Grey wool waistcoat

3 months ago I made a pair of breeches with some pieces of wool from a pair of old pants, and a bit of similar wool from a skirt. I covered some buttons in the breeches fabric, then decided to use contrasting ones. I said I'd use the rejected buttons on a waistcoat made from the leftover skirt fabric, and here it is!

It's the same pattern as my striped waistcoat, but with lapels and a slightly different collar.

I finished it 2 weeks ago, but I also started a full time job 2 weeks ago, so have been very busy and haven't had time to write this post.

My new job is at a tailor's shop, and I've been cutting a lot of linings and sticking on a lot of fusible interfacing. I feel very fortunate to have a job that involves sewing!
My boss told me very firmly that I cannot hand sew without a thimble, so I did more hand sewing than necessary in order to practice.

This waistcoat is about half machine sewn and half hand sewn, and it took a total of 23 hours.
It's lined with the same blue cotton as the breeches, and interfaced with some very sad and limp hair canvas I got at fabricville years ago.

The wool is pieced on both shoulders, and on one side just under the armhole.

Like the striped waistcoat, it has an annoying wrinkle at the shoulder and I don't know what's causing it. I really should have investigated this on the mockup before I made the waistcoat. I hope I can fix it without removing the collar.

I'm also a bit annoyed by how much my weight is fluctuating. When I made this pattern I had to curve the front edges outward a bit so they'd fit smoothly, but now it's considerably looser there and I'll have to straighten the front edges a bit on my next waistcoat.

Here's a picture of the waistcoat being worn with the breeches, but the snow is so bright they both look black.

This photo shows the two different shades of wool much better.

I like the fact that the unpicked wool bits were given to me by my grandmother, and the blue cotton lining came from the stash of my other grandmother.

Grey wool breeches

Update: It turns out these were very badly fitted, so in 2019 I tapered the legs, shortened them by a few cm, and completely re-did the kneebands so I could wear them for my late 1780's photoshoot. They're much better now.

Much less wrinkly.

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I now have four pairs of breeches!
Having done my previous 3 in the style where the fall is narrow and made with plackets, I wanted to try the kind where the fall covers the entire front, like in this pair from c. 1760.
It's mostly the same pattern as before, with some alterations.

Some years ago I was given a stack of unpicked wool garments by my grandmother.  (Thank you Mamoo!) They were ones she'd gotten for rughooking, but found that the material wasn't right for it. I've been meaning to make something out of those wool bits for ages, and the January challenge for the HSM 2018 finally prompted me to do it!

One of the back pieces traced out, before the top part was filled in with piecing.

I made these breeches out of the wool from a pair of grey pants, and part of a skirt. The fabrics are the same weight, and the skirt is a noticeably darker grey, but close enough that it's not jarring.

I was just barely able to cut everything but the kneebands and waistband out of the lighter pants wool, and arranged it so only the two back panels needed piecing. The left back side is in 7 pieces, and the right is in 4 or 5 (I forget which).

View of the back showing the piecing.
It's all on the top and sides, since I just needed to enlarge the
 pants panel I was cutting it from.

The waistband is interfaced with heavy cotton canvas and hair canvas, sewed together all over to form one stiffer piece.

You can't see it, but there's a buttonhole at the top of the CF seam.

I used a plain blue cotton for the lining, which came from the fabric stash of my other grandmother.

It's mostly machine sewn, with hand finishing on the inside of the waistband and at the knees. The buttonholes and eyelets are all by hand too.
I found a tiny white shoelace in with my cords and tapes that was just the right size for the back! And there are 3 more of them! (Not very historical, but it's easy enough to replace. And who's going to see it anyways?)

I had originally covered 11 of the 13 button molds with the light wool, but with the darker coloured kneeband the light buttons just didn't look right. So I did 11 replacements in the dark wool, and they look much better.

(The lighter buttons were not covered in vain though! There is just enough dark wool left for a coordinating waistcoat, and the buttons have been set aside for that.)

The knee band before I shortened the long flappy bit.

The knees gave me some trouble. Having determined that the pattern I used for my noisy synthetic taffeta breeches was a bit too long, I shortened them a bit when I did up this pattern. However, I failed to consider that this meant they no longer tapered down to the right amount, and after I had attached the kneebands I had to pick them both off and take the bottom of the inseam in by 3 cm.
I did that by hand, and ended up doing the kneebands all by hand as well.

I also discovered upon trying them on that the end of the knee band was ridiculously long and flappy, so I shortened it by about an inch.

I then found that the front was pulling and making an unreasonable amount of wrinkles because I had put the buttons for the fall corners too far back, and that the CF seam buttonhole was not as high up as it should be. I moved the buttons, and moved the CF seam buttonhole up almost 1cm. Now, finally, they're done!

My poor monster slippers! They're worn so much my toes are sticking out!

I still need to adjust the fullness in the back. The top came out a bit too puffy compared to the seat, which looks a tad tight in this photo.

The gathering should thin out a bit more towards the side seam, I think.

But still, overall these fit better than any of my previous breeches!

The knee looks SO much better with the buckle strap shortened.

The Facts

What the item is: A pair of fall front breeches
The Challenge: #1- Mend, Reshape, Refashion
Fabric/Materials: Grey wool, slightly darker grey wool, plain blue cotton.
Pattern: Drafted by me
Year: Second half of 18th century
Notions: Canvas interfacing, thread, 13 wooden button blanks, one small shoelace.
How historically accurate is it? Maybe about 70%? I did keyholes on some of the buttonholes, machine stitched a lot of the seams, and used blue cotton for the lining, but other than that it's mostly good.
Hours to complete: 43
First worn: January 21st, 2018
Total cost: Definitly less than $10 (Canadian) Most of the materials are stash things that were given to me.

Nightgown alteration + hem monsters

I altered a nightgown!

It's one of those old fashioned fine cotton ones with very long pintucks.

Before.

It had these stupid 3/4 length sleeves with button cuffs on them. What's the point of cuffs there?? They were way too short to reach my wrist, and so tiny that buttoning them around my arm was impossible.

Bad and foolish sleeves, so I cut them off. I turned one of them into bias binding for the armholes, and the other I used as a collar ruffle. I was very indecisive about the collar, but eventually went with a stand collar and put a ruffle along the top. There wasn't quite enough sleeve material for the collar itself, so I used a different scrap of white cotton.

After.

I wanted to put monsters all around the hem, just because.

 I drew a bunch of them in my sketchbook and used the ones I liked best on the nightgown.

I did some practice monsters on a scrap of sleeve. (Which turned out blurry after steaming because I didn't rinse it in dye set solution.)

I drew out my monsters all around the hem with a fabric marker, which I got recently and I like very much! It's the sort that disappears when you put water on it.

In the textiles studio we use these delightful little pointy tipped squeezy bottles for drawing with resist on silk scarves, and I used my finest tipped one to draw my monsters on with black dye paste. (Which is a thing we mix up in the textiles studio, and I shan't get into the particulars of it now)

Always, always wear gloves when working with PRO MX fiber reactive dyes.

My monsters turned out so nice! With proper setting and washing they didn't blur at all.

Front.

Back.

And here are some detail shots of them.

This one is my favorite:

I have decided that her name is Elyse, and have drawn a few more pictures of her.

She enjoys rollerskating, gardening, and is working on her masters degree in architecture.

And she does have a lower jaw, it's just very thin.

Here's the nightgown worn with the ruffly bed jacket, which goes very comfortably over sleeveless nightgowns.

I need to make more sleeveless nightgowns, so I can wear this jacket more. It's comfortable and I like it.

I also made a dressing gown for my mother a few weeks ago, which is pretty simple so I'm sticking it onto the end of this post instead of doing a separate one.

Old gown on the left, new one on the right.

She had this other dressing gown that was very worn out, and I just made a copy of this. All the pieces are rectangles, except the main piece, which is a rectangle with a big slit halfway down it that's rounded at the end for the neck.

And here she is wearing it! Photo taken by my father.

It was supposed to be a mothers day present but it was a bit late.