*That Petticoat* and Venetian Carnevale

I have come close to accepting that I will simply never catch up on the posts for the outfits I've made during my PhD. Happily, I'm about a month or two away from submitting said PhD, so maybe after that you'll get lots of posts. In the mean time, here's a post about a petticoat I've been working on for about seven years.

Here's a photo from Venice in February to whet your appetite for the rest of this post, because I'm going to be talking about quilting a petticoat for quite a while before we get to the nice Venice photos:

(The thing I'm holding is a black velvet moretta mask - more on that later)

This post is mostly about the quilted petticoat in the background image for this blog; the one I've been in love with since Dr Lynn Sorge-English first pulled it out of the collection to show us in the (second?) year of my undergrad at Dalhousie University. This petticoat:

It's mid-eighteenth century, made of emerald silk lutestring/lustring (a flimsy plain weave, like a really thin taffeta or habotai), hand-stitched to a linen backing, and it's just ideal in every way. I'm very grateful that Lynn allowed us to examine it, learn from it, and photograph it on two occasions during my undergrad.

I decided almost immediately upon seeing it that I needed it, and I was going to make a reconstruction. A couple of years later, when I took a class on textile dyeing at NSCAD, I went in for extra time in the studio so that I could use their vats to dye some silk using weld and indigo - one of the most common early modern natural dye combinations for green. Unfortunately, the indigo vat was pretty exhausted by the time I was able to get my silk in, since I had to use it for some class assignments first, so my green isn't quite as deep and vibrant as the original petticoat. But it's still a lovely colour!

Then, when I was at Colonial Williamsburg, the curator of textiles in the DeWitt Wallace Collection at the time, Linda Baumgarten, very kindly pulled a number of the quilted petticoats in her collection so that I could examine them, and she allowed me to take photos. Most of the ones there are more elaborate than the Dalhousie petticoat, and are backed with wool rather than linen. Since I'm always cold, I decided to adopt this method. The Williamsburg petticoats are also bound with ribbon on the hem in many cases: something that was either not applied to the Dalhousie petticoat, or was applied but later removed. I liked it aesthetically, so again decided to borrow this technique. I collected the necessary materials from Burnley and Trowbridge while in Williamsburg - wool backing and many yards of green silk ribbon to bind the hem.

A petticoat in the DeWitt Wallace Collection at Williamsburg

When I started my masters, I brought the materials with me and got as far as basting all the layers of silk, wool batting, and wool lining together, and then I got distracted by the Bath Victorian Ball and our trip to Versailles and my dissertation, and I put it in a box. Then I started a PhD, so that was that for a while.

But then, last October, James surprised me for my birthday by telling me that we were going for a weekend in Venice during carnevale in February, and I'd better get ready. Naturally, when I thought of an appropriate carnevale costume, I thought of the quilted petticoat just waiting to be quilted.

I had months!, I thought. Lots of time! Easy!

Here's my quilting process:

This is the petticoat pinned to my big embroidery frame. It was a permanent fixture in my living room between November and February.

And here's a photo of the original to show the hem design, which I slightly enlarged based on some of the other originals I'd viewed:

As you can see, the Dalhousie petticoat has a rectangle of glazed cotton pieced in at the back, up by the waistband. This saves on silk, since this area would be invisible under a gown. However, I knew I wanted to wear mine under a short jacket, so I went with silk all the way up. I did have to do quite a bit of piecing, though, since I only had a few yards of narrow-width silk.

I also liked that the original quilter had made some mistakes and had just corrected the line instead of pulling the stitches out. This implies that the original was quilted by eye, without lines drawn as a guide.

For mine, I used pins to mark general guide-points, and eyeballed the curves:

Excuse this extremely washed-out image

Anyways, it turned out that I did not have lots of time, because, as I remembered, I was writing a thesis. I finished about a third of the quilting before Christmas, and couldn't take the frame with me for the holiday, so that was that until January. And then I had about a month left to finish the other two thirds.

The first third done

I quilted like crazy for the next month. The finger tips on my left hand were literally shredded for several weeks of it, and I punched through my thimble (again, RIP). But the night before we flew to Venice, I was able to pull it off the frame and pin it into a set of waist bands!

Front

Back - extra poofy! There are no other petticoats or pads under this. It's just that fluffy.

On the flight to Venice, I attached the skirt to the waistbands. In our hotel the next evening, I hemmed the bottom edge with the silk ribbon. And it was wearable!

I wore my little silk brocade jacket and the stomacher from my Louisbourg Gown, did my hair 1760s-style, and added some silk mitts, colourful silk stockings, and a harlequin-pattern pin ball for a carnevale-appropriate look. Then we headed to Ca'Rezzonico, an eighteenth-century palazzo in Venice, to take some photos. I couldn't have asked for a better location, and I love that, in Venice, all the historic sites let you come in wearing costume! British sites do not like that, for the most part.

The mitts, stomacher, and pinball. I'm taking off my mask here, hence the weird pose.

All the photos from Venice were taken by James, by the way. He is very patient.

By the canal outside

I'm holding a 'moretta' mask here, which was the most popular mask choice for female carnevale attendees and masquerade-goers in the eighteenth centuries, if portraits are to be believed. There are lots of portraits of women with them on, or holding them as if they've just taken them off, which I tried to replicate in my own photos.

They're a bit creepy, as the black velvet absorbs all the light coming onto your face (they're descendants of sixteenth-century vizard masks, which were used as a form of sun protection), and you hold them in place using a bead that you clamp between your teeth, so theoretically you can't talk (although I managed pretty well).

They did give women some additional freedom of movement, however, because while wearing a mask you were protected to some extent: you couldn't be immediately recognised, you didn't have to greet or respond to unknown men, and it was a way to appear demure. Kind of like wearing sunglasses to avoid talking to people on the train.

Here's a woman in a jacket-and-skirt combo much like mine. She, and characters very like her, make appearances in a number of Pietro Longhi's paintings of Venetian Carnevale from the eighteenth century

François Boucher (1703-1770), 'Le Soir or La Dame allant au Bal'

Jean-Baptiste Santerre (1651-1717), 'La Comtesse de Bersac'

There are dozens more along these lines. I tried to keep them in mind as we went through Ca'Rezzonico.

I think this one looks like the old photos where they're trying to prove the existence of ghosts or faeries or something.

So there we are! I could say a lot more about Venice. I've been wanting to go there since I was really little, and it didn't disappoint in any way. I especially loved how many traditional craftspeople still had individual shops in the city - bookbinders, printers, gilders, painters, furniture restorers, and on and on. But all of that will have to wait for another post. We also got into 1890s kit for an afternoon, so I'll have to post about all of that (and the new c.1903 corset I made over Christmas, when I couldn't work on the petticoat!) another time.

I'm really glad I finally got to make this petticoat - and it was a perfect inaugural event for it!

Fishing in Fife

Oh hey, I wrote this and then never posted it! I've just found it in my drafts. It's from December 2016. Whoops. Better late than never.

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Well, as usual, it's been a while since last I posted! Sorry about that. I've been working away, but haven't attended any events to show you photos from. That changed this past weekend, though!

A friend and fellow St Andrews student, Adam HL, pulled me into the project he was putting together on eighteenth-century maritime fashion, and, in particular, the material culture of early modern fishing communities in coastal Fife, Scotland, for his undergraduate honours course. Some of you may know Adam from his work on the French reproduction frigate Hermione, which stopped to call in various spots up the North American coast in the summer of 2015. His deep interest in maritime fashion resulted in his choice of honours project, and also in the project's, er, *expanding* past the usual bounds of university coursework! I was very glad to get involved, and it's been very fun - we put on two public talks at the University of St Andrews, co-led a walk down to the ocean estuary near St Andrews to learn about historical ecology, foraging, and fishing work, and did a photoshoot down on the St Andrews pier and harbour-side. For next term we're planning some further demos at the Anstruther Fisheries Museum, and hopefully a trial-run on the Firth with a recreated sma'line (ocean fishing line). You can read lots more about Adam's project here, on his excellent blog 'Fishy Fashion and Maritime Modes.'

First of all, here is a watercolour by David Allan from the end of the eighteenth century (#D404, National Gallery, Edinburgh), showing one of the very few depictions of Fife fishwives from this period, and a photo of me next to Jigger's Inn, an eighteenth-century cottage on the Mussel Road that fishwives would have walked down to get to the estuary.

The basket is a back creel, which would have been loaded up with mussels to bait the lines or herring to go to market. Fishwives walked many miles on foot down to Edinburgh or up to Dundee to sell their wares, and came back with the goods their families needed in their fish baskets. They were also responsible for using the mussels they gathered to bait the fishing lines their husbands would take out to sea. Fishwives were the backbone of these communities, and their hard work resulted in quite a bit of power - they had control of the money, the households, and much of the daily running of the town. We re-created three baskets for this project - the back creel and two smaller baskets - with the help of Liz Balfour.

The photoshoot we did on the St Andrews pier, with photographer Noël Heaney, re-created a series of photos taken by Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill in the 1840s. Their work, now held in the National Portrait Gallery in London, gives us some of the best and earliest documentation of coastal Fife's fishing communities. Although our impressions are based on 18th-century sources, we chose to re-create this photoshoot because we wanted to show the continuity over time that made these looks iconic. Indeed, the fishwives' back creels and striped petticoats survived with little change until fishing declined here between the World Wars, and became so iconic that locals were able to immediately recognise my impression as I walked around St Andrews.

Here's my impression, alongside an Adamson and Hill portrait of Elizabeth Hall.

And Adam's impression, alongside an Adamson and Hill portrait of David Young.

Adam had reproduction seaboots made, and they are top-quality but very difficult to get off:

Behind us is one of the original fishing cottages in town, which you can see in another of Adamson and Hill's images:

So there you have it! It was quite a different impression for me, as my non-medieval kit tends to be more suited for ball attendees and suffragettes, but I really enjoyed putting this together and I learned a lot.

~

Note, 2019: Adam is still working on expanding his maritime impressions and is conducting further research into eighteenth-century dress and maritime work, particularly with regards to the material cultures of sailors of all sorts (except pirates). He's now based in the U.S., so definitely have a look at his work and public lectures if this is a topic that interests you!

The Versailles Ball, and HSF Travel

So, as anyone who follows my facebook has known for quite some time, on May 30th I was privileged to attend the Fêtes Galantes at the Palace of Versailles. This post has taken a very long time in coming, which I'm very sorry for, but I've been very busy with my masters and I just haven't had time to do a proper post!

As always, an image to start:

Photo arranged by Raven of Plaid Petticoats

I love this shot! Raven wanted to evoke Annie Leibowitz's Vogue shoot for Marie Antoinette, and I think she did a fabulous job. Our instructions were "look bored," haha. I am in the sage green gown in the centre. To my right are Emma, in dark blue, and Alana, in pink satin brocade. I draped both of their gowns, and did much of the stitching on both.

~~~

Now, before I talk about the process of getting ready for the ball, I wanted to share a little bit of context on this gown, because taking it to France was actually quite special to me. The gown was created to tell the story of one Nova Scotian woman who was forced from her home in Acadia in the 1740s, and took refuge in France. Wearing the gown there felt like an important part of its story. In addition, I posted this gown on the Historical Sew-Fortnightly for the Travel challenge - I didn't actually enter it in the challenge, as it was mostly made some time ago, but I did want to share the travel-laden story that goes with it.

The gown is my c. 1740s Robe a la Francaise and embroidered stomacher, modelled on one in the collection of the LACMA, and chosen because of its similarity to the gowns listed in the death inventory of Dame Marie-Josephe Le Borgne de Belle Isle, of Louisbourg. It was made and initially worn in Marie's birthplace of Nova Scotia, Canada.

Marie was the highest-ranking woman at the Fortress of Lousibourg (in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia) in the 1740s, with close ties both within the town and to surrounding communities. She had an impressive lineage: she was descended from French noble houses on both sides of her family, claiming a number of seigneurial lords of New France, as well as two Governors of Acadia, among her recent ancestors, and her mother was the daughter of Chief Madokawando of the Penobscot of Pentagoët. She married twice in Louisbourg; once to a respected civil administrator of the town and afterwards to Lord Joseph Du Pont Duvivier. Between these two marriages, she had nine children, at least four of whom survived to adulthood.

Given her strong ancestral and communal ties to Louisbourg and Acadia, the Siege of Louisbourg and the resulting expulsion of the Acadians in 1745 must have been devastating. Marie packed up her children and her belongings, and undertook the voyage to France along with many other members of her once-thriving community. The voyage would have been dangerous, and the outlook bleak - especially when she lost her first husband, soon after the tumult began. Yet in 1749, when Louisbourg was returned to French hands, Marie found the strength to once again pack up her children and her life and sail back to the New World. She remarried in 1750 and immersed herself as a pillar of the Acadian community at Louisbourg until her death from illness in 1754. In some ways her death at this time is a blessing, as she did not live to see the second siege of Louisbourg in 1758, which ended when the residents were once again expelled and the town was purposefully burnt to the ground. This event effectively ended French occupancy of the Maritimes, although the Acadian culture remains to this day.

Marie's travels are unlikely to have taken her to Versailles, despite her aristocratic connections and the time she spent in France, but when I had the opportunity to wear my "Louisbourg" gown to the ball in May it felt a bit like I was completing a part of the story the gown was created to tell. The gown is not a travelling suit - a riding habit or a redingote or anything particularly practical - but in many ways travel has defined it: my own travels, but more importantly the travel forced on Marie and her family, and on the entire Acadian community.

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The Ball

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It looks like a painting! I'm so happy with how these came out.

Getting ready for our own travels was a pretty hectic business. It started back in the fall, with drafting and making stays for Alana. Alana has never sewn before, and she was an enthusiastic learner but given the time-crunch Emma and I made the stays for her, and much of the gown. She sewed her hoops all on her own, with some guidance from Emma, and did a great job! We're getting her hooked on reenacting so I'm sure she'll have lots to practice on in the future. =)

Here's Alana's draping process - first a photo of her wearing her stays with her hoops and Emma's candy-cane/circus petticoat (100% linen! 100% amazing!), over which I have draped her bodice lining. The second photo shows the process of draping the gown itself. This was Alana's first gown and she wasn't sure if she'd like it, so we've used a poly satin. I WOULD NOT recommend this, ever. Even for a beginner gown - or rather, especially for a beginner gown. Silk taffeta goes together like a dream. Poly satin is a fraying, drooping, wrinkling, hell-spawned mess. *Ahem*

But she looks lovely, no?

Emma used a gorgeous steel blue taffeta, and had her own stays and petticoats already, so her process was a lot faster and smoother. She's also a very experienced costumer, so we just spent a lot of evenings watching TV and handing bits of the gown back and forth to drape or stitch. This meant she had to spend a lot of time in her 18th century underwear, ready to have bits of gown draped on her, which resulted in this gem:

#Cinderella

Here's her draping process:

Then front

Back first

Pleats!

Finally, sleeves.

I, unlike most people, apparently, don't actually mind draping or setting sleeves. I find them really satisfying, actually. Emma's took some fiddling, but they sat really nicely in the end.

Oh, and I made some shoes. Well, took apart and re-covered some 1940s shoes.

Trying out the look of the AD buckle

I used all stash silk! Also, I wore stockings to the ball. =P

Unfortunately, it rained almost the whole time we were in Paris. We got to wander around the first day, but as we'd taken the 22-hour overnight bus from Glasgow and arrived at about 6 a.m., we mostly just wanted to sleep. We did get to see the Louvre and a few other monuments first, though. Paris is beautiful - I can't wait to go back!

On the second day we wandered around Paris for one day in the 18th c. daywear we'd brought along, joined by our friend Adam, a sailor and sometime-Revolutionary of generally lower repute than we should probably be associating with. He dressed Alana up in some sailing clothes and we went out on the town.

From the left: Adam, Emma, myself, and Alana 

We had fun stealing swings from children and taking the metro.

Also: ice cream

The metro is fun in 18th century clothing

And then it rained. This is a period umbrella method!

Met Museum 53.600.588(60), 1746 - "Espéce de Parapluye" 

The following day was the ball, and we spent all day getting ready. We got down to the wire at the end, but we made it!

Emma working her hair magic while I sew a Revolutionary cockade to Adam's hat. Also yes, I put on my petticoat and bedgown for getting ready. That's what they're for!

Here's the result of Emma's efforts (all the powder!):

Dancing in the Hall of Mirrors

The grand staircase - one of my favourite photos

The three ladies

Revolutionaries don't smile

I *love* the back of this gown!

The custard plates are hiding behind us on the window sill.

We were joined by a big group of Emma's friends, who are historical dancers from Massachusetts.

And finally, fireworks!

It was pouring rain the whole time, so here's how some of Emma's friends kept dry - genius, but hilarious!

T-rex dancers!

Anyways, it was an amazing experience. I feel so lucky to have seen the Hall of Mirrors come alive as it was meant to - with people in incredible gowns, instead of just people in sweaty t-shirts and shorts and ballcaps. =P But really, I think it just feels a different way entirely. It's what it was built for.

Thanks to my amazing travel-adventure-sewing buddies, who made this such a fun trip. Can't wait for more shenanigans!