Sometimes I am a terrible brat, as in this past weekend, when the autocorrect on my phone insisted that the proud four-letter Anglo-Saxon words I was typing were not what I meant to say. Darn tootin’ they were.
This is not my first rodeo with stays, but somehow I’d forgotten about the special stabby hell of boning the beasts. I’m machine sewing the channels for these, mostly because I calculated the time required to completely hand-sew them and realized I would not finish them before I needed them. I’ve rationalized this by acknowledging that I’m not using the hand-woven brown wool sateen I covet, but instead a dark blue wool twill.
A bloody, messy business
all around
I know, I know: there’s a reason staymaking was a man’s trade. My hands are pretty strong, but it took some doing to figure out how to slide the pieces in neatly without jabbing the ends repeatedly into the freshly re-opened split on my thumb.
d’oh! surgical tape made this *much* better later.
It takes discipline to keep doing this, the way it takes some discipline not to eat ice cream for breakfast just because you can (though I did, just this week). Spencers and dresses are so tempting, but there’s not point to making a new dress of wonder unless I have the stays to wear it over: infrastructure is required.
The stomacher and the two front pieces are boned… six more pieces plus whipping and eyelets and binding, oh, my! It’ll be a race to have them done by June 24th: Discipline’s the thing.
This past weekend, I had a conversation with a friend about requests to borrow “costumes” we’ve made, sometimes for school children to wear, sometimes for movies, and sometimes for parties. We generally say no: these are hand-sewn clothes, and the replacement cost would be ridiculous– plus, we like them and wear them.
I hand sew because I get better control, but also because there were no sewing machines in the 18th and early 19th centuries. To get a garment right, you have to hand sew it, and that’s expensive. I took the time once to figure out what a set of clothes for the Young Giant cost– much to my dismay, and eventually, to his, as I became even more insistent that the garments be treated with respect.
Last year, I sent the Young Mr off to Battle Road in a new suit, and the whole business of what he was wearing was quite expensive. Using $25/hour as a base for labor, here’s how the kid’s Battle Road suit breaks down:
Grand total, with labor: $2532.25 Grand total without labor: $732.25
This wasn’t cheap either.
So think about this the next time you attend an event with a lot of well-made garments: you are standing amid a lot of labor and love.
Sewing is a fairly simple enterprise (you’re pushing thread in and out of fabric, after all), but it takes practice to develop fine skills and speed. A well-made garment will never be cheap. The best investment you can make in your wardrobe is to invest in your skill set, and learn to sew.
Sometimes you’re a jerk without meaning to be, usually because you can’t see past your own limited self. I was that jerk on Friday, when my obsession with a missing package led to unfortunate words with both a supplier and worse, my sweetheart, about an unexpected length of fabric lately arrived from India. Would that my brain would work faster, for by the time I’d figured out what to make of it, the conversation had turned, and an additional 300 miles lay between me and the recipient of my confusion and dismay.
Despite my best intentions and resolve, I am a sentimentalist. This instinct sometimes conflicts with a devotion to honesty, for kindness often lies in elision. Confused? Short story: I don’t wear yellow, but a package arrived Friday with a dress length of printed Indian cotton, red and green flowers on a yellow ground.
“But Kitty,” you say, “Don’t you crave the hideous, the clashing, and the correct? You applaud Our Girl History’s choice of 1770s fashionable pink, though she prefers blue. Yellow is the haute couleur of the 18th century, fashionable everywhere, even in North America. You should leap at the chance to wear it.” (I was not thinking fast at all on Friday evening.) What made me bend my resolve– what will always makes me bend my resolve?
Petticoat fragment. Note the bright yellow, with crudely printed lining. Wintherthur Museum 1959.0118.004
Sentiment, of course, backed by research.
April, that cruel month, brought obsessive searches for Indian cotton print appropriate for the 18th century, as I looked at sample books and extant garments, searching for material to create frankly annoying clothing. Orange and green check with clashing Spencer and bonnet lining isn’t enough: I want to push my representation of the fashion sense of the past closer to truth. People in the past weren’t as matchy-matchy as we are, and their ideas of stylish, attractive, and fashionable were very different from ours. Loud was ladylike, and that’s a style statement I can get behind. Along the way, I ordered fabric in a pink and green (a departure itself) floral print on white ground, yardage now long overdue.
Textile Sample Book, British, 1780. MMA156.41 P34
A friend has been dabbling in these same waters, and made up a new gown for Mount Vernon, satisfyingly loud and clashing with our modern sensibilities about the past. Our mutual friend, also at Mount Vernon, assisted her in choosing a dress length for me, and reader, I was confused and lacking when it arrived. But like any good curator in a social history museum, it was the story that got me. How can I resist a gift from a fellow enthusiast in a pattern chosen by my sweetheart, on the grounds that I don’t wear the color? Reader, I cannot.
Think of Cranford, of lengths of dress muslin requested and never received, and the sentiment embodied in that fabric. Think of women in Providence craving an India print gown, of lovers, husbands, sons, ordering dress lengths at trading ports thousands of miles and long months from home. Think of the affection and thoughtfulness embodied in textiles brought back months after they were requested. Complex meaning is woven into that cotton, giving this dress length interpretive meaning before it is even a garment.
Now what? Now I have to decide which century/event this gets made up for: 1812-1817, 1778, 1804, 1768. There are many choices, but with the meaning embedded in the fabric, I’m most inclined to make something I’d wear often– not that this is particularly housekeeper-appropriate.
And about the research you ask? Yes, small floral print on colored ground is documentable to the 18th century. While early and European, here’s an example of an Indian motif translated by Dutch makers for printing in Sweden. Rhode Island merchants traded in the Baltic, so given the early date of this fabric sample, its arrival in North America could predate 1788 and John Brown’s first ship to China and the far east trade. Possible? Yes. Probable? We can have a lively discussion, in which I will point out the Brown’s love of all things French and French translations of bright, small motif print patterns. The printing factories in Sweden ran until 1771 and produced at least two relevant prints. Would my successful Presbyterian farmer have bought something like this for me in New York or Philadelphia? Would I have worn something so bright and loud? Am I overthinking this? Perhaps, but yellow is a new thought for me.
With especially fond thanks to Miss N and Drunk Tailor, to whom I also owe an apology.
Almost…except of course the whole thing nearly derailed into a visit to the Princeton Art Museum. Why, you ask? The Great April Stay Failure.
Confessions of a Known Bonnet Wearer are what we’re all about, so here you go: Despite a quick stay alteration that appeared to solve the too-big shimmy, the Stays of Yore continue to chafe and annoy.
Bent and Broken Bones
Seemed okay at the time
Turns out that lacing yourself up the back is nowhere near as effective as having someone else lace you up. Leverage: you don’t has it the way another person standing behind you does. And if that person naturally possesses greater upper-body strength than you, well, there you are. You will find yourself experiencing a great deal more containment than you might find desirable. Actually, the stays were more like nipple guillotines, as the fault shown here made itself all too well known.
Yes: the fool things were not made properly in the first place, exacerbating any fit issues that can be ascribed to weight loss, fabric stretch, or general high-level-of-activity use. Reader, I am up against it.
Not only do I have a pair of 1800 stays on the table needing to be finished, I have a banyan to make up and a bedgown to finish, all by April 21 for a program at work. A mere two weeks later, I will need really serviceable and decently-fitting stays if I plan to go back up to Fort Ti. Quickie torso measurements, anyone?
It tried, and did well, considering the circs.
Of course, the thing is that these ought not to be done quickly, but correctly. I recognize that after four years of wear, these imperfect stays made of modern (linen and caning instead of wool and baleen) materials could legitimately be wearing out. But the really important thing is this: They turned out to be so (literally) painfully wrong that turning them around and wearing them backwards was better. No, that was not an ideal solution. I have a sizable bruise on my left underarm area and a red wear spot on the right and my poor handmade (just finished!) sketchbook is bent from use as a stomacher/busk.
Granted, I do have the materials I need to make new stays, but what I lack is more critical: time and a second pair of hands to help me measure torso length. I suspect that even a new pair (of wool and linen, thank you for reducing stretch) will take more alterations than I currently credit. Hilariously, while these pattern pieces may require some lengthening, the 1800 stays needed shortening to fit properly. So on my table sit one pair, shortened, and another pair, seemingly in need of an opposite alteration. Get fit or die tryin’, right?
Sometimes I am a terrible brat, as in this past weekend, when the autocorrect on my phone insisted that the proud four-letter Anglo-Saxon words I was typing were not what I meant to say. Darn tootin’ they were.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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