Bustle Era Day Dress

Patterns Used:

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When the opportunity to attend a "Victorian" era tea party being held to raise money for a local historic cemetery arose, and after hearing that guests were encouraged to come in costume, I decided it was high time to start exploring some latent 19th century longings. Last winter I had started a diary of a bustle era gown, but since the tea was to be held in the spring, and the weather was probably going to be hot, I wanted to make an outfit that wouldn't boil me alive.

Not having a real clue about Victorian clothing other than a childhood obsession with "Gone With The Wind", and lacking the time to commit to a really in depth exploration of the bustle era, I decided to use commercial patterns. I've heard plenty of good things about Truly Victorian and felt that I'd be able to knock out an outfit in 2 weeks time with confidence, so I went ahead and ordered. The patterns arrived within 4 days (gotta love that fast turn around!) and so I set to work on the underskirt. Unfortunately, I had misinterpreted one of the patterns and ordered the wrong one. Instead of any underskirt pattern, I had bought a petticoat pattern. However, this isn't rocket science, so I was able, with a small amount of tweaking, to use the petticoat pattern to make the underskirt.

For the underskirt fabric, I chose a light blue/yellow shot taffeta that I'd picked up at JoAnn's for 50% off. I bought 4 yards of 58" wide fabric, guessing that I'd have enough for the skirt and then some left over for the ruffle at the hem. The skirt itself only ate about 2 1/2 yards of fabric, thanks in part to the fact that it was so wide. The remainder went into the 14" ruffle at the hem.

 

 

The skirt is flat lined in a cheap cotton calico. When you back light the taffeta, the flower print shows through. It's an interesting effect, but I doubt it'll be noticeable while being worn.

The taffeta is synthetic. Much as I would love to be using silk taffeta for this project, budget and time constraints wouldn't allow it.

 

The hem is hand sewn using a blind hem stitch. Haven't got a clue if this is actually a period stitch for this era, but it's neat and unobtrusive. And my mom enforced a "no machine stitched hems" rule while I was growing up, after an encounter with my great-grandmother left her permanently scarred for life. Inherited neuroses.. Gotta love it.

 

 

The hem ruffle is shown here, box pleated using roughly 1" pleats and a 2" 'box'. At this point, I was guessing at how much yardage I'd need and tried to over compensate by cutting my pieces the entire 58" width of the fabric (the pattern only called for a length about half that wide, but since I'd modified it to work as an underskirt, I'd also enlarged the circumference of the hem by about a foot).

 

Turned out that my haphazard guesstimate was actually exactly the length needed to go around the hem of the skirt. I ended up with a pleated scrap piece about 8" long which was cut off. In the photo to the left, the box pleats are shown pressed flat and pinned to the skirt. I didn't want to leave them like this, however, since they looked too 2 Dimensional. I wasn't going to have a lot of surface detail on this outfit, but I wanted it to have depth.

 

So, I tacked the pleats down about 1.5" inches from the top and then pinched the center of each "box", tacked it in place and let the rest fall open in a sort-of fan shape. This is reminiscent of the same method of pleating I did on my first bustle underskirt last winter, but on a smaller scale. The only thing left was to pleat the waist and install the waistband.

 

With the underskirt taken care of, I moved onto my next project, the over skirt. The fabric is a gorgeous silk jacquard in teal and shot with a subtle purple. I had bought about 4 yards of this stuff years ago and used half of it in an Italian renaissance gown that never got finished. The other half was tucked away in the 'ol fabric stash ready to be rediscovered. Having unearthed the unused yardage, I went digging through my old costumes and found the Italian Ren outfit and salvaged the skirt portion for the overskirt. The unused piece was set aside for the bodice and sleeves.

The Truly Victorian pattern I'd chosen was #324 "1878 Long Draped Overskirt" (scroll to the very bottom of the page and it's on the right. Incidentally, the pattern for I used for the underskirt is right next to it, in case you're wondering). The finished product of this pattern that's pictured on the site is lovely, but due to a couple of factors I've had no real luck with getting it to look right and following the pattern. I think the main difficulty was that I was forced to piece much of the fabric back together in order to make the pattern fit. Ultimately, I had to sacrifice about 8" at the hem, which isn't all that bad considering I'm shorter than average. However, it still probably makes enough of a difference at the back in the end, when it comes time to gather the fabric into a bustle shape.

Another complication was that I had to use a larger amount of width to fit my hip measurement (with bustle and underskirt on), but my waist measurement is still pretty small (in fact, there's almost a 20" difference between my corseted waist measurement and my hip measurement with the small bustle pad and flounced petticoat). This made it difficult to get the front piece to lie flat against the skirt without bunching out across the hips.

I tried a variety of pleating and gathering methods on front and back, but nothing really fit what I'd had in mind. Finally, I took out all the pleating and gathering and just started doing my own thing. I'm not overjoyed with the result, but it's decent:

I still need to fix the back a bit. It's all just pinned in place at the moment, too.

Up Next: The Bodice