Frilled Veil, Part One

Part two of the tutorial can be found here.

I'll be going to a much different than my local Renaissance faire this April. Therefore, my usual faire clothes (Regency fairies, 1950s, the last time I wore Renaissance to my faire my friend and I were the only ones who did and it was a hundred degrees...) won't do. In typical me fashion though, I decided I had to have a cotehardie, and then I decided I really had to have a frilled veil. OK, a little early, but desire is a strong thing, right? In place of the many costumes I need to post (blue bustle dress, plaid 1820s, beaded 1920s and a few tutorials), I'm going to post an in progress post of my veil. What I'm doing isn't really that innovative, but I'm posting in the hopes that it will be helpful. My sources are all linked at the end of the post.

This may be a little premature, as the veil isn't done and may come out completely silly, but I have confidence it's going to be a good veil!


To start, I narrow hemmed four strips of 2.8 oz linen from William Booth Draper. They're 2 inches wide, by the size I liked draped over my head. How's that for scientific?


Then I marked the veil for what's basically honeycomb smocking. A little trial and error showed that 5/8" would work best with my dowels. (This picture shows the 3/4" marks. I'm not sure why I feel that's important to mention!)


Then sew two layers of the frill together. Quite simple, just stitch around a few times, and then put the needle through the hem, take a few more stitches, repeat...


Then I added the next frill layer. Repeat the above procedure, sewing the new layer halfway between the marks on the first layer. I didn't bother marking it this time.


When all of this was done, I hemmed the edges. I hemmed towards the side facing the veil, not the side facing my face. The ends of this will be visible when worn, so I wanted them smooth.


Then I bound the long edge. Koshka supervised.


I dipped it in starch, and inserted dowels to give it shape. The starch shown in this picture is a little too light. I used the recipe from the third post in this thread. Initially I used medium starch, as I for some reason thought that was heavy starch. That's what I get for skimming and reading amounts only. Also, I didn't boil it, I just added boiling water from the kettle, and it worked great.


I baked it (at 350, very, very closely watched! Please, be careful with baking. And if you have any synthetics, I'd be very, very nervous. They melt! ), and then noticed my very stiff test swatch of the starch was now only kind of stiff.


So I made some new, very thick starch paste by mixing 1/4 cup starch and half a cup water and a tiny bit of boiling water. It wasn't enough boiling water though, so I had to heat it on the stove, and then I got some massively impressive gloop.


I took this picture today. It was a little more wet last night :)

So then I restarched the frill by pressing starch into the fabric. One problem--the inner layer. The paste was too thick, and I'd have to take out all the pegs. I didn't really want to, but you have to do what you have to do, right? I took out the top row, and noticed that smushing more starch still wasn't getting to the inside. It still had the wetter starch on it from before, since I was able to dip that, but I obviously wanted more starch! So I dipped each peg in starch and put it back in.

This seems to have worked quite well to starch the inside, with one small problem. Many of the dowels are stuck in. To remove them, I'm using a size 00000 knitting needle to separate the peg from the linen, and then pulling it out with needle nose pliers. It's working quite well, but may take a while!

And that's the frill. The veil itself is going to be a half oval. I starched it with what I thought was a very light starch, and it came out too stiff. I washed it by hand, and it got stiffer. It's in the washing machine now, hopefully losing some starch!

References:

Research and Thoughts about Frilled Veils at By My Measure (and she has a lovely frilled veil on her Fitting Yourself page

Frilled Veil in Action at Medieval Silkwork

Starched Frilled Veil, at Katalfalk coincidentally the same site I learned honeycomb smocking from.

The Fretwork Veil at Family de Huntington.

LInks to many veils at Larsdatter.com

18th Century Hair & Wig Styling: The Book

If you don't know Kendra of Demode, you really should. She's an absolutely amazing costumer.

She's written a book, 18th Century Hair & Wig Styling: History and Step-by-Step Techniques, and if you have any interest in the 18th century at all, you need to support this project! There are many levels of support.



And selfishly, I want this book published too. Have you seen how awful I am with hair? I need all the help I can get! Seriously, the one time I wore a wig it blew off my head and rolled away a bit. If I lived in the Bay Area, I would have gone for the personalized styling session :)

The campaign is almost over, so help spread the word, and if at all possible, support this amazing project!

Macarons!

And now for something a little different! I've gone a little over the edge making macarons lately--not much of a surprise for anyone who knows me! A friend asked if I'd write a tutorial (saying I make things easy to understand, to which, yay!), so here it is.

First, the recipes I've been using. Please visit them for the amounts and good instructions--they taught me what I'm doing!

Salted Caramel Macarons at Cakecrumbs--This is the base recipe I've been using for all but my chocolate macarons. To change things, just add orange or lemon zest, a tablespoon of espresso powder, gingerbread style spices like these at Tartlette, whatever you can think of! I usually halve the salted caramel because I don't like a ton of filling.

Chocolate macarons at Chocoparis--My chocolate recipe! If you're afraid of overmixing your macarons, this is the one for you. The meringue is a very stiff one and takes more mixing than the above recipe.

Whatever base recipe you use, keep using it! Don't switch recipes when you want to try something different, just add whatever it is you want. If a recipe works for you, use it!

Below the jump, a fairly fully photographed macaron making session!

An 1880s Bustle Coat

In early November, my friend Sarah posted about a costumed tour of the Original Governor's Mansion in Montana, and who wants to come? Well, that would be me! Somehow, the stars aligned and it all worked out. And, since there would likely be snow, I, of course, needed a coat to wear with the bustle dress I was making for the event.

This ended up being a remarkably good decision, as one of the days I was in Montana, it was colder than it was in Antarctica. I don't own a coat in the real world, so ended up wearing this one all weekend! It's quite a toasty coat :)

I fell in love with this coat from the Met and used it as my inspiration.


The coat is made of three layers--lightweight wool from Burnley and Trowbridge, cotton flannel from my local Hancock, and 10mm silk habotai from Dharma Trading.


Construction is quite straightforward. I flatlined the wool with the cotton flannel, sewed it like any other bodice--right sides to right sides, sew the darts, set in the sleeves, and set in the collar (which is just a straight strip of fabric folded over with a little dart at the center back to give it a curve). Then I made an identical coat in the silk habotai (except without a collar), and put it in the coat, wrong side to wrong side.

I then folded the neck edge of the silk down and whipstitched it to the raw edge of the neckline/collar. Then I hemmed the sleeves by trimming the cotton flannel and folding the wool over the silk and cotton and used a tiny whipstitch that caught just the lining. The bottom hem came next--I hemmed the wool layer and silk layers separately. The wool is hemmed with a a bias facing sewn by machine and a herringbone stitch that just catches the cotton flannel so doesn't show through (like the sleeve, I trimmed the cotton flannel away at the hem fold). The lining is hemmed by machine. I then sewed a placket on. It's just a straight strip of fabric a few inches wide. I sewed it just to the wool, trimmed away excess lining, pressed it into place, and used whipstitches to hold it at the collar and hem, and herringbone down the middle. The coat then closes with hooks and eyes.



And I of course needed a new muff! A very last minute project, I had been thinking of one, and then Jen Thompson made a faux fur muff which was just incredibly adorable making me want one even more, and Amazon Prime to the rescue, I made one the day before my trip. I used my 18c muff base and my tutorial to make the cover. Really. I used the tutorial. I forgot the easy way I handled the channels on it :)


As for the pattern, I used my standard bustle base pattern which is based on an original I made many years ago and can be seen on my website, here. All I did was add a little ease and lengthen and widen the pieces. Obviously this is shorter than the finished coat. I cut the lining first, continuing to extend the pieces, pinned it together, fixed the hem, and then cut the coat.

In the picture, my bodice pattern pieces are laid on top of the coat pattern pieces. As you can see, except for the center back piece at the waist, which I narrowed during fitting, each piece is just slightly larger than the bodice piece.


And the sleeve pattern. My lower sleeve pattern piece on my base pattern is slightly narrower than the upper sleeve, so I just made them the same width and shaped the bottom.

About that one hour dress...

I still have plans to make the one hour dress, the fabric is ready and sitting on my shelf with the book, ready to go. However, I had a surprise event come up, and of course I needed a new dress, another new dress, and a coat for that. The 50s and bustle dresses are done, and I started the 1880s coat tonight. More on those soon!

Also, since every post needs a picture, I made macarons for the first time last Wednesday, and I may have a slight obsession-I've made nine batches in the past week and half (salted caramel, chocolate with salted caramel, coffee with salted caramel, orange zest with almond Swiss buttercream, vanilla bean with chocolate and chocolate/salted caramel, lemon zest with almond Swiss buttercream and raspberry jam, gingerbread with Swiss cream cheese buttercream, chocolate with white chocolate ganache and raspberry jam, and coffee with Swiss vanilla buttercream). So here are my coffee macarons with salted caramel filling. So good!


And for the sake of completeness, here are the recipes I used.

Salted Caramel Macarons at Cakecrumbs--I used this as the base for most of them, mixing in a tablespoon of espresso powder to the almonds and powdered sugar for the coffee, and lemon zest and orange zest for those. The only difference was I used the food processor to blend the almonds and powdered sugar and they take about 13 minutes to bake. This recipe includes the tip that I think made me successful--test a little batter on a plate and it should take about 15 seconds for it to smooth out.

Chocolate Macarons at Chocoparis.com . The only difference was I used two oven temperatures, as above. If it works, right?

Back to our regularly scheduled costumes soon!

Postponing Again

While I am going to make the one hour dress, and soon, I'm postponing again. To make this post somewhat more interesting, here's the I just realized I haven't posted about this dress that I'm probably wearing to work on Halloween. It has good elements for that--it's stereotypically pretty, and is quick to put on and has easy hair--important for the morning!


It's a blue cotton velvet (the fabric photographs horribly!) with an antique lace collar (very lightly basted on, with a little pocket inside the neckline where the excess lace is tucked!) and net sleeves based on a dress of Princess Alexandra's from 1869. It has a huge train. I've only worn it twice for two rather short times, and it needs to be worn some more.

To pass out candy, of course, will be the Angry Birds dress :)

A Necessary Postponement...

My one hour dress? I need to put it off another week. Sadly, the cold I got last Saturday is in its final throes, and I just don't have the energy to do it.

So, I leave you with this instead--my in progress bicycle stocking!


It's from an 1890s pattern, and yes, I'll be knitting a sweater and making a green tweed split skirt to go with it. All topped with a straw boater. Doesn't that sound like the perfect costume for LA in August? Next Costume College, that would be :)