The outfit consists of a italian gown and a quilted petticoat with a embroidered pocket. If you haven’t already read about my making them they can be found here https://sewthroughtime.home.blog/2019/04/13/quilted-petticoat/ and here https://sewthroughtime.home.blog/2019/04/26/tale-as-old-as-time-pockets/ Ofcourse I am also wearing a shift (the undies of the 18th century), stays (18th century version of a corset to get the conical shape) and split rump to get that big butt action of the late 18th century, these are all from a previous project from before I started blogging.
I made this outfit for an 18th century masquarade ball this spring and there I did my hair in a more historically accurate style rather than going full on disney Belle.
Then this week when all the spring flowers bloomed we went to take some pictures in true Disney princess style with my hair done up more accurate to the movie look.
And now on to the picture galore! If you look closely at my gown skirts you can notice I’ve tied them in several different ways for the pictures, each giving a slighty different effect.
this pleating is really my favorite part of tghe italian gownthe quintessential princess twirl
And one last one with hubby, more about his outfit later. Now I’m off to making the kids some 18th century garments for a picnic coming up soon… 🙂
Ever since I started down the 18th century costuming rabbit hole I’ve loved the italian gown, the fitted back that ends in that deep v with a slip rump to give your derriere that extra oomph. The reason why I decided to make Belle’s gown an italian gown instead of the sack back that would be from the 1740s when the book first came out was that fitted back and flowing skirt. As much as I’ve loved the francaise gown Belle costumes I’ve seen others make it lacks that one thing why I think the animators originally went with a 19th century ball gown instead of 18th century, that princess skirt twirl! You know the one every little child does as soon as they get that princess dress on. A francaise moves beautifully but those loose back pleats just do not twirl the same.
here is the francaise from Belle’s timeand here is the fitted back of an italian gown
I started mine by printing out the italian gown pattern in the American duchess guide to the 18th century dressmaking https://www.american-duchess.com/book/american-duchess-guide I scaled the pattern as near as I could to what I thought would be my measurements and printed it, then taped the pieces together to form a pattern and traced it onto pattern paper and muslin to make my mock up. American duchess blogged about scaling these patterns up to make a printable sheet and since her way seems much more accurate than mine I’ll just link that instead of explaining how I did it. http://blog.americanduchess.com/2019/04/how-to-scale-up-gridded-sewing-patterns.html
First mock up was slightly loose but otherwise okI sewed the mock up quick and dirty on the machine, marked any nececary changes on it and ripped it open and used that as my pattern pieces and as my lining on my gowncutting into silk is very terrifying
All the sewing I did by hand with silk thread using the instructions in the american duchess guide. All in all I’m happy with it but in the armpit area my stitches on the inside are pretty messy. Also I’m not sure how but somehow I goofed and managed to make the lining too small on the other arm so there is tiny bit of silk peeking out on the inside.
first try prooved that I had somehow managed to miscalculate and ended up making the back pieces too big. Here I have to give huge credit to hubby who patiently pinned this all in place for me despite his complete lack of interest in sewingsince the front didn’t need any fussing with I finished it off with a running stitchHere is the side back seam with the lining sewed on to the front pieces One last check before cutting the lining and sewing the fashion fabric on topthe fashion fabric gets sewn on top of the side back seam in a curve to give an illusion of a smaller waist fitting with the back side seams sewn upthe front is still a bit floppy in this one but here I’m setting the sleeve, the front is smoothed out against the shoulder strap so that the extra volume that allows your arm to move gathers in the back here you can see how the fabric gathers in the back of the arm to give full range of movementthe sleeve is first rather crudely sewn onto the shoulder strap liningthen the fashion fabric is pinned onto the shoulderstrap hiding all that messy stitchingI prick stitched the long sides and aplique stitched the short edges of the shoulder strap to the gown Here is that messy inside bit at the armpit. I’m not too worried about it though because slightly messy is completely authentic though I think mine is a bit more than usual
Next came the pleating of the skirt part. I decided to leave the edges unturned as the selvedge gave a nice firm edge to it so I just sewed the skirt pieces together and started pleating. I used the stripes in my fabric as a rough guide and pleated it so that 2 pleats made up the width of one stripe. So always one opposide colored stripe ended up completely hidden, luckily this added up to pretty much the width I needed.
here the fabric is all pleated and pinned to correct size in this one you can kind of see the color changes in the pleats, this proved near impossible to photgraph with the silk shining and the srtipes being so similar in color gown pinned ontop of the skirt I applique stitched the bodice to the skirtafter attaching the bodice to the skirt I ripped open the top and folded it down leaving the extra fabric to give the skirt more lift after sewing the skirt on and opening the back seam enough to let the extra fabric to fold down I stitched the back of the pleats down a little under the seam to keep the pleats from opening up too soon
After hemming the gown so that the back sweeps the floor and the sides come up to my ankles I added bias tape loops to the lower part of the skirt and ribbons to the back waist so that you can lift the skirts up in differnt ways to keep it off the ground.
dress guts! 😀
All finished! Well this post ended up so long that I’ll leave the action pictures for the next post except for thi one back view. See you then!
I’ll get back to writing about my historically accurate Belle look in a later post but I wanted to write about my latest outfit I just finished. I actually started this in the winter before the Belle costume took over all my time so now I just had the finishing up to do.
The skirt is from an 1939 suit pattern that I made once last summer. Though I like the first suit I wasn’t completely happy with how the back side hung on me. My hips are much wider than suggested in the pattern so the flounce that is created by drape didn’t really have enough fabric to gather into a big enough flounce. I changed the anle of the center back seam to give me more room in the back for the fabric to drape right. This time I’m very happy with the result and will most definitely be making more skirts with this pattern, I think the next one will be the full suit again.
Here is the suit I made last summerHere you cna see how much better the back drapes with the extra fabric
The skirt is made out of a very light 100% wool felt I found a few years ago. Such an awsome material, I wish I had bought more. It doesn’t even need hemming, the raw cut edge looks perfect.
The shirt is from a pattern from 1940. This one I don’t own the original pattern but bought a digitalized copy from evadress https://evadress-patterns.myshopify.com/collections/1940s/products/1940-ladies-hooded-blouse-wide-leg-trousers-and-overalls-t40-3322 . I’ve made the pants from this pattern before and have wanted to make the shirt but for some reason I don’t seem to ever find blouse fabrics that I’d like so it was left to marinate for a while. After christmas when I was sorting out fabrics looking for something else I realized I had this lovely light striped wool suiting piece that wasn’t quite big enough for slacks. Well since I’m too cold to wear blouses most of the time, the reason why I usually wear wool knits instead, I figured that it would make a lovely blouse. The hood in the pattern was way too small for my head (kind of like most vintage hats, curse my big noggin lol) so I scaled it up to not only fit but to drape a bit since I like my hoods slightly oversized. It also gives me the extra room to turn the edge so that you can see a fabulous hood lining fabric, a small scrap of vintage 30s/40s very light weight wool crepe, the kind you can’t find modern made.
Just a quick selfie for the hood sorry, hubby didn’t get the importance of having the tip pointing up and showing in the pictures lol the buttons are vintage 30s
Now for the picture galore! I’m really happy with how this outfit turned out and am completely in love with the hood. I feel like an elf or fairy with it.
My shoes are vintage 30s and my stockings are vintage wool seamed stockings
Last time I made an 18th century outfit it was for halloween but I wanted to still make it fairly historically accurate to be able to wear it at events also. Then I seriously under estimated how much time goes into these outfits and made everything: shift, stays, under petticoat, split rump, petticoat and the caraco jacket in a week. I had no time to make a proper pocket so just cut out my fabric pieces, machine sewed it into pocket with raw edges and whipped it onto a bias tape and went with that! It worked for that one night. So making my second 18th century outfit and my first gown, this time hand sewing it I knew I wanted a proper pocket. At first I was looking at extant pieces for inspiration and was thinking of copying one. trrying do deside on the pattern I figured since I don’t actually reenact, it never gets shown to any public as education, my pocket doesn’t actually need to be completely accurate so I went wild with the design. It’s all hand sewn and hand embroidered using stitches that were used at the time though. I used the book 18th century embroidery techniques as my guide for accurate stitches. https://www.amazon.com/18th-Century-Embroidery-Techniques-Marsh/dp/1861084765
Here is a picture of that very first 18th century look for Halloween. All in all I think it turned out quite good though the hair is a bit wild
Since I was doing a historically accurate Belle this time around I thought maybe I could use the movie for inspiration. After musing it over for a few days I settled on the stained glass design of beauty and the beast with some more 18th century flower vines framing it. I ripped out that previous quick and dirty pocket made from an old linen tablecloth I thrifted. I drew the design (with a pencil because I’m lazy) on the back piece that didn’t have the pocket slit cut open and started embroidering.
I drew the picture free hand from this picture on my phone and used it as my guide for the details
The actual embroidering took me 10 days, then sewing the pocket, meaning I took more time making my pocket than I did my quilted petticoat! 😀
I first did the outlines and then filled the people out mostly with a satin stitch it felt like Belle’s dress took forever but Beast’s jacket took longer as it was too big of a space for the satin stitch. I forget the name of this stitch I used here thoughFinally all the embroidery done! You can kind of see the outlines of 2 extra flowers I had drawn out but decided to leave out from the finished work. The bottom rose ofcourse is the one beast received from the enchantress, the rest is just freehand floral design based on what I saw on the original onesThe fabric is doubled for the front so that the back of the embroidery is protected and hopefully to protect my pretty pocket from wear. All layers are sewn together, then the raw edge is folded under bias tape and that whipped on from both sides. The slit is covered with linen bias binding that is sewn on from the right side with a running backtstitch and whipped on in the inside.
All the embroidery is done with silk floss. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out especially since it’s my first time making an actual piece with embroidery. I have done some stitch practices in school and some cross stitching but never anything like this. Now I really want to make another pocket, one that isn’t white, for everyday use! They are just sooo much better than modern pockets or even ladies bags for all the little things we lug around.
And here are the final risque lingerie pictures 18th century style!
Looking at these I’m really happy with how my hair turned out for these. My makeup is all plausible for the time, no modern products! I have to say I am very impressed with 18th century face makeup my skin is currently doing all kinds of wierd things and is far from flawless but this looks good, also the clove brow pencil is one of my all time favorite brow products. Another thing quite obvious is that I see a new stays project in my future, not sure exactly why or how since I don’t think I’ve lost weight these seem now slightly too roomy on me. The shift is made from an old linen table cloth, soooo soft! I do need a lighter weight one some time in the near future…
When I had decided that I was going to do an italian gown for my historically accurate Belle, I started looking through pinterest and museum collection of 18th century gowns to try to figure out how to make mine so that it would have some clear elements from the movie gown but still be accurate. The gown in the movie is actually more like a 19th century dress than 18th century though her other clothes are a bit closer to 18th century.
To me the key of this dress is that scallopped rouching so my idea was to mimic that in some way but still stay faithful to the time period. So looking at pinterest I figured that that the only 2 possibilities was either by embroidery or quilting. I went with quilting since I had wanted to make a quilted petticoat anyways. I already posted several original examples of quilted petties in my previous post so here is only one to show the general idea.
Like you can see most quilted petticoats had some more intricate work on the bottom to give them more interest. So my next step was to figure out what that something would be without losing the original disney vision too much. Then I came across these amazing ebroidered gowns and desided that either some embroidery or beadwork would do the trick.
I knew from looking at the museum examples that they were not that full so I used my 114cm width silk fabric as one half of the total width then I counted how big I wanted the design to be and drew it out from there on to paper.
here is my rough sketch and the first straight rows on the bottom
I lay out my inner lining linen, then my cotton batting and the silk satin on top and pinned all layers trying to get them as straight as possible. Here I ran into a bit of a problem since I had opted for the “cheap” thin silk satin. It did not want to stay on grain! Everytime I moved or even breathed the fabric fluttered and shifted but I did my best and after nearly 2 hours of pinning I finally had the layers well enough together and cut to size since both my batting and lining were wider than my silk. Then I basted the top edges together and started quilting from the bottom with running stitches. Now many of the originals I found online had the stitch count somewere between 8 and 12 stitches per inch. Try as I might I could get it only to 7 per inch. I don’t know if that is because my batting, though very thin might still be slightly thicker than many originals or just my lack of experience in quilting. I didn’t want to risk transfer ink staining my satin so I decided on punching holes in my drawing and chalking those dots onto my silk.
I did 4 rows of the scallops on both sides with the back having an extra 8 inches of material at the top. Then when both sides were quilted I took some sequin trimm I had and fashioned it into bows on to the fabric and sewed it on. In my original sketch I had visioned tassels on the ends of every other bow but I ended up making ribbons of sequins instead on all of them. I was still planning on adding a row of sequins on the bottom but ran out of time so maybe I’ll add that on at some point.
Then for the actual making up of the petticoat.
Like I already stated in the previous post I desided to go with this specific way of making up my petticoat because it looked like it was perfect for wearing with a split rump under it, like was fashionable in the late 70s and 80s and that looks so awsome with the italian gown. It is made up from two equal sides, the front being pleated at the waist with very big pleats, the center back being cartridge pleated with big pleats on the sides. The waistband is fitted with hooks and eyes and pocket openings on both sides.
I first stitched up the sides ending several inches before the front top edge to leave pocket slits. Now my initial plan was to use a mantua makers stitch for the seams but because on the sides I had all 3 layers on both sides, the seam would have come out very bulky. I desided to go with a flat felled seam instead. I did a running stitch through all layers, then when the seam was sewn up trimmed the inner layers down and turned the lining ontop of the other and whipped it down with a narrow rolled hem on the raw edge side and just whipping it flat on the selvedge side.
sewing through all 6 layers required me to do one stitch at a time so it was slow going
Here on the finished seams you can see I ran out of steam and my whipping stiches ended up quite messy
After the the sides were finished I undid the basting on the top and trimmed the batting down to the last row of quilting and stitched it to the lining fabric.
Next I needed to cut the back piece to size. I measured 4 iches higher than the front for the center back point and pinned the linen and silk together sloping down towards the same legth as the front on the sides and cut it. Then I eyeballed about the middle 1/3 of the back piece and basted that with two lines of as equal length stitches as I could get them.
Then I pulled them tight together to form the cartridge pleats and knotted the threads to keep them in place and basted the remaining top edge. Then I secured the pleats down with grouping them into 3 pleats together and sewing together. I have no idea if this stitch has a name, I just did what it looked like in the original picture.
fabric lint really stitcks under my nails 😀
With the cartridge pleats done I just winged the big pleats making sure the end result ended up half of my waist measurement in the back and ever so slightly more than half in the front to allow for a tiny overlap at the waistband to make the pocket slits hang nicer. Now I turned the pocket slit edges inward and running stitched shut to give the pocket slits a clean edge
Time to make the waistband. I took the piece I had cut off the back and straightened the curved edge and cut it to 2 inches longer than my waist measurement in my stays. This is to allow for a bit of overlap at the side were the hooks and eyes go and to allow for me to do a tiny turn to stitch the ends neatly shut. Then I removed the basting from the top and took the batting out and folded it in half legthwise so that the silk is both the outer and inner with the linen doubled as the interlining.
Now at this point when I started pinning the waistband on to the petticoat a realized I gooffed earlyer and did my cartridge pleating onto a raw edge. I should have finished the edge BEFORE the cartridge pleats! So I stitched the edge with the ends turned inward now though it took me many times the time it would have if I would have done it before the pleating.
Now finally it was time to sew on the waistband! I did a running back stitch over all the regular pleated parts and whipped the fronts of the cartridge pleats onto the waistband after sewing the waistband shut with a running back stitch and then continuing with a running back stitch for the rest of the waistband. Then I went back and whipped the front ofthe waistband also to the cartridge pleats for extra strength.
Now all that was left to do was pick out the bits of basting stitches that ended up visible, attaching the hooks and eyes and hemming the bottom. I used the lower line of straight stitches I had on the bottom as my guide and trimmed down my lining and batting about halfway between it and the silk fabric’s edge. Then I just rolled and hemmed the silk on top.
Finally all done!
It took me a little under a week to quilt this and 3 days to sew up, no clue as to how many hours.
Many times during this project I did question my life choises not only for doing this but in general :D. In the end I am so happy that I did it. All in all it wasn’t that bad though and now after finishing it I am planning on making another at some point but in a more strictly historically accurate motif. Now this post has already ended up very very long but I can’t resist the temptation of adding quite few pictures of the end result. I think this in one of the makes I’m most proud of that I have ever made. This and my italian gown are the first completely hand sewn garments I’ve ever made and this is my second 18th century outfit. The stays, the shift and the split rump are from that previous and first 18th century outfit.
Hi! Maybe I should have done an actual introduction post first but I’m just way too excited about my latest project, the reason why I decided to start this blog. So I’ll do a shortish intro here. If you’d rather get straight to the dress feel free to skip the first 3 paragraphs and get straight to the good stuff. 🙂
This is my second 18th-century outfit and the first one to be made completely with historically accurate techniques all sewn by hand of course since the sewing machine wasn’t invented yet. Making it I relied a lot on other blogs, facebook historical sewing groups and the American duchess guide to 18th-century book. I found so many useful detailed blog posts but reading them I felt that there weren’t that many to find and as someone with fairly severe dyslexia figuring out written instructions isn’t always my strong suit. So looking at those posts I felt like maybe I write my own to share my personal points of struggling and the light bulb moments I had when making this, maybe others would find it useful too. So here it goes! I’ll get to the actual making of stuff later, soon I hope since I’ve already finished the project I thought I’d start by showing it off and telling you a bit about the idea and inspiration behind it first.
I’ve always loved historical silhouettes and at least since my teens daydreamed of making historical clothing, late 19th-century bustle gowns and frilly 18th-century gowns, medieval gowns and the like. For some reason, I never actually made any. As a little girl, I always dreamed of my very own proper Disney princess dresses. Back in the early 90s, most of us had dress up clothes but they were mostly just old pretty dresses from charity shops not the look-alike princess dresses of today. Going forward to my early 20s I started wearing retro and repro vintage 40s, 50s and 60s but because my job back then involved a uniform in everyday life I was mostly in sweat pants and only dressed up for special occasions. When I had my first child and became a stay at home mom that changed. I wanted to feel pretty and keep a bit of myself through my clothing so I started to shift towards wearing vintage or vintage inspired on a daily basis. After the first few years and after having my second kid with my changed body I just didn’t feel at home anymore in the new look hourglass shape. I felt much bigger than I was and just not that pretty in general, and since I’m a strong believer in wearing clothing that makes you feel good I needed a change, so further back in time I went. So now my everyday style is mostly late 30s to early 40s. It seems to be my sweet spot in time, clothes have all the interesting details I love as a sewist and in a style that is flattering on my body. I’ve always been one who loves to dress outside the norms and have a flashy style but I’m most definitely a comfort dresser. I want my clothing to be easy to wear and live in, styles that look good on me even without shapewear. that being said I don’t mind corsets or stays, it’s mostly the more modern girdles and the like that are really not my cup of tea.
Anyways to get my ramblings back on track what really sparked my interest in historical dress to the idea of actually making one was a combination of two things. I had read the first 2 Outlander books in my early twenties but since having kids I hadn’t read much. One big reason for not really reading any was that I had rekindled my love for knitting and with the modern world of Facebook groups, Instagram and Ravelry it opened a whole new world of knitting that I hadn’t known before. Since I was always knitting in the evenings after kids went to bed it was easier to just tune into Netflix, until I found the magical world of audiobooks. Yes I know they have been around for a long time but I’m very much not tech savvy and very slow to find new things. This time listening to the Outlander series it really sparked my imagination, what if you really could go back in time, could I live in those previous times. Then on insta through some lovely vintage dressing ladies, I found that there is such a thing as historical costuming and that I wasn’t the only silly person who wanted to make historical clothes. But still, I felt that why would I make one since I really have nowhere to wear one. Then hubby suggested that what if he went as an 18th-century vampire to a burlesque Halloween party he was playing at. Well, I didn’t actually get around to making his outfit but I did start my research into 18th-century dress and make my own first outfit.
After making that first dress I wanted to make more! Not only make more but find more occasions to actually wear them, so I went on the hunt for local events and found that there are indeed a few historical balls around. The first one that I could actually go to was this springs masquerade ball were the theme was literature, as a mom that instantly made me think Disney! Well of course Disney is all modern 20th or 21st century but most of the stories have older roots and are set into history. 18th century and Disney really brings just one princess to mind, Belle. The original story is from 1740 so it fitted well with the theme. The first thing I did was google to see what others have done with the subject. Most historically accurate Belle dresses I found were robe ala Francaise, which makes sense since that was the fashionable style of the time, but I knew I wanted to do something different. My first idea was that I’d make it in an earlier beginning of the century mantua style as that would be most like her hairstyle in the movie. With that I ran into 2 problems, first patterns of that era gowns are much harder to find that later in the decade ones and second that style really needed a good brocade to give the proper Belle look but good brocades are very expensive and hard to find. As I was going through hours of looking at 18th-century gown and coming up with ideas of what I wasn’t to do I really got my heart set on making an italian gown, with those gorgeous back pleats and making a quilted petticoat. When looking at quilted petticoats I saw that many of them had these great scallop patterns of them that really reminded me of Belle’s dress. So the two ideas morphed into one and so the idea of Belle in the late 1770s early 1780s was born.
Here are some of the quilted petticoats that I used as inspiration:
Since I had settled on an italian gown and the quilted petticoat my first problem was that I really liked the italian gown with a split rump but all the petticoats I had seen looked like they were either worn without any kind of support underneath or just a small hip roll or the earlier wider style ones to be worn with panniers. So my solution was to ignore the problem and go ahead and make the pocket, finish up my stays that the last time around a wore unbound as I ran out of time and make the gown. I drew up the design for the petticoat and ordered my silk satin for it bought the cotton batting and found an old linen plain table cloth from a charity shop to use as the lining fabric. Then when I googled to see how others had made their quilted petticoat I ran into this amazing blog post http://stay-ingalive.blogspot.com/2018/01/a-quick-green-silk-quilted-petticoat.html about an unusual quilted petticoat in the Nordiska museum. It has cartridge pleats in the back and the hem is clearly longer in the back, rump room y’all!
So there you have it, how the 1780s Belle came to be and the thought process behind it. I’ll make a separate post on the actual finished project and more detailed making of posts on each individual piece later but for now just a small preview of the finished look that I wore to the masquerade ball this last weekend.
Sew through time 