Glad That's Over

I find that impatiently waiting to see what color I end up with is incredibly stressful. ;-) Fun, but only when the color miraculously turns out to be something I like....I'm finally pleased with my colors and ready to move on.

First, I overdyed the garrish peach with a diluted bath of "golden brown." This yielded something that could be described as onionskin, sweet potato, adobe, or terra cotta. I love it. It is my favorite part of the fabrics for this project, and thus I will use it to make the kirtle. Seems counter-intuitive, as the kirtle is largely covered up, I guess. But then, when i'm hot (or lazy), it will be a stand-alone dress, and get more attention. Ditto for when its hot and I flip up the outer dress's skirts.

For my other color choices: Since I'd abandoned the idea of peach as an accent color, I figured it was a good excuse to use the pale yellow that I already have, which is great, cuz i really love it. Additional benefits of this: it means one less bout with the dye pot, as well as saving my white linen for later projects. The pale yellow will be the underside of the overdress.
For the third color, I decided I couldn't do the brown as originally planned, since the onionskin fabric was already significantly like the only shade of brown dye i had, and I didn't want to be redundant (as authentic as this probably would've been). So, I've decided to stick with the red that had been in my original plan.

When it came to coloring the red, I was deathly afraid of repeating the super-bright fiasco as with the peach. So, I pre-emptively added a bit of black and brown to mute and darken it. I'm pleased with the outcome, except that it is a bit dark/pale splotchy in a few places. I'll just use the peasant excuse, eh--couldn't afford quality fabrics, right?? The green in the below pic is what i think I'll do sleeves with, for contrast.



Now the the palette is FINALLY finished, perhaps I'll actually get around to sewing the dress, eh? In nosing about the Web Gallery, I was happy to notice that this Vegetable Seller painting from Beuckelaer has a very similar scheme:

Magenta Finger

Its the more flamboyant version of the famous James Bond film. No, wait. Its my finger after fabric-dyeing. ACK! How did PEACH dye make my finger MAGENTA, I'd like to know? Its just not natural.

Oh, more importantly, how did peach dye make my fabric.....ORANGE? Or, tangerine, really? Its quite a bit more vibrant than I'd expect for peasant gear, or for peach. I realized too late that I should've added a bit of brown dye in the vat to mute it (vat makes it look even more orange, to be fair).



THe result is the salmony in the pic below. Maybe I could overdye it with a very dilute brown mix? Hrm. Or soak it in coffee. Or i could just leave it as is and be a brilliant little peasant. What does the peanut gallery think? Its really not a bad color. Though I think its brighter in person than in the below photo. Shocking. ;-)



In other news, I'm having color choice dilemmas. Again. It took me weeks and weeks to decide on the colors for my original sketch. And now, of course, I'm having second thoughts. Why? Well, mostly cuz I found that loverly pale yellow linen (above) at the thrift store. Hmmmm, so, do i swap out one of my colors for yellow? I have no idea. I decided since I was keen on peach, I'd dye that first and see how it came out. I thought "If I like it, i'll use it. If not, i'll overdye it brown or red for another part of the dress"....

The prob is I don't know if i like it... I could do the kirtle peach with a brown/yellow overdress. But if I get hot and take off the overdress, I will be "Little Miss Wow-Peachy-Peacheekins". Or I could throw that blue in somewhere. Help. I'm so friggin indecisive. Argh.

Partlet

Well, I was making my v-neck partlet, and discovered I didn't have enough length of selvage edge to make the ruff as full as I wanted. I was using Drea's Ruff directions. Anyway, with insufficient selvage (and being too lazy to cut more out of my 20 yard spool, wash it, iron it, blahblah), I decided to buy lace. Yeah, its fanciful and flat out wrong for a peasant, but it was purty, and I like a little luxury.



Here is the finished partlet:

Looks like i'm running out of excuses not to start the dress now, eh? I can still procrastinate with an apron...

The Little Engine that Could

I seem to have lost some major steam on this project. Whether its related to the steamy MD weather, I do not know. For some reason, I just haven't been sewing inspired. Here is my latest attempt at doing something. ANYTHING.....


I decided I'd make something ridiculously simple. A caul. Why not make the accessories first, says I? That way when I'm finished the dress, I'm actually finished--should feel like fewer fiddly bits! That'll be far different than what I'm used to. Hopefully refeshingly so. So far I'm finished the socks and caul, and next I've got my partlet planned. And perhaps an apron. A white-linen theme.... Then onto the dress. Yes, I'm clearly putting off my fabric dyeing. I'm a wimp. Also, a large boiling pot when its 85% humidity just sounds like a disgusting proposition.

I used the directions for a simple caul from Drea Leed's site. I chose an 11 inch round, since that's how big my handiest-for-tracing-round dish was. That's all folks.

caul

Corset Lessons

Right, well, its done (except for eyelet coverings). I learned a few valuable lessons:

1) beware of expanding edges. Somehow one side of my front edge got to be about 1.5 inches longer than the other. This was most umcomely and caused me a bit of a pain to fix. I think it was caused by a combination of building it on the bias and threading the hemp through one side in a manner that required more scrunching and unscrunching of fabric (before hubby engineered the shish-kabob-crochethook-bobbypin "thingy" to make threading easier).

2)my dog is a would be pot-head. I caught him eating my hemp cord on more than one occasion.

3) When you make a mental note to raise the neckline on the final pattern, remember to do it. This is lower cut than i intended, but oh well.





Its light-weight, comfy, flexible and still holds all my bits in. I actually wish it were a bit rounder in the bust, but i didn't do the "s" so I can't really be too picky. ;-)

Onto the dress!

Queen of Cups

A tarot reading friend once told me that I would be best symbolized by the Queen of Cups. Apparently, her characteristics are loving, tenderhearted, intuitive, psychic and spiritual. Sure. Except for the psychic part. Unless excessive de ja voux is a strange form of psychic power. What's funny is that "loving," among other definitions, denotes "infinite patience." While this is fairly true when it comes to people, this rule does NOT in any way shape or form apply to corsetry. Heh.

Regardless of knowing that fact, I set about working up a corded corset this weekend. I educated myself by reading Jen's article, and then drooled over various examples. One of them being Beth's new curvy "s" corded corset. The shape certainly gives her that buxom "free" peasant look, but with the support of well, a corset. I knew I'd like to achieve something similar. The problem is that I really don't think I'm up to the "creative tailoring" it would necessitate later for drafting the overlying dress. I honestly think beth is a far better pattern drafter, and will do well with it, while it would most likely just frustrate me. Also, I'm a chicken.

Then, in an internet search, I was inspired by this:

Its a corset from 1598 Germany. I imagine that the unboned "cup" section would allow for a bit more curvature, and hopefully the "underwire-ish" cup action would mean less probability for pancake boobies (as seen in beth's what-not-to-do post). Oh, and as its otherwise straight, I thought it would make later tailoring of dresses easier.

I was certain that it wasn't the right type of corset for a flemish peasant/working class. But comfort with corset trumps authenticity with floppy boobies. Like Beth, I don't go out without some support, you know?

For the corset design, I used the bodice pattern from my green venetian, with less point at the front, point removed from the back, strap altered a bit to not be at the shoulder point like on the venetian, and front lacing.My original plan was to make the corset from my green cotton and cream duck. But since I wanted some give at the unboned boob section, I decided not to go with the very sturdy duck and settled on an inner lining of yellow linen from my recent thrift store finds. I also made the front portion fall somewhat on a slight bias to allow some "give" so my womanly bits could assert themselves. Probably a big no-no for lacing integrity. But I guess we'll find out, eh?

Then the sewing part happened:
While I was sewing, I abandoned the cup plan completely. Mental note to try that sometime. But my "infinite patience" ran out. Chuckle. I did use the diagonal boning channel design like beth --it seemed rather natural since the corset front was on the bias anyway. I ended up with a hemp-corded green and yellow corset bound with white grossgrain, cuz that was all I had on hand. I must've been subconciously affected by Niter's recently dyed "sprite" yarn. I dub this the "Sprite corset" in deference to her cleverness. Its definitely not as curvy as Beth's fun experiment. But its awful comfy, and it'll do.
I didn't think to take a pic while I had the lacing strips still attached. So here it is sans eyelets (and with a bit more binding left to finish).



Hopefully I'll be able to finish this bad boy tomorrow, and get a decent pic with "womanly bits" asserting themselves.