mandie_rw | Entries tagged with z:18thc:yellow chemise gown

In short: Amazing! I'm already looking forward to next year!

And then you have the long version. With pictures mostly stolen from

jennylafleur,

madamekat, and

quincy134,and a few from

sadievale!

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

( And Monday )

In conclusion: great conference, fun to hang out with old friends, get to know some better, meet some new people (who we hopefully didn't scare off!)...let's do it again!

And yeah, that write-up took forever. Link to album if, for some reason, you want to see all your photos again!

Current Mood: good

We had a great time! (See where all my bitching gets me?) It ended up being just me and

rose_bertin (surprise, surprise), but the morning rain cleared out, and it was only about 80 degrees (except on the roof of the Penitentiary...), a temperature that the people in multiple layers appreciated!

The Bastille Day celebrations at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly aren't very big at all - it's basically a street fair a couple blocks long, with food, French flags, and booze, and then at 5.30 they have a Monty Python-esque "reenactment" of the storming of the Bastille and they behead Marie Antoinette -- actually a watermelon. But it's all very silly and good fun, plus, hello, an excuse for me to dress up!

( Read more... )
There are a few more pics in the Photobucket album (you can take the ones you want from there, Katy, so they're not squished down to Facebook-size!)

Edit: Aha, link to the news clip where you can see us! Sort of. We're to the left of Marie Antoinette...okay, just look for the big hats. You can see me throwing an armful of cake to the masses, haha.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Rolling Stones; Salt of the Earth

Finished it today, surprise surprise. I didn't think I'd be able to finish it til tomorrow (yay for a holiday! moar sewing tiems!) with the cuffs and all. But I sewed the sleeves in and pinned in one cuff, and decided I didn't like it, so hey, no cuffs, means it's done! I'll take nice pictures on Mabel tomorrow if my camera batteries don't die.

How do I feel about it? I dunno, it's all right, I guess. There's just no pleasing some people!

(I may just be cranky because I was really looking forward to going to see Paul Rodgers from Bad Co./ Free at Cooper River Park tonight before the fireworks, and everybody bailed on me LAST MINUTE. I wasn't going to go to a concert & fireworks by myself, and there was nowhere to park anyway by that time, since 50,000 people showed up, according to the radio! So I sat home and had a pout instead. At least I finished the gaulle while pouting!)

Current Mood: morose
Current Music: Who; My Generation (Live at Leeds)

Sleeves are perverse, evil things. I cut out the first muslin for the sleeves for the gaulle at some point last week, but was less than impressed with the way they fit, and figured I'd come back to them later and do the major tweaking they'd need. Fitting sleeves on yourself is no fun, and requires that I have a certain amount of motivation that I haven't had for the past two weeks!

Today before class (Sociology 101, btw...super-hard, you guys...I have to write a TWO-PAGE REACTION PAPER!!!) I made a list of Things I Still Have To Do Before Our Little Bastille Day Shindig, and since I did not like the length of that list, I decided to find some motivation to spend an eternity fitting sleeves tonight.

Hah. Hah. Hah. The sleeves, always one to throw a curve ball, needed hardly any more tweaking. *boggle* I've been avoiding them for two weeks, and all I needed to do was spend another half-hour on them. And they're a long two-part sleeve that I've never done before, so I used my tried and true Eyeballing It method, expecting to need a lot of alterations. But nope. The fit of the sleeve into the armscye was nearly exact, even. And that never happens!

So despite the fact that I've got a fitting sleeve muslin and cut out the pieces for the actual sleeves, I still feel like the sleeves are ahead in the contest, because they got in the element of surprise.

Current Mood: surprised
Current Music: Rolling Stones; 2000 Man

I sewed something this weekend! Um, well, it's only the little ruffles I'm going to put at the wrist of the sleeves to the gaulle -- if I ever make said sleeves. Still, at least it's something?

And I've started helping one of my friends who will be playing 18thc dress-up with me this summer. We went out fabric hunting, which was more successful than fabric hunting under pressure tends to be! The first fabric store we went to was closed, twenty-five minutes early. (Really? You suck.) So we, very grudgingly, drove to Jo-ann's, not holding out any wild hopes for the cotton voile or something similar we were looking for. Well, we didn't find voile, but I found something even better in the ~~usually crappy~~ red-tag section: ivory silk dupioni with very few slubs for $4/yd. And it turned out to be on sale for $2/yd. Win! I would have bought any that was left over, but there was only a little under 4 1/2y on the bolt, so C got it all.

I think I was going to post about something else, but I forget. Oh, no, that's right, I remember. I chopped off a foot of my hair. Am too lazy for pictures, so, you know. I've been thinking about getting it cut for a few weeks, but wanted to be able to do 1780s hair if I didn't get round to buying a wig. Well, I tried it out last night, and WOW did it look stupid. Idiotic, in fact. It looked like I'd been electrocuted, and not in the "oh, look, Big 1780s Hair" sort of way. More like the "why did you stick your finger in a socket?" look. So I thought, the hell with this, I'll just deal with a wig or at least hairpieces, and took out the scissors. It's now very short for me -- about chin-length. That's a change!

(Also, this weather? Do Not Want. I have a very low opinion of summer.)

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: Birds; Run Run Run

For the past couple of days, I decided I needed a small break from hand-sewing 18thc stuff, so I hauled out my old favorite hobby: reading. (Nothing exciting or new, just re-reading books I already own, but very pleasant all the same.)

Then today I decided to get back to the Bastille-Day-sewing, so I finished hemming the dark-brown sash I cut out two days ago, to wear with the gaulle, and finished up the bits of the neckline that still needed to be sewn. Also did the eyelets, yay. (And yes, in retrospect, I think I'd rather sew eyelets than bind tabs on stays!) That's all, but at least now I can try the gaulle on properly to mark the hem...and fit the sleeves. Ewwwww.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Rolling Stones; Beast of Burden

Had a fabulous Saturday afternoon sewing and night out with

rose_bertin ; I worked on my gaulle and she tackled her stays. Putting on A&E's Pride and Prejudice was an excellent idea, but bad for immediate productivity, as we both eventually started watching the movie more than our sewing. Plus Katy is doing her best to tempt me with the idea of Regency dress-up later in the summer, which has started my brain going on all the lovely Regency frocks I'd like to make. Going out that night was large amounts of fun, what with the fight across the street while we waited for the bus, the time-traveling bus itself (on that bus, it was December 31, 1979, according to the little scrolling thingie), the Whitest Bar in Philly that we ended up going to, dancing, and me telling off a few creepers ("NO THANK YOU, WE DO NOT WANT TO DANCE."). When we got back to University City, we purchased and ate a large amount of McDonalds food (because late-night menu apparently = no mediums or smalls), and talked until three in the morning, about everything from weird freshman roommates to our interesting friends to Keith Richards' liver. Good times!

And I was absolutely determined to get the gaulle into a try-on-able state and post about it tonight...hence the late-night posting.

It's very fluffy because the silk likes to fluff and it's not hemmed. Verdict? Eh, it's all right. I definitely made the waist longer than I meant, especially in the back. I can live with it, though, especially as fixing that would mean taking pretty much the entire thing apart -- and redoing all those nice even little pleats. Yeah, that's totally happening. Not. (I guess it'll be more a 1780s gaulle than a 1790 one? Resounding "whatever".)

Still have a lot to do on this, like sleeves (clearly...and I hate sleeves), a hem, eyelets so I can actually lace the lining (more eyelets! WHY do I do this to myself!), plus a real sash and hello, a hat, but a decent amount of the work's done. Woot.

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Rolling Stones; Coming Down Again

Um, I think I have CADD. Correction: I know I have CADD. But I tell myself it's okay, because it's still 18thc, and will be worn this summer, and the fabric was just sitting in The Stash, and I'm still going to make the wonderfully obnoxious anglaise...yeah, yeah, okay. Justification, whatever.

I was out most of the day, and when I came home, got all trussed up in my stays and decided to make a muslin for the orange and blue anglaise. I didn't end up making a muslin for the orange and blue anglaise. Somehow I cut the back point too short, and the front was looking crappy...and somewhere in there I decided I wanted a more casual dress for the Bastille Day picnic anyway, so I made a muslin for a gaulle instead. This saffron-yellow silk shantung from a fabric.com sale last summer has been telling me it wants to be either a round gown or a gaulle, so I finally pulled it out today, and told it to shut up, I was going to make it into a c1790 gaulle.

Research for this pretty much consisted of looking at demode and Mode Historique's gaulles, and at screencaps from Marie Antoinette and the Duchess. Okay, and a few portraits. I just wanna wear a pretty dress! For some reason, I'm hand-sewing the thing...I think I like to annoy myself.

This may require a different hat than the Big Pink one that will be worn with the blue and orange dress. *ponders* Oh no, another hat, how will I ever survive? Hah. I might just be making this dress so I can add to my hat collection, actually.

So here's the pic of the bodice pieces cut out.

For some obscure reason I've never been able to figure out, I never kept a pattern from my block-print polonaise (what, did I think I'd only be making one 18thc dress? *snort* Yeah, okay), so I only had a pattern from the Evil Polonaise of last year, which is a two-piece back. I was okay with this until I realized all the gaulles I was seeing (which, to be fair, isn't all that many, but still) had the back cut in four pieces. Fine. *snip snip sew* Okay, four pieces!

This bodice was actually frighteningly easy to fit; I'm quite sure I'll sew it all together and discover I've done something completely moronic. Oh well. The silk is just lined in cotton muslin, because I'm a cheap bastard, and I've got a lot of cotton muslin. It's worked before, and I'm sure it'll work again!

The front lining pieces will be covered with the gathered front of the dress; those pieces will lace together to hold the back tight. Well, now I've got something to sew when I visit

rose_bertin !