Striped Muff, Finished

The muff is done. I decided to go ahead and use the grey hat, it's condition wasn't quite as bad as I had previously thought, even though it did look pretty creepy on the inside.

The grey hat, inside out.

Those black marks really made the inside look gross, but some of them were shaped like numbers, so they were just ink. The hide had a really scruffy texture and was thinner in some places than others, maybe whoever scraped it did a bad job, the brown hat's hide was much nicer and thicker. There was mold in the hat, but only a tiny little bit, it was easy to remove and the fur doesn't smell musty at all. I think the creepy ink marks scared me into thinking the mold was more serious than it actually was.

Speaking of the hats themselves, they are much better as a muff, both of them were way too small for my big head. I found the grey one in a cupboard in my Grandparents house, in a hatbox marked "Vivian Gibson- Hat" I think It was from the 60's. The brown hat was from a building with lots of stuff in it that my other Grandmother took me to years ago, apparently there had been a church sale and there were a lot of leftover things that they wanted to get rid of.
I cut both hats into 6 cm wide strips, they were impossible to get straight since the hats were curved. I cut them (very carefully so as not to cut all the way through the hide and damage the hairs) with an exacto knife. Then I arranged them on a table, trying to make them into a rectangle that was a little over twice as long as it was wide, with the fur pointing in the same direction, and trying to match the length and colour of the hairs. It seemed to be mostly successful.

A puzzle made of fur.

Once the placement of the fur pieces was figured out I started piecing them together.
A lot of the pieces had pointy ends so I had to cut a lot of tiny little triangles to make them all fit together.

One of many small triangles of fur.

I whipstitched all the fur pieces together. I also waxed my thread for the first time ever, which made the sewing easier.
Once the stripes were mostly put together, I started trimming them down to 2 inches wide with the help of a quilting square.

The stripes before trimming. See all the notches and bumps and wobbles?

I cut more little bits of fur to finish filling in the gaps and then sewed all the stripes together. Their edges were almost straight.

The outside of the muff skin, before the ends were added. The colour matching didn't go so well, especially with the brown.

I then sewed the two ends of the rectangle together, there was a lot more cutting and piecing. This was the first time I've ever made something out of fur and I must say, it's not a particularly friendly material to work with. Cutting is a very sneezeful business, the little bits of fuzz fly everywhere, I kept the vacuum cleaner right next to the table the entire time I was working on the muff.

The least fun part of muff construction. That white thing on the left is a piece of fusible interfacing to strengthen a particularly weak piece of grey material.

Then I attached the ends. The brown hat had a bit of a brim so there was a big strip of fur that curved in a very convenient way for muff ends.

The hat brim, cut in half.

The two halves were almost big enough to attach to the ends of the muff skin. I only had to add one small trapezoid of fur to each.
For the lining I cut a rectangle of black flannel 19" by 28". I know that cotton flannel is wrong for 18th century linings, but it's not fair if all the fuzziness is on the outside.
I found a muff workshop post that shows how to put a muff together with a tubular pillow and a separate, removable cover. Since my muff cover is of questionable quality (I tore one of the end pieces putting the pillow in) my pillow tube is permanently attached to the furry outer piece.

I stuffed the muff with a scratchy grey wool. It wasn't a very good fiber for felting or spinning so I thought this would be a good way to use it up. It was a really thin roving, which wasn't a very good form for muff stuffing, so I turned it into batts using Mama's drum carder. (Sorry for not asking permission Mama, but it was really late and the muff was so close to being done but I wasn't going to wake you up. I was extra careful to not bend any of the teeth.)

Roving being turned into batts. The batts are the pile of fluff on the left, the roving is the stuff on the right that looks like a brain.

I sewed the 28" sides of the flannel together(the only seam in the muff that's machine sewn) and wrapped the batts around one half of it. The wool had greatly increased in volume, which made this part very difficult to do. I scrunched the huge mass of wool down with one hand and folded the other half of the flannel tube over it with the other.

The stuffed tube. There will be a seam at this end, but it's just folded over on the other end.

I tucked in the ends of the flannel and whipstiched the pillow closed. Then I scrunched up again and stuffed it into the muff cover. The curved hat brim end pieces folded in very nicely over the pillow ends. They are whipstiched on too. This particular place was very awkward to sew stuff to so these stitches are rather large and crude. But big, unsightly interior finishing stitches are very accurate for 18th century.

Big, crude stitches. At least they aren't in a location where they will be seen.

Here is the finished muff.

See? The fur hides the lousy stitching.

The wool is so puffy that you can hardly see through the muff tube. It's sort of like a fuzzy blood pressure cuff.

The finished muff sitting on a table.

This is what the muff looks like when someone is holding it. I'm not wearing 18th century clothes in these pictures because the only other clothes I have from that era is underwear, and nobody carries a muff when they're in their underwear.

Me looking quite startled.

Me with flour on my shirt.

And now, Complaints! There are several problems with this muff. The most obvious one is the colour variation. This muff has very clearly been cobbled together out of lots of odd bits of fur and it takes away from the effect of the stripes.

Frankenstein's muff.

Another problem is that only most of the hairs point in the same direction, some of them are at a slight angle, but some pieces are going entirely the wrong way. Because the hat brim fur was pointing in the same direction all the way around the hat, and because of the shape of the muff ends, only one of them has fur that is facing the right way. I guess that's what you get for trying to make rectangular muff covers out of dome shaped pieces of fur. I'll have to keep an eye out for bigger, flatter fur things at thrift stores.
But the biggest problem is the shape. This was supposed to be a 1780s muff, and 1780s muffs are supposed to be square. like this one.

Gallerie des modes, 1781. (source)

  Mine is really, really rectangular. I think I cut the stripes too wide. On the other hand, if I had made the stripes narrower and the muff more square, it probably wouldn't fit both hands as nicely as it does. I used up almost all the fur, so there wasn't any way to make it bigger.

All the scraps that were left over. Maybe I can make pom poms out of them.

It's rectangularness isn't so bad. It'll work great for the 19th century, and for some of the decades that come before the 1780s. I did manage to find one 1780s fashion plate with a muff that didn't look square.

French fashion plate from 1787. (source)

 The muff on the right doesn't look square to me, although I'm not entirely certain, since it's on an angle. Not everyone would have had up to date muffs all the time anyways, I'm sure plenty of people were walking around with 1770s shaped muffs in the 1780s. I don't know if they had stripes though. The earliest image of a vertically striped fur muff I can find is from 1784.

Summary

The challenge: #6, Stripes.

Fabric: A rectangle of black flannel 19" by 28", from Mama's stash.

Pattern: Guesswork and a quilting square.

Year: 1780s, or very early 90s, at least that's what I was going for.

Notions: An unknown amount of scratchy grey wool, from the stash. Two old fur hats, their origins are listed earlier in this post. One small scrap of fusible interfacing, also from the stash.

How historically accurate is it? Well, the fur and wool are real, the overall construction is probably decent, and it's mostly hand sewn. Other than that I don't think it's very accurate. See Complaints, above.

Hours to complete: Approximately 20

First worn: March 25th/13. Can you use the term "wear" with muffs, or do you say "carry"?

Total cost: $0