes, the mangled quote is period! [The original is 'STAND not upon the order of your going... '] Macbeth was probably written between 1603 and 1607, the first recorded performance was in 1611, and it was published in the First Folio edition in 1623. The stays and frocks are for an event set in 1628. While most folk think of Shakespeare and The Globe as Elizabethan theatre, the theatres of the period were not closed permanently until 1642, by the Puritans at the start of what came to be known as the English Civil War[even though it was far from the first civil war enjoyed by that nation!])*
* Damn! I taught English Lit for waaaaay to long! :D